We signed the contract on our home in December of 2019 with a projected closing date of July of 2020. If I am being honest, building a home was absolutely terrifying because we had never done it before. I had so many questions running through my mind–“Is this going to be entirely too stressful?” “Can we afford to do this?” “What if I don’t like it?” I think it was just fear of the unknown.

Our home builder is somewhere between a custom builder and a track home builder. I like to call it semi-custom. We went to the design studio and picked out all of our finishes and made any adjustments to the floor plan that we chose. I say semi-custom because we could customize most things for a fee, but we could not source our own finishes. Thankfully, they had tons and tons and tons of finishes for us to choose from!

The Design Studio

The base price of our home included the standard selections. For example, some standard selections included:

-stained kitchen cabinets
-4 granite options for kitchen cabinets
-tile flooring in hallways and kitchen and carpet in living room
-2 color options of floor tile
-2 color options of carpet

We stuck with the standard option in a lot of instances to save some money, but we did upgrade things that would be harder to do down the road. Some of our upgrades included:

-painted cabinets throughout the house
-wood floors in common areas, hallways, and master bedroom
-wood wrapped island
-quartz counters
-pendant lights over the island
-recessed lighting in the living room
-fireplace tiled from floor to ceiling with upgraded tile
-lots of added electrical outlets, lights, and CAT6

When we signed our contract we had to submit any structural changes to the floor plan. We chose to extend and cover our back patio and we added a door to the backyard from the master bedroom.

The Building Process

Thankfully, we had a fairly easy building process. We broke ground the month before the *you know what* hit. (February of 2020) We were fortunate that we didn’t run into any supply chain issues and we stayed on target for our projected closing date. I absolutely loved the building process and I would go check on the progress just about every day during nap time or when Kyle got home from work. It was so fun to see our lot go from dirt to home in about 6 months.

So Would We Build Again?

Absolutely! We have now experienced remodeling a house, doing a major master suite addition, and building. Want to know what we did in our previous houses? Be sure to check out this blog post! I personally enjoyed the building process a little bit more. Have you ever built a home? Have you ever remodeled? Let me know in the comments!