Building a home can be an exciting, fun journey. But it isn’t always.
Today in my Instagram stories, I got honest about some of the less than beautiful parts of building and things that I would change and I thought I’d share them here too.
To be fair, we had a really great building experience. I’ve heard some horror stories on here and we didn’t experience anything like that, but there were definitely speedbumps.
Starting with the mishaps, we were in a critical stage of our build when COVID hit and the world shut down. This meant that factories shut down and we had to completely pivot on what we had planned. Ultimately, we had to change our throughout flooring, our laundry room flooring, our tile and our cabinet pulls due to factory shut downs and availability. That was a tough one but we didn’t have a choice and had to roll with the punches. This might sound like no big deal but with such big edits like our main flooring and our kitchen backsplash, we were now having to pivot our “vision” for the house.
Another thing that I don’t think a lot of people talk about when building is that no matter how much planning you do, they may start installing things in your house and you might not like everything. Some things were installed and I thought, oh my gosh what was I thinking?! I’ve honestly come around on most of the things I didn’t like upon install but it was difficult to get past at first. You put all of this effort into the selections that you want it to look perfect and that isn’t always the case. For example, we had to pick a new flooring for the main rooms of the house (thanks COVID) and when they installed it, I cried because I hated it. That sounds dramatic but I was so disappointed. I’ve come around on it but it’s still darker than I anticipated and if we did it all again I wouldn’t pick that shade again. Another thing I didn’t love was our kitchen countertop. I gravitate towards neutrals but my husband encouraged me to step out of my comfort zone and I hated the colors it pulled upon install. I actually like it now but it took some getting used to.
So let’s talk about things I would change if we did it again:
The island color. Love it in our master bathroom, don’t like it in our kitchen. It pulls kind of a weird shade in our kitchen lighting.
I would have completed some of the spaces we plan to DIY just because it’s so time consuming (mudroom, upstairs spaces...)
Customization of the kitchen cabinets
Landscaping
If you’re currently building or getting ready to build, here are few pieces of advice to offer:
Take a deep breath and don’t let the stress get to you.
Find a support system. Whether this is even online or in real life, it’s important to have people to turn to for building advice or just to be a listening ear. If you don’t have that, my DMs are open!
Fight for your house. No one is going to care about your house more than you do, so if you aren’t fighting for your house no one is.
You can see more Building 101 on my Instagram stories!
Comments