Before I get down to sharing the actual rooms and individual parts of our home, I had several people reach out to me asking for tips or suggestions for the building process. There are SO many decision that you have to make when you are doing a home renovation or when building a home. I've put together some of the things that helped us along the way. It is a ton of information, but hoping it will be helpful to one of you!
Spend time touring model homes for design and layout ideas.
When we were in the planning process of designing the house we drove all over town to find new neighborhoods with model homes. We would always snap pictures of neat design ideas or things we liked so we could try to incorporate some of those into our home. We also were known to find paint cans in unfinished areas so that we could find out the paint colors that were used in some houses.
Create a wish-list and decide your must haves and the things you would be OK without.
I had a list of must haves and the Mr. did, too. For me it was a mudroom, a playroom on the first floor, and a wrap around porch. The Mr. was dead set on a certain garage set up to meet our needs so we designed the house around those things.
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| I got my wrap-around porch and the Mr. got the giant garage he wanted. |
Use Pinterest as your designer.
One tip that I feel like made a big difference for me in picking out things like tile, kitchen cabinets, and all of those little details was using Pinterest. I created boards for every room in our house like Kitchen, bathroom, living room, etc. and would just pin anything that caught my eye. Anything I liked or that I thought looked pretty I would pin. Then I went back and looked at trends that I found. For example, I had pinned a lot of kitchens with white cabinets, wooden counter tops for the island and a farmhouse sink. So when I went to pick out those types of things I knew what I liked and it helped me feel confident in making my selections.
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| I knew I wanted a darker island and white/cream cabinets. |
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| Still happy with my choices today! |
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| And I LOVE having a farm sink. |
If you have exact pictures and examples of what you like it makes it easier for other people to see your vision when. When we were picking out tile for a back splash and in our master bathroom, I literally printed out pictures and showed them to the woman helping us so that we could try to replicate and copy what we saw in the photos. I also had a lot of unique trim detail that I wanted in different parts of the house, so having photos to show the carpenters made me feel confident they would understand and deliver exactly what I wanted.
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| Dining room trim work in progress. |
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| Dining room trim work completed! |
The money will run out at some point. You can do your best to plan accordingly, but there will be things that come up and cost more than you originally expected. We decided to wait on some things like finishing the basement, adding a trellis over the garage, having barn doors on the office, and some bigger landscaping projects. Instead we decided to finish the things like beams in the office and stuff that was easier to complete at the time of building and did some of the other things later.
Spend money where it matters.
Unless you win the lottery, chances are you are going to be sticking to a budget. If you really have to stick to that budget, I would suggest spending the money where it matters. Lighting and custom details are a perfect example. We choose to spend more on some key lighting fixtures that we loved and wanted to make a statement with in prominent places like the kitchen, dining room, entry, etc. (where people would actually see them).
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| I was dead set on this light fixture over our kitchen table. |
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| I wanted our entry to have a cool ceiling! |
There isn't much to this one except to know that these things take time and there WILL be setbacks. I went by our house every single day it was being built and sometimes nothing had been done from one day to the next. That drove me insane!!!! I just wanted my house to be finished, but these things take time and for the most part, there was a reason something hadn't been done that day...even if I couldn't understand it at the time.
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| The kids loved seeing what had been done each day...and didn't mind nearly as much as I did if nothing had happened. |
We've all heard the saying pick your battles. Well this can be applied to building a home, too. The Mr. really wanted a big driveway so that there was lots of space for people to park and for him to be able to back in our boat. I didn't want to have a parking lot in front of my house. It was something he wasn't going to budge on so I just let it go. And now I am so thankful for that big space because my kids ride bikes and play out there and area able to use all the space! When they were putting in the granite for our bathrooms they messed up. They put the granite I'd picked for the kids bathrooms in the master and the granite for the master in the kids' bathrooms. I was upset at first, but decided in the end it didn't really matter. They would have redone it, but they offered us a HUGE discount for their mistake so it was worth it for me to just be OK with it. 5 years later, I haven't thought about that granite until writing this post. The wrong mantles were installed on our stone fireplaces and I HATED them. Totally not what I had picked and I was not willing to live with them. It really mattered for me to have them redone so they ended up being replaced.
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| So happy I put my foot down and got the mantle I really wanted. |
Because we had an entire house to start with we were able to salvage a lot of things and repurpose them in the new house. Some of the old kitchen cabinets were used in our master closet, my blog room and in our laundry room.
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| Kitchen cabinets in the original house |
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| Old kitchen cabinets now repurposed in my blog/craft room. |
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| Built-in shelves in the original house. |
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| Repurposed shelves now in my son's room. |
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| Brick fireplace in original house. |
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| Painted brick fireplace in our keeping room. |
I'm thankful that the Mr. is a handy guy and liked to be a part of what was going on. He was constantly doing something at the house. He did all sort of little things like hanging mirror and towel rods in all the bathrooms and painting some rooms a different color than the basic color we picked for the entire house and any other little things we could do to move things along. We could have paid someone to do that, but he was willing to and it helped the budget in the long run.
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| Picnic for the kids while the Mr. was getting something done in the kitchen during building process. |
I feel like if you know you are going to be in a house for a while, it is good to make it your own. Some people like to worry about resale and what other people will think of it, but we knew this would be our family's home for at least 15 years so I wanted to make it work for us. We did things like 5 built-in cubbies in our mudroom...one for each of us!
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| Love having this drop-zone for all of our stuff! |
Next week I promise that we I will start sharing room by room. I think up first will be the front porch and foyer/entry or I may do something totally different! Tell me what you want to see!
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