Did you have your house built so you could have it just the way

[raccoon]

you wanted it? X bedrooms, x bathrooms, screened porch, walk in shower,
etc.

If you did, I'd like to hear your experience, strength, and hope. Would you recommend this to someone else?

[tosh]

1. Yes,

we did that. The actual building process, at times, was stressful but at other times fun. We've been here now for a year.

We ask ourselves multiple times each month why we waited so long to do this. No regrets!

Small town, rural area, did not want to live in a sub-division. We own a business so life can be hectic. We wanted a house that "functions" for us, is low maintenance and a pleasure to BE in.

We seem to have achieved our goals.

Ask me anything!

[raccoon]

12. Thanks! nt

[Kilgore]

2. Yes, yes and yes

However the quality of the experience is directly proportional to the amount of work you do up front in planning and thinking through what you want. We spent almost a year before building defining whats important to us, looking at other homes, and searching for a highly recommended contractor

We sold our long time home in preparation for retirement and used the proceeds to build exactly what we wanted and where we wanted it. The home has features that will allow easy changes to enhance accessability and convienence as we grow older and our mobility decreases.

Go for it, it was a great experience.

[madinmaryland]

3. Out of my entire adult life of 37 years

I have owned homes for a grand total of 5 years. One house was 20 years old when we bought it and the other was 80 years old.

Yeah. All it takes is one or two economic downturns and you are fucked. It seems to have bit me. So I have decided to never buy a home. Even if we came into enough money to afford one, I would never fucking do it again.

mim

[mercuryblues]

4. Yes, yes and yes

If you want suggestions Pm me. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process. I went in with as much knowledge as I could, which helped me immensely.

[raccoon]

11. Thanks! I may be doing that.

I went in with as much knowledge as I could, which helped me immensely.

A great suggestion.

[mercuryblues]

16. go to the library

and find books and magazines on building a home and where the money goes. Do that as soon as possible.

[ileus]

5. Bought two, built (had built) two.

The current house we're living in was only 8 years old when we bought it. After looking at over 30 homes we decided it was perfect. Everything fit....and once the two kids are gone it won't be too large. While a ranch may seem like a old folks home, it still has vaulted ceilings, great room and a second living room. Other than being on one level my main requirement was a attached garage.


There are only a few things I plan on changing with this house before we retire in the next 20-25 years. One is making the master bath old person friendly, and at some point make the back deck smaller than the current 1000sq ft it is.

If you're going to invest in something for the rest of your life it should be exactly what you want.

Our last house we thought was what we wanted but quickly decided it wasn't, a cape cod with 28ft ceilings and loft just wasn't all it was cut out to be. Especially since one side of it was basically 3 stories, it makes maintenance hard. Really hard. Having that thing built took 10 years off my life. Having a view to kill for did allow us to sale it for what we wanted....I priced it to one person they stopped by to see the interior and it was sold. We took 60k in equity and sunk it into the home we now have.

[marlakay]

8. Our house had high ceilings too 33'

With a beautiful cedar ceiling with mountain views.

Like you said maintenance was hard as our tallest ladder didn't go up to dust or change lights.

Our house now has a raised ceiling in living room but only goes up 15'.

I love fireplaces had a big one but produced no heat, i have woodstove now.

We had acre of land loved it at first all the privacy, but too much to take care of.

Sometimes what you think you want you don't.

For instance we had a huge master the whole second floor except bath and it was a loft with perfect view, except too bright to sleep in summer and no door to shut and sound travels when you have company.

[ileus]

15. Sounds the same as ours...

Except the upper floor was all master bed and bath and the loft. It really was a wonderful home with the T&G ceilings...

But it did require a 20ft step ladder to change out bulbs and cleaning the dormer lights..Ugggh.


The vaulted ceiling we have now is around 15 feet also with nothing but a lowered ceiling fan and a skylight. If I want on the roof of this house a 6ft step ladder is enough.

It's a home that we can grow old in.


We had a pellet stove in the old house, now we're gas, but we were just talking yesterday about putting in a pellet stove again. We're on 3 acres now nearly all field and with a nice trout stream behind us. It's like we're on vacation year around, the road is even called Hunting Camp road.

[pipi_k]

17. Like being on vacation...

That's how it is where I live, too.

In fact, my house used to actually BE a hunting camp. One room, 16 x 16, and then the original owner added a kitchen and bathroom, and an upstairs bedroom.

We moved from a 2200 sq. ft. home to this one, which was only about 800 sq. ft. and then added on over the years so it's over 1600 sq. ft. now not including a basement rec room that used to house a hot tub.

First heating system was oil, then we put in a pellet stove which heated the entire house. Got a bigger stove when we added on, and it was OK except for some cold spots which were remedied by strategic use of fans. After a number of years, those bags of pellets seem to get heavier and heavier (!) so we went with propane heat instead, and it's been great.

But, like you, we feel like we're on vacation all year long. Nearest house is like 1/8 of a mile away and it's a dead end, dirt road. Lots of forest, hills, streams, wildlife, etc. Very small town. I love it here

[rgbecker]

6. It's one big compromise, so don't get your hopes up too high.

I've built several houses for several people and they have all become friends if they weren't already.

But plan it well, be aware of the compromises necessitated by financial considerations and choose carefully where you spend your money. I advised all to remember how much time they actually spend in the bathroom and what they do there vs. say the kitchen, living room or out in the yard, for example.

If you think you have a great new design idea, look hard to see if you can find a similar setup already built. Then see if it really worked out all that well. Most traditional ways of doing things were developed over years and years of experience. Looking at already existing setups will also help if you or family members have trouble visualizing how things will actually turn out. This is very important for example in seeing what kind of space you might want in and around your kitchen work areas.

[marlakay]

7. Yes but be realistic

When they give you a price, you will definitely be tempted to upgrade on everything!

This was our retirement home which we meant to have small loan, ended up with 200k loan, hubby got a job for ten years he thought so we got 15 yr loan, we had retired early. Then 2006 happened he lost his job and we had to get 30 yr loan.

Then when times got better property taxes went up many thousands of dollars so we sold and came back to northern CA and bought a older house fully paid.

I miss my great house but it was a risk once we spent more on it than we originally planned.

The stress, decisions totally worth it. I had a kitchen and bathroom to die for. At least i had it for ten years. Would i do again? Yes but be more careful with upgrades.

[phylny]

9. Yes, we did.

We looked at hundreds of plans, picked one, and that would have been too expensive to build, so we looked again and picked this one. We are very happy with it.

We looked for very specific things: We wanted a craftsman look, a dining room, a sun room, area for an office, an eat-in kitchen, a fireplace, and a bonus room over the attached garage that has a stand-alone heating system so we'd only heat or cool it when we have company. We live on a lake, so we knew we'd be able to have the basement function as secondary space, as at least half of it is ground level due to the pitch of the land, and that's where the other two bedrooms, office, second living space, and bathroom with a bathtub are at. We wanted to have our bedroom on the main level (we live on this level 99% of the time when it's not summer and we're not on the dock), we put grip bars in the showers to help as we age (showers, not bathtubs on the main floor so that we can easily step over the 4" lip to enter the shower) and we have a stackable washer/dryer in our master bath, which we pat ourselves on the back for almost daily

Our builder was great and made some nice suggestions that weren't expensive to implement. We are happy in our space. After moving around so many years - this house is ours. There are one or two small things we might have done differently, but we're content.

Good luck!

[raccoon]

10. Thank you everybody for sharing!

At present this is just kicking around in my head. But if I decide to
pursue it I'll keep what yall have said in mind!

[mnhtnbb]

13. Yes, we did. After a fire destroyed the house that was here

we finally decided to rebuild something entirely different.

We have a hillside lot. We wanted single level (the house that burned was 3 stories) and
the idea was for us to age in place--not go to a retirement community or assisted living. When we built I was 60 and my husband 69: we've been in
the house for 5 years.

My husband is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and he works from a home office. We designed
the house for his office to have a separate entrance from the front of the house. Our master
bedroom/master bath is at one end of the house and the guest bedroom is at the other end of the house.
I have a study at the back of the house adjacent to the guest bedroom. We have a screened porch
with two doors--one from our master and one from the dining area. We have an open concept kitchen/living/dining area
with big windows overlooking the deck(connected to the screened porch) which overlooks the downward slope of our hill.

We also decided to do one ensuite bedroom/bath downstairs--with a separate entrance--that our youngest son occupied when home
from college when we first moved in. It's intended to be used by live-in help--if needed--to keep us out of assisted living should it
become necessary.

We hired a design/build firm, which was an attempt to avoid communication issues between architect and builder. I think it contributed
to the problem of ending up over budget. BEWARE of over budget! We ended up with the project costing about 10% more than we'd
anticipated and not all of that was making decisions after the plans were fixed to "add something else". We made a lot of trade-offs.
I was just telling someone last night--who is also building--that I really wished I hadn't given up my walk-in storage this time of year.
It's getting more difficult to get up/down the ladder to the attic to get decoration stuff down! I also did a lot of looking at plans for single story houses before we hired the architect so I had the basic layout in mind BEFORE we even had a first meeting with the architect.

I wouldn't do it again if I didn't have to. To me, I'd rather find a house with good bones and remodel--preferably while living somewhere else--
than build from scratch. It's usually cheaper to do that. I've done that a number of times with houses where I lived and been happy with the process.
If you're going to build and you don't have the time to do a lot of planning/supervision yourself, then you really need to find an architect/builder you
can trust. It seemed--toward the end--that if the contractors could figure out a way to screw something up, they did. I was telling this person I met last night--for example--about mounting a kitchen light fixture that was supposed to go up in a wave. The electrician put it up in a straight line--with attachments through the ceiling in several places--even though the photo on the box showed it in a wave. Well, rather than have them redo it--and have to fix holes in the ceiling, I just had them leave it. Bugs me every time I turn on that fixture--and it's 5 years later! Lots of little stuff like that you'd never expect contractors to mess up--but they find a way to do it unless you can supervise daily at the end of the project.

[Silent3]

14. We found a new, small development where we could customize what we had built.

We started with their basic floor plan, which we thought was a little overpriced for what we'd get, but were able to modify and expand on that at a bargain rate.

I'd always wanted to build a nice home theater, but most houses don't have any rooms that truly fit the bill. I wanted a big, symmetric room that could easily be made fully dark, with enough ceiling height to have a second row of seats that were a step higher than the first row.

In most houses the biggest rooms are very asymmetrical (closed on one side, but opening into the kitchen on the other, etc.), often for either practical reasons or a deliberate breaking of symmetry to make the space more architecturally interesting. But that's terrible for consistent acoustics. A big room that is, architecturally speaking, a boring symmetrical rectangular box is hard to find.

You can section off a space like that in many unfinished basements, but then you run into ceiling height problems if you try to cover all of the pipes and duct work. I'm six feet tall, and I've been in many finished basement where my hair lightly brushes against the ceiling.

What turned out to be the best, most worth-while customization bargain for us was getting one extra foot of ceiling height for only $2500. Even if you don't want a home theater, for that small price (relative to the cost of a whole house) you get a basement that's enormously more useful for all kinds of uses. For example, there's a small family room in our basement too, where we have an elliptical exercise machine. Anyone taller than 5' 4" would be banging their head on the ceiling trying to use that machine without the extra foot of clearance above their head.

[pipi_k]

18. My house was already

built and was very small, so we've added on over the past 20 years, made things how we wanted them the best we could given our budget.

There was no back deck, so we put one on, then in 2005 we used it as the base for a glass-enclosed three season room with propane gas Rinnai heater. It's my favorite room in the house because my very own microsuede sofa is out there and I often take naps and listen to the birds and the waterfall splashing into the small backyard pond.

One thing I would highly recommend is this...

If you have any intention, or even an inkling, that you may stay in your home into your retirement years, do give serious thought to making it as "senior friendly" as possible. First floor bathroom(s) with plenty of room for walker or wheelchair, toilet bars, that sort of thing. Look around and assess whether improvements along those lines can be made sometime in the future, if need be.

Good luck and have fun

[sarah FAILIN]

19. yes. best decision ever.

I had the plans drawn to my specifications. I put a pocket door between kitchen and living so I didn't have to worry about cleaning up before meals to feel comfortable. Built in dressers in closets, used an industrial sized kitchen sink big enough to lay cookie sheets in, a hoist which has never been used to change light bulbs.
Things I wish I'd done.. put the laundry in the mb closet or bathroom, used standard windows instead of casement which are flimsy.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

20. My childhood home was essentially that.

My parents bought it when it was just a one bedroom bungalow, and each time after me and my siblings were born, they added on to their exact specifications.