If you’ve ever built a home you are about to be nodding your head in agreement…

At the start of your home build process all things are shiny and incredible and completely amazing and you MUST HAVE THEM ALL!!!

And your builder probably is like “well yea that’d be great… but”. You do not like “buts”. Until the builder starts giving you actual real prices on these awesome things. Prices that you have to pay REAL money for.

Then you’re like, “you know what, on second thought I don’t really need that elevator. The stairs will keep my butt in shape anyways.”.

And so you begin the process of deciding what upgrades you can actually live without and which ones you just aren’t willing to pay for. So here are a few of the “big ticket” upgrades we didn’t do, and I’m not even that sad about.

Outdoor Wood Burning Fireplace

The original plan for our house had a full wood burning fireplace on the back deck. It’s beautiful. The website even has some where someone else built this and I love it so much. I think it would be so cozy to sit on the deck and enjoy a fire in the winter with a nice fuzzy blanket.

But those visions quickly went down the drain when I found out the cost of this. Since our deck is above our full basement the masonry would have had to run all the way from the ground up to the second story plus up and out the roof.

So material alone was going to be exorbitant, then add in labor. We won’t go into specifics because every region is different, but let’s just say it was my whole cabinetry budget AND THEN LIKE MY FIRST CAR. This was a no.

Was I sad, yes, sad enough to fork over that kind of money, definitely not. In retrospect I’m glad we didn’t have the budget for the fireplace. The original plans for our house had a much larger deck than we actually have. The fireplace would have taken up tons of room, so I wouldn’t be able to have a seating area and a table if we had the fireplace too. We chose to do a smaller deck because we shifted the floor plans around a good bit.

Would We Actually Use It?

Plus we live on acreage, so we spend a lot of time outside anyways. It isn’t like we need the deck space to have an outdoor area. The fireplace also would have eaten into our master closet and the area in the basement where we have a third bedroom.

At the end of the day the space and not messing up the layout of the house was much more beneficial than an outdoor fireplace. Since we do live in the south and can really only use it like two months out of the year anyways 😏.

Glass Railings

Ok so I want to tell you I’m not sad about this, but TBH I still kind of am. I had no idea how much glass costs! This was going to be like an $8,000 upgrade! Just for a little glass around our stairs.

I just couldn’t bring myself to do this. We hadn’t even broke ground when I would have had to make this decision, and $8k off the top and out of our contingency would have really hurt.

I do feel like it would have really elevated the modern style in the living room. And I think they look absolutely incredible, but it just wasn’t worth it. My goal with the glass other than aesthetics was to not block off any natural light. I think the way our builders did our railings still allows light to flow freely and the black is a nice accent to the space too.

We both also really love our under the handrail light, which I’m not sure we would have been able to do with a metal/glass railing. Plus, cleaning doggie nose prints off the glass would definitely get old after a while.

Floating Toilets

I just think these are awesome. We have floating vanities in our two upstairs bathrooms, so I felt like why not have everything float!

Honestly this is probably my number one thing I would go back and do. I love the cleanness of the floating toilet. I adore that the button is hidden in the wall. The fact that I could easily clean under it, around it, the whole thing makes me giddy.

But alas, these were also a really expensive upgrade. And in addition to the cost Ethan said he really didn’t want them. He was concerned about any plumbing issues down the road.

Where a regular toilet everything (with the toilet itself, I promise I know there’s plumbing in the wall also 😝) is in the tank or behind the bowl, with floating toilets all those components are actually behind your drywall. So if we were to have issues he would have to cut into the drywall then repair it.

The combination of him not being on board plus the costs, it just wasn’t something we decided to do. The toilets I did go with have a sleek look and go straight down to the floor instead of having all those bumps and curves and weird knob things to clean, so cleaning is still fairly easy. And I replaced the silver knobs with black ones because that was a non-negotiable 😂.

More Square Footage

Having more square footage is really something I waffled back and forth with during the whole build. Before we built our house we’ve lived in two different ranch style homes. One around 1500 square feet (really 1300 plus a converted carport which gave us the additional square footage) and then one around 1800 square feet plus a (sort of) finished partial basement.

The first house was our starter home and the size felt manageable and like we had enough space. We moved for reasons other than the house itself and still make comments like if we could have just picked it up and moved that house.

The second house was older. It had lots of space but also lots of rooms, which meant lots of chopped up areas to clean and keep neat. Don’t get me wrong, I loved this house, but it was A LOT of upkeep inside and out. So when we first started playing with the idea of building, I knew I wanted a smaller footprint with more open spaces. 

In our new home, we technically have the same or more finished square footage than our last house because we have the main floor which is almost 1200 square feet plus the finished basement which is around 800 square feet (the garage is finished but doesn’t count as heated/cooled square footage). But the layout is so much better. Both our living spaces are open, meaning I can run the robot vacuum and it won’t get stuck on a floor threshold.

Second Guessing Myself

But during our build from the start I second guessed myself on the size. Maybe 1200 square feet for a main floor was too small. That number includes two bedrooms, two bathrooms, laundry room and the main living area. Was I trying to cram too much in and the result was going to feel tiny? What if I ended up with spaces that wouldn’t even accommodate the furniture I wanted? Should I just ask the design company to bump out all the walls a foot or two? What would that do to the price? I could go on for days, but you get my point.

This feeling was ESPECIALLY hard to deal with after it was too late to change the plans, like oh say once the footers are poured! We came out to see it the day they poured the footers. (For anyone wondering what the heck a footer is don’t feel bad I didn’t know any of this stuff until we built either. I basically picked out pretty things and Ethan made sure the house was built correctly and to last well beyond our lifetime, thanks babe! The footers are the metal rods(?) and then concrete poured into the ground to make a stable foundation so your home won’t settle as much. See the picture because I know my explanations are horrible. 😂)

So walking the area between the footers was overwhelming for me. There’s nothing really to visualize in this space. You can’t get a sense of the walls or how anything will really feel once there’s walls and a roof. But you’re walking around inside this concrete outline like what the crap did I do. This isn’t big at all. We aren’t even going to be able to live in this. WHERE WILL WE EVEN SLEEP!!! Ok, so these dramatics were probably just me. But really I freaked out. Again, a little too late, but it didn’t stop me from freaking out. Ethan kept telling me just to wait it would be fine that I was over exaggerating (who me?). 

It All Worked Out

In the end, our house size is perfect. It’s manageable for me to keep clean and things tidy but the living spaces are perfect. I love the open concept but still each area has its own space. And while the second bedroom is on the smaller side. There’s still plenty of room for a kid one day if we decide we’re grown up enough to keep another human alive. And right now it makes a perfect office space! Our master bedroom is incredible and the closet is the biggest closet we’ve ever had.

 So I’m really glad in this case we stuck with our principal feeling and chose to build “better” not bigger. (I use better loosely, please don’t take that to mean if you built a 5000sqft house I think it’s a piece of crap. I just knew with our budget if we built a huge house finishes would have to be lower grade and we wouldn’t be able to do as many of the detailed upgrades that we did. Everyone has different budgets, styles, and wants!) 

Moral Of The Story

You don’t have to do “ALL THE THINGS”. You will ultimately have to say no to some things. (Well I mean unless you have unlimited funds, and then you do you girl!) But most people building a home will run into things they just simply can’t afford to do.

Some of them will be things you CAN do later, like kitchen backsplash or my glass stair rails if I hit the lottery. Some of them will be things that won’t be possible later like our outdoor wood burning fireplace. And you might be pretty bummed about it.

But you’re still going to love your house. Even if you don’t get everything on your wishlist, it’s still YOUR house. That YOU get to turn into a HOME. It was still a labor of love, even if you just chose the floor plan and wall color. You still put your love and energy into making it what you wanted.

And remember, it’s the people who make a place home, not the things you collect, but the memories you make and the love you share.