4 Things to Think About Before Building a House

In case you missed my last blog post, it’s official—we’ve started building our house!

If you’ve been here awhile, you know this has been a long journey and dream in the making. We’ve had plans to build a house on the land we purchased for a long time and we’re so excited to be doing that.

Like I said in that very first post, we are no experts in building, so there’s a LOT we’re learning on the fly. But we’ve already learned many important lessons (and are looking forward to everything else we learn along the way!), and I wanted to share a few of them with you.

In no particular order, here are a few things that may be helpful for you to consider if you plan on building:

1. Understand Local Permits & Restrictions

Depending on where you build, you’ll likely face different restrictions and guidelines for building your home. It’s important that you and/or your builders know what’s needed to get your permits signed while still creating your dream space. Our plans were delayed for a while because of a few local restrictions we had to ensure our home complied with.

2. Stay Organized

There is a HUGE amount of paperwork, emails, and communication to keep track of once you begin your build, and it’s really easy to lose track of items if you don’t have a system in place.

The good news is that there are a lot of awesome tools to stay organized. I prefer to keep everything pretty simple, so we have one master binder and location for all physical paperwork and samples and a Google Drive folder where we keep any electronic documents, photos, and more.

If you’re still working on figuring out a system, my only advice is that you have ONE physical and digital place to keep everything in the meantime—otherwise, things are bound to get lost.

3. Design Intentionally

We spent months considering each space within our home’s blueprints and design. From closets to flow, we wanted to ensure our house was well thought out.

Think through how you will use each space for different occasions, times of day, and seasons. If you’re going to do the hard work of building a house, make sure that each part is thought out and will work for YOU.

We also did many conceptual walkthroughs to envision what the space would look like and how it would flow. We didn’t just consider what our current needs were, but we set aside time for dreaming and envisioning what we wanted to accomplish in the future.

This may seem obvious, but make sure you love the design you choose! We spent a lot of time gathering inspiration from a wide variety of places including Pinterest, homes of family and friends, open houses, magazines, and more. We would talk through the feeling we wanted our home to provide for us but also for guests. We debated many design features and elements before we even got to the blueprint stage.

When it came time to create blueprints, I think this helped us tackle this step more efficiently. We knew what we wanted and didn’t need to spend additional time waffling back and forth.

4. Consult With Your Contractors

We wish we had consulted with our general contractors and a few other trades during the design phase! This would have saved us some time and money down the road to make sure everything was in line with local restrictions and our budget.

Have you built a home before? What lessons do you wish you had known prior to building?