Building a custom home is an insane process. Even though you go through the process of choosing a great custom home builder, there are still things that will be missed and not thought about until it’s too late. Some mistakes are small and in the end don’t really matter and others are things you will still be saying “dangit” about once you move in. Here are some of the big and small mistakes we made when building our home.

Not Planning Space For Utilities

So when we were picking our floor plan, I knew I wanted open spaces, minimal design, and a small footprint. Ethan wanted a big open basement with a garage area for his man cave. On the initial drawings from the design company (not our builders) this looked like exactly what we got.

It wasn’t until the basement slab was about to be poured did we realize we didn’t make any plans for where all of the “components” of the house would go. You know things like PLUMBING and the HVAC SYSTEM!

Kind of necessary things.

So the first I heard about this problem, Ethan had talked to our builder about it and was like I think we got it all worked out. Then a day or so later I met with the builder at the site and he was explaining again the fact that all this (ugly) stuff had to go somewhere. And where he was now explaining it was going to go was right in the middle of Ethan’s TV area in the basement.

So after some discussion we came up with a plan to move it to the outside of the basement bedroom and make it seem like a closet. This cut into the workout space (hahaha) some, but was better than us having to re-plan the whole man cave TV area.

I should probably note that this may not be an issue for everyone. We chose to get a split HVAC system in order to allow the basement and the main floor to be set on different temperatures. This meant that there is this HUGE part of the HVAC system inside, instead of having only the big thing that sits outside your house. When we chose a split system, this wasn’t discussed. I would still choose the split system however, because it’s really nice for two people who don’t agree on temperature 🙂

So after we settled this it seemed like things would be smooth sailing. We got it figured out yay!

But no, probably two or three months later we had a meeting with our builder and the HVAC contractor to discuss how the system would run, where the returns would be, and the thermostats. This is when he starts telling us he is going to have to drop half of the basement ceiling down to below 8 feet for the returns and it is going to mess up lights we’ve already determined where they will go.

So moving the lights, fine, the dropping of the ceiling did not sit well with Ethan. He made it very clear from the beginning of the build that he wanted the basement ceilings to be 9 feet when finished. He was already a little disappointed that they didn’t pour the walls high enough so they would be a little under 9 feet. (Our builder said this was due to the lot grade or lack thereof.)

But now they were telling him they were going to be closer to 7 feet for around half of the open space and he was pissed.

There ended up being a semi-heated back and forth between him and the HVAC contractor when our builder stepped in and was like well couldn’t you do it like this. The solution was instead of so much of the ceiling, we would change where the return was upstairs and only a small area along the beam in the basement would be lowered. We also determined that he could use a slightly smaller return system and still have a well functioning HVAC so that the drop wasn’t so low.

In the end Ethan said it wasn’t as bad as he initially felt like it would be. Is it ideal? No. But we both still love the space and no one really even notices it.

However, we could have avoided the whole situation had we asked about utilities before hand. And this I will say is 100% my fault, I was only focusing on the pretty things when we picked the floor plan.

Not Adding Enough Storage

So I’m not going to lie here. I kind of felt like I was adding enough storage. When you’re living in a camper you’re like “We don’t even have that much stuff!”. The house will be basically empty! HAHAHAHAH

No. It’s easy to forget that you have a whole lifetime of things packed neatly away in a storage unit across town.

We did end up purging alot of stuff when we finally moved into the house for a few reasons. One half of the stuff smelled horrendously like moth-balls and I just couldn’t get the smell out. Two if we hadn’t used it in a year and a half and it wasn’t sentimental did we even need it? And three I had this weird thing with bringing “old, dirty” things into my brand new, sanitized, perfect house.

I can’t really explain that last one, the animals moved with us so we all know clean and sanitized no longer applied. Especially when we had been living here at least two months before we went through said storage building. Because I can’t be bothered in the winter to do things like that :P.

Anyways. I still wish I had of thought of more storage spaces. We do have a huge master closet (huge in my opinion, not by Pinterest standards by any means). We also have a very small attic space that we laid some plywood down in so we can utilize. And my kitchen has tons of cabinets compared to our houses before.

But for example, the laundry room only has two lower cabinets and one drawer and really the only other place I can ad anything is wall shelves. So I don’t have a good space to keep the vacuum, broom, Swiffer, and steam mop. The vacuum and steam mop are currently housed in our spare bedroom and the broom and Swiffer just live beside the dryer. So to my future kids, you’re gonna share your room with the vacuum. Just kidding, kind of.

We also didn’t consider pulling a car into the garage would greatly decrease the amount of storage in there. We have never had a garage at all, so having even a one car garage was so exciting. However, the reality of a one car garage is that either you can use it for storage OR you can park your car in there. Not both. So we use it as storage and Ethan uses it as a workshop. He’s incredibly more organized than me, so he has wall systems and shelves and organized toolboxes.

And we just park in the driveway. Which honestly sort of makes sense anyway since we mostly use the front door and our laundry room “drop area” is right as you walk in the front.

Not Thinking About Future Additions

So this is not really something I’m particularly worried about, but I thought I would throw it out there.

Our house plan doesn’t really leave any room to do future additions. The layout and foundation don’t really give an easy way to add any square footage to our home.

Now I’m not planning to add five kids to our family, so I don’t really think we would ever WANT to do an addition. But for anyone building who is like “maybe I will have seven kids and this house won’t be big enough”, you may want to just think about where you could possibly add to later.

Maybe off a den or a spare bedroom? Would it make sense with your layout? What about the grade of your property?

Just food for thought.

Personally if we ever add anything it will most likely be a detached garage for Ethan. It will have a finished loft above it, so that will technically add some livable space.

And I also know that if you ever outgrew your house you could move, but in our situation, we love our property so much. We love the location and how much land we have and the fact that you can’t see our house from the road. We planned this to be our forever home, and hope that’s what it is.

Have you built a home and made mistakes in the planning process?! Or if you’re planning a home build were these tips helpful or is there something else you’re struggling with? Let me know in the comments!