House Plans

After looking at several builders in the area and at several different options, we finally picked a builder.

We had our pool narrowed down to two that we liked. One was a 'lot' builder in which he had a standard house and he builds on lots in neighborhoods. The other was a custom builder that had a few spec homes, but would build more from scratch.

I really liked the lot builder's house and it was 90% there. The only concern was that it was designed to fit on a small lot. Therefore, like most houses in the suburbs, its garage was integrated into the house design. When you looked at the front of the house, the garage was at least 50% of the frontage. They are playing with side load garages and such so that you can at least make it look like part of the house. We drove around the area and looked at a lot of his houses, but none really stood out as outstanding to us.

The other custom builder would go with anything we wanted. Our concern was cost. I didn't think we could afford fully custom. So, we looked at thousands of plans on-line and in several books. We found one that, again, was 90% there. The builder said he could do it and gave us a ball park estimate. It was in line with what we thought and he brought in an excellent designer that would take the plans that we purchased on-line and make the few changes we needed to make it our ideal home. The house has the garage off to the side, connected by a large utility room / breezeway type of room. I've wanted a big utility room / mud room and Miles dreams of having a breezeway like his parents house.

We purchased the plans and the designer gave us his first rev. We reviewed them last night and we're not quite sure it's there yet. The utility room is huge, yet it doesn't really use the space very well. Lots of middle space and not a lot of space for cabinets and cupboards for storage.

The same thing happened with the kitchen. We made it quite a bit bigger, but it didn't really gain us anything.

We're meeting with the designer (Jon) and the builder (Wayne) again next week to review some of our additional changes and concerns.