Buying your own home is one of the most exciting experiences a human can possibly have, second only to working with a home builder to create a custom home tailor-made to meet your needs. While you might love the new homes for sale that you tour, there’s always one or two things you wish were a little different. When you design your own modern home plans, you get exactly what you’ve always hoped and dreamed for.
However, creating your own modern home plans can be a giant nightmare if you make one of these common mistakes:
Three Mistakes to Avoid While Creating Your Own Floor Plans
- MISTAKE: Designing a home that you can’t grow into.
If you’re building a home from scratch, there’s a good chance that you’ll live in it for a long time to come (most people don’t build their own home to flip it in a year or two).
It’s easy to get so focused on the needs you have today that you forget the needs you’re going to have down the road while designing the floor plan for your custom home. It’s a big bummer to go through the effort of building yourself a house, only to outgrow it in just a short time.
The most obvious “future-proof” factor while creating your own modern home plans is potentially having children. Even if you don’t plan to have them today or tomorrow, if expanding your family is a possibility down the road, you might want to add in some spare room that could be converted into a nursery when it’s time. If babies are not even in the realm of possibilities, you might want to consider how you’ll downsize (perhaps you have kids on the “moving out” end on the spectrum) or creating functional space if you decide to work from home down the road. Make sure to consider the possibilities of the future and design your home plan around it. - MISTAKE: Getting so hung up on the floor plan that you forget about the location.
There are a lot of big decisions to make while designing your home. However, if you end up with a design feature or two you don’t love as much as you thought you would, it’s possible to change it down the road. What cannot be changed later is the piece of land that you build your home one (or should we say, it cannot be changed without selling your entire home and starting over). It’s easy to get so carried away with your home design plans that you forget to pay close consideration to the lot that you choose to build on altogether. This involves considering both the community or area that you choose to live in, the lot within that community, and the placement of the home on the lot.
Make sure you take into account the schools you’re zoned for, the commute you’ll be subject to, and the businesses nearby (such as, living near a Starbucks is a huge selling feature if you tried to sell, whereas living next to a sewage plan, not so much) while choosing a location for your home. - MISTAKE: Designing a home that’s impossible to sell.
Having the chance to create modern home plans that are tailor fitted to your needs is a double-edge sword. On one hand, you can create a home that perfectly suits your needs. On the other hand, you can create a home so perfect for your needs that it’s impossible for anyone else to live there. For example, maybe you’re a huge basketball maniac. Putting a basketball court in the garage or backyard is a great way to get the most function from your home, and even might add some value when you’re ready to sell. On the other hand, putting a professional-grade basketball court in the middle of the house instead of a living room is going to make it difficult to sell down the road.
When you design your home, make sure to keep in mind how you’d have to change it to make your home sellable down the road, if you decided to move. This shouldn’t be your only decision-factor, but it shouldn’t be ignored!
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