Reimagine Your Home – Remodeling Solutions
The following article was published in the Sunday, May 19th 2024 edition of the Houston Chronicle.
How to choose? It depends on what you want!
When you build a custom home aka your “dream home”, you have a blank slate to design your ideal living space in the location you desire. You have control over all the decisions from the floor plan layout to the types of finishes that will be used.
The Advantages of Building a Custom Home:
- Have it your way! A custom-built home can be personalized to reflect your personality, tastes, and preferences.
- With a brand-new home, everything will be under warranty which means less maintenance issues.
- A new custom home allows you to use sustainable materials to design an environmentally and energy efficient home. Sustainable materials offer a way to reduce the environmental impact of construction and remodeling projects by conserving natural resources, minimizing waste, and lowering carbon emissions.
- When designing a new custom home, you can include smart technology features for better functionality.
The Disadvantages of Building Your Custom Home
- It usually costs more to build a new custom home than to renovate an existing one for reasons including site preparation, permitting, regulatory compliance and architectural design fees.
- New landscaping may be an extra cost.
- A new custom home may take longer to build than renovating your current home. Building a new custom home from the ground up involves multiple stages of construction, including foundation, framing, roofing, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, insulation, drywall, and finishing work. Each stage requires careful coordination and may take several weeks or months to complete, depending on the size and complexity of the home.
- Lastly, you might want to stay in the home you’re already in because it’s full of memories and you love your neighborhood.
Advantages of a Home Remodel
- A home remodel allows you to transform your home into the home of your dreams by making modifications to meet your current lifestyle needs.
- Depending on the improvements you make, you can boost the value of your home.
- A home remodel may allow you to have a more open layout or, depending upon your property, to add additional space either by building out or up.
The Disadvantages of a Home Remodel
- Sometimes when remodeling a whole house, problems can be uncovered when knocking down walls or with the home’s structure which can result in unexpected costs. We’ve all seen this happen on various home remodeling tv shows.
- Remodeling a home can be a time-consuming job and may be challenging to live through. If possible, you may be able to designate specific areas of the house where you can live comfortably while the remodel is underway. This might mean setting up a temporary kitchen, bathroom, and sleeping area in parts of the house that are not being renovated.
- There may be limitations on how much space and functionality you can achieve in your current home. You may find that changes that you want to make to your layout are not possible or may put you over budget.
No matter what changes in your life, a custom home can meet those changes while a home renovation can also make it possible to have the home of your dreams!