We built our home 14 years ago and spent about a year doing research on building the perfect home for us before we started building. We read many books; talked to many friends and family members who had built homes; and interviewed numerous custom home builders. We spent a lot of time evaluating was was important to do during the building process (thicker exterior walls, tilt-in windows on both floors, wiring for future landscape lighting, etc.) and what could be changed out later (upgrading appliances, paving the driveway, etc.). We're really happy with the choices we made. Our plan was and is to stay in this house until the kids are all off on their own and we just don't feel like investing our time and money to the upkeep of this house any more. Then DH & I will move to a 3 or 4 bedroom condo in some type of retirement/over-55 community.
As for this house, there are too many pros to list but my highlights are:
1. Love the lot and location. We aren't in a development -- just on a quiet road in the country. Everyone on our road has 2-4 acres (we have 4). We have a 400 acre cornfield across the street yet we are less than a mile out of town; less than 5 miles from a major highway; and less than 45 minutes outside of a major city. We have a beautiful view. We worked with the excavator prior to construction to find the perfect spot to put the house on the 4 acres we had to work with so that we'd have a great view but more importantly so that we wouldn't get water in our basement since we planned to make that additional living space.
2. We have 6 bedrooms (plus one more room that *could* be a bedroom but we prefer to use it as storage) and 4 full baths. We located the guest room on the first floor (along with a full bath and the laundry room) so that we can live on one floor if/when we need to. I love having the laundry room on the first floor. That was a priority for this house. I've lived in houses where it's been in the basement (no fun dragging wash baskets full of clothing up and down 2 flights of stairs) and upstairs with the bedrooms (hated having the noise if I threw a load of laundry in at night before I went to bed and did not like having to run up and down the stairs to shuffle laundry from the washer to the dryer and then to empty the dryer and fold). Once I lived in a house with laundry on the first floor, I knew I would never build or buy a house without that feature. Everyone carries their dirty laundry down in the morning and I line up the baskets of clean clothing at the bottom of the steps for them to take back up later that day or the next day. Easy peasy.
3. While we have a very open floor plan on the first floor, we also put in pocket doors between some of the areas so that we can create smaller, more intimate spaces when needed. Those doors have gotten used a lot!
4. We put a door in one of the bedrooms to allow us to walk out to the attic space above the garage. That has proved to be invaluable. If we hadn't done that, we would have to use a pull-down ladder in the garage to access the space all the time (which would mean we'd have to back the car out every time we wanted to use that ladder). It's so much easier to just open a door and walk out there. We also have another 1,000 sq. ft. of attic space above the house that we don't use.
5. We added an extra 6 ft. of length to the garage. This gives us plenty of storage space in the garage for bikes, extra refrigerator, storage cabinets, garbage can and recycling bins, etc.
I don't really have a lot of cons... I think my biggest con (and it's really not a big deal at all) is that because of the size of everyone's yards, there isn't really the ability to have any of those "across the washline" chats with the neighbors. If I want to talk to them, I have to call them on the phone. It's not really a "neighborhood" -- we're all just living in homes along the road. Which, based on some of horror stories I've heard people tell about their neighbors (not in this thread -- just in general), I probably should list the distance between houses as a "pro"
. I really only know the people on either side of us -- they're the only people who ever bothered to come over and introduce themselves when we were building.
My other con (or more of a peeve) is the wildlife. While I love seeing the deer, foxes, rabbits, squirrels, coyotes, etc. roaming through our yard, those darn deer have destroyed/killed numerous trees we've had planted. We purposely didn't do any significant landscaping in the far areas of the yard where they like to gather but I think they just seek out our "new" trees and kill them. Our back yard is surrounded by wooded areas but the deer don't want anything to do with those "free" trees. They just like the ones I paid to have planted.
And snakes. I hate snakes. They seem to like to live in my flower beds. Not sure why that lovely 400 acre field across the street isn't appealing to them, but apparently it's not. They prefer the mulch in my flower beds. I know they're harmless (at least the ones we have around here) and that technically I've invaded *their* space, but seriously, I'm just asking for 1/4 acre "no snake zone" -- they can roam wherever they want to on the other 3.75 acres we have (or again, that 400 acre mecca across the street, or the acres of wooded area behind our house), but STAY OUT OF MY FLOWER BEDS!!!!!
