So you decided to build a home or maybe you just signed the papers and took a selfie at your new home site – congrats!

This was truly one of the most exciting things I’ve done as an adult, but I promise it’s a tough process. Now that we are fully moved into our home here in Castle Rock, I wanted to share some of my top tips for building a new home.

Spoiler Alert: would I choose to build another home? Probably not. 

How To Make Building A New Home Easy – Where To Cut Costs, What To Do And What Not To Do:

1. Hire an inspector before closing. Maybe this is already the norm, but I used to think inspectors were meant to cover people buying a used home. Point blank, they are meant to help all home buyers, so that is you with a new build. Especially with a new build given how quickly these homebuilders just throw houses together and all the things our inspector caught. Not only that, but we are going to rehire our inspector before our one-year walk through, which is when the homebuilder’s warranty ends, so we want to be covered.
2. Be realistic and OK with the fact you will live in a construction zone for probably 1-2 years. Obviously this depends how early into the neighborhood you move in, but we were one of the first. This can be a huge benefit because betting into a new development early can definitely save you money with their incentives. Part of our incentive was a free finished basement, which is probably valued around $60,000. However nice the incentive, I haven’t been keen to the fact that our street and backyard (as they are building the street behind us) is a complete mess filled with dust, debris and workers constantly accessing your backyard or sneaking a peak in your windows. Half the time our street is completely blocked with construction trucks, and all the other things that are involved with a construction zone. You may also be looking out your beautiful windows to a dumpster. True story.
3. Get everything in writing. This is a good rule of thumb for pretty much everything you do as an adult, especially expensive purchases like a new house. Our homebuilder had AWFUL reviews about the warranty department (not necessarily sales), so everything I needed done like paint touchups, our backyard flooding, etc. was done in writing. It’s funny because the company would immediately call rather than put their answer or timeline in writing and that just didn’t work for me.
4. Be sure to factor in costs you are responsible for, that you may not have to pay for if you bought a used home. Sure the incentives mentioned in #2 were great, but when you start to add up things like window treatments (i.e blinds), landscaping (OMG), a fence, and other things like that. For example, a rough estimate of these things includes our landscaping ($25,000), our fence ($8500), and our window treatments ($4,000). That is a ton of money will you add all of that up.
5. Be a stickler and document everything. Most builders give you blue tape to go around the house and find little places to touch up and they ask you to put blue tape on areas that need to be touched up. These are usually places that they missed with grout or paint before your move-in or even things that you may have damaged upon moving in. I wish I would’ve documented everywhere we put tape, because we had so many tape pieces that I think the workers just got lazy and took the tape down without doing at least 20% of what we had pointed out. So now 8 months in, I still see spots I know I marked that were never fixed and it’s probably too late. As tedious as it sounds, I wish I would have walked around the house with a quick video just for reference.
6. Ask all the questions. This was probably our biggest mistake as we learned after the fact that you could look at the same builders floor plans in other neighborhoods and have them build those plans in your neighborhood, as opposed to just the four models shown at the sales center. Again, I was new to this and I love our home, but had I known I had 30+ floor plans to choose from versus four, I may have loved my home even more! (How many of you knew you could do that?)
7. Make a list of things that are important to you that may seem common sense or things you love at your current house. This is probably the one thing Jason beats himself about, or at least did all winter long. Jason has lived in Colorado for around a decade, and knew that having a south facing driveway was essential (it melts the snow faster, which is key in Denver). Somehow he forgot to think about that fact when we selected our lot, and six months into our brand new home he hates the fact our driveway is solid ice in the winter when our neighbors across the street has already melted without doing any work.

The hardest part about our new home build was probably at the Design Center picking out every single detail. Here are some tips and hard lessons we learned as we started to pick out some key details and where we saved some money on.

The Design Center will try to upsell you on absolutely everything and it is frustrating, overwhelming, and expensive (three of my least favorite things).

Here’s what we upgraded in our new home after the fact, which saved us a HUGE amount:

• Soft close (our cabinets and drawers) — at the design center it is all or nothing, meaning they can’t do just the upstairs or only the kitchen. It’s every single drawer and cabinet in your entire house, including those spare rooms that never get used. It was around $4500 at the design center to do this, but we had friends show us how and we probably did 90% of our cabinets and drawers for less than $200 and it didn’t take Jason super long.
• Light fixtures — the main reason I didn’t do this at the design center were there lack of choices. Our home game with a “level 2 upgrade” so we just let them put in whatever, and had a designer pick out our fixtures and then hire an electrician. Not only did we get such better choices, we were able to price shop, as opposed to being stuck with the options the homebuilder gave us.

Before you start ordering, read these tips for buying furniture online. Trust me, this will save you time, money and major headaches. 

• We demoed our main hall/powder bathroom. If I’m being honest, these houses are cookie-cutter and man is that pretty annoying given what you pay and what you can see talented people online do with renovations. So we picked one small space and totally ripped everything out (we didn’t upgrade anything with the builder, and then sold everything on FB Marketplace, like the pedestal sink, mirror, lights, etc.)
• Knobs/Pulls from Amazon for all of our cabinets and drawers. Again, this is all or nothing, which doesn’t let you swap it up and their options were pretty limited. This allowed us to use different pulls (this is a term for the handle, which I didn’t know) for the kitchen, master bath, basement bar, etc. to give each room a fun flair. Here are some black kitchen pulls from Amazon, that were such a small price for a major impact on your kitchen or bathroom.
• The first thing you should do when buying a door online is knowing the type of door that you want. Some hardware stores might have a wide variety of doors, but since you are online, you can browse through the internet and see which door would suit your home. It would also be best if you keep lockpicking tools handy just in case you encounter newly installed doors with faulty locks. We don’t want to break down new doors, now would we?

SHOP ALL MY LINKS FOR HOME DECOR

• Kitchen faucet (and other faucets). You can get some awesome ones on Amazon, believe it or not. Here is our Amazon kitchen faucet and it was $80 versus the next level upgrade at the design center for $350+ and not even this cute!
• Window shades – this again saved a huge amount of money, but was a mistake I made and I’m still paying for it (literally). Don’t be afraid to ask questions and put some decisions on the experts you are paying for. I was so caught up with loving natural light for selfies and OOTD (honestly, I was and still am), that I got a very light window treatment that allowed for natural light. As soon as our back neighbors built their house, the light was too much with just one porch light on. We now have to replace our bedroom window treatments at an additional cost. That was just something that didn’t occur to me, and obviously if you want natural light you can lift the window shade. Talk about a blonde moment. I wish the lady we used for window treatments had suggested that. Same thing about the front guest room. We didn’t have street lights when we moved in, and we do now, so there’s another room we have to double pay to block out some of the light.

Speaking of the design center, I would absolutely photograph and take videos of everything you select. We had an issue with our fireplace tile based on the small sample at the design center and what the final product was in our home. After pushing quite a bit, they refunded the money, but I can almost guarantee you they wouldn’t have if I didn’t have such a dramatic example of how wrong it was. Not only was it wrong, but we paid almost $2000 to upgrade that one piece of our home, and I’m not going to pay for something they got wrong.

Another annoying thing with building a new house is that the homebuilder has to give you a complete house. Here are a few examples that really sucked:

• We wanted to change out lighting, so we had to take down what they put up
• We wanted to replace mirrors in our bathroom, but they still had to hang up the big bulky stock mirror with the glue – ugh!
• We wanted to do special flooring in our workout room, but we still had to pay for carpet, to just end up having to rip it out – that one hurts the most.

So even if you plan on putting different mirrors in the master bathroom after the fact or putting up different light fixtures and chandeliers, they still have to hang everything as if it is a complete house. So you will have to take that stuff down and then hire someone to do it.

Other Things To Be Aware Of 

Once you move in, prepare to have contractors and workers in and out of your house constantly for the first few months. Between repainting things, fixing holes in the ceiling, fixing areas of the hardwood floor that didn’t match with the other areas, it is a lot to deal with even after you move in. And working from home, they don’t seem to realize you aren’t there to cater to them. Your doorbell is constantly ringing and contractors are constantly dragging dirt, etc. into your clean home.

I don’t say all this to talk you out of building a home, but I was pretty naive at all the extra costs I hadn’t thought of.

Again, back to my spoiler alert way above. I’m not sure I would build a new house or deal with new construction again. Of course the housing market is always changing, as are my wants and needs, but there was a lot more of a headache than I originally thought.