The 8 Smartest Design Decisions You Can Make Before Building Your Dream Home
You've decided to build your dream home, which puts you in a very unique position. You get to call the shots and choose exactly how your new home looks. It feels invigorating and refreshing, yet also slightly daunting. You don't want to create a home that ends up looking bad or not being very well designed.
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Without wanting to scare you, that exact problem happens more often than you think. It's easily avoidable - but only if you implement these eight incredibly smart design decisions:
Work With Builders To Balance Design & Function
You have the freedom to do whatever you want when designing your home, but this can lead you to one very common mistake: favoring looks over function. You put yourself in danger of creating a house that looks beautiful but lacks any practicality whatsoever. Work with experienced home builders to avoid this and strike the perfect balance.
There are loads of case studies and examples by 101 Residential home builder that demonstrate this perfectly. You can see how a builder like this is able to help people develop iconic-looking homes that retain brilliant functionality. It's all about blending the best of both worlds for a better living experience.
Create Separate Living & Resting Zones
Have you ever lived in a house and felt as though the bedrooms weren't that peaceful? Your bedroom should be a place that encourages you to relax and wind down - but that's impossible if it's right above the living room and you hear noise from downstairs. Likewise, you almost want the bedrooms to be separate from one another for more privacy, rather than connected via a wall.
This brings you to the next smart design decision: create separate living and resting zones in your house. Build your home so the bedrooms are above quieter places or as far away from the "active" zones as possible. You'll feel a difference when settling down to sleep every night because everything feels quieter.
Always Include At Least One Multi-Purpose Room
A multi-purpose room is a room that's built for more than one function. Here's the interesting thing: this doesn't mean it performs multiple functions in one go. No, instead it's more of a room that can transform over time.
It starts as a spare room, then it becomes a baby's room before turning into a home office. You want rooms like this because they grow with your home and provide more flexibility. There should be at least one, but try to include two or more if you can fit them into your home-building budget.
Ensure There's A Usable Attic
Don't build a home without giving it an attic/loft. More to the point, design your home so it has an attic area you can genuinely use. Be sure you can board up the flooring and use this extra space at the top of your home for storage or other solutions.
Funnily enough, attics come under the multi-purpose room heading. You don't always view them as such, but one can start out as storage for your home before evolving into an extra bedroom or home office area. Put it this way: not having a usable attic is a waste of space. You've got an extra chunk of floorspace at the top of your home that sits there and does nothing - why?!
Include A Garage In Your Home Design
Likewise, every home should have a garage. Yes, yes, this is another multi-purpose area you can transform throughout your home's lifespan, but it's also handy to have some additional square footage on your property.
From a practical standpoint, a garage gives you space to store one or two cars, depending on how big it is. While that may not look like the biggest deal in the world, it's great for security and can bring down your annual car insurance premiums. There's not much better than including design elements that benefit your wider life.
Maximize Natural Light Exposure
Not designing a home to capture natural lighting is easily the number one design mistake people make. You don't realize that professional home designers will build houses based on where the natural light comes from. That's why some homes have really strange layouts compared to others; it's so certain rooms get more natural lighting than others.
Create your home so the sun shines into key rooms and increases the natural lighting. You ideally want natural light in your living room, kitchen and bedrooms. Design ideas that help you with than include large patio doors, skylights, etc.
You Can Never Have Too Much Storage
Always design your home with storage in mind!
Nobody in the history of humankind has ever turned around and said, "I wish my home had less storage." You're designing yours from the ground up, so take advantage of this flexibility to build various storage units and hidden places to keep things. It's the perfect excuse to create built-in storage solutions, so there will always be space for you to remove clutter.
Design With Energy Efficiency In Mind
It may sound boring, but don't forget about energy efficiency when designing your dream home. There's not much by way of aesthetics here, though adding some energy-efficient touches will bring down the overall cost of your home. You'll see lower energy bills from the moment you move in - and don't underestimate how much that saves you!
A few ideas that spring to mind involve solar panels or solar roofs, using energy-efficient building materials, and so on. The solar roof idea is really cool if you want to make a modern-looking home that also saves energy.
Following all eight of these design decisions will give you the ultimate dream home. You experience a true blend of comfort, aesthetics, and functionality. Of course, there's still freedom to stamp your own tastes onto your home. It's entirely possible for two people to use all of these design ideas yet come out with totally unique properties. Think about how you want your home to look and the interior design themes you wish to follow, then implement the concepts above.
