10 Home Build Regrets | Tips for new construction

[Music] hi i'm courtney and welcome to my channel today i'm going to be talking to you about the 10 regrets i have when i built my own home we built this home about two years ago almost and i do love so many things about it so finding 10 things that i don't like was a little bit difficult to do but i've definitely gone ahead and gathered up everything i can think of for you today if you want to see more videos just like this one make sure you go down below and hit that subscribe button before we get into it and ring the notifications bell so that you don't miss a single video too let's start with the first item on the list and that is one that's probably my biggest regret to be honest and it is not doing a stone on my counter tops in the laundry so we have 20 mil caesar stone throughout the home in both the kitchen in the kitchen island and the main run of cabinetry and also in both of the ensuite and the bathroom i didn't choose to do the countertops in the laundry just because it was a little bit of money and i thought i could spend it better off in other places and at that point in time obviously we would stick into a budget like many people are when they're building their own homes so the money i could save there i spent elsewhere but reflecting upon it now it was only a few hundred dollars or so to do it was less than a thousand dollars for sure and i think it would make a hell of a lot of difference now i walk in that room and the countertop being a melamine a different material to the rest of the countertops in the home kind of bugs me a little bit now the second one we're gonna be keeping it in the laundry as well i wish i had both an undermount dryer and a washing machine next to each other underneath the cabinetry right now i've got the washing machine on the ground and then i've got the dryer up above it's a little bit annoying right now with the height of the dryer to get things in and out so ideally it would be good if they were both underneath the cabinetry or both at ground level i'd rather deal with that than dealing with something being too high the other alternative that i could have gone for is doing like an all-in-one washing machine and dryer which probably would have been a great option as well but i really don't love the wall mounted hung dryer and ours is a little bit high all right the third item on my list of regrets is that we painted our home theater a different color to the rest of the house so included a standard when we built our mcdonald jones home we were allowed to pick two paint colors and select them wherever we wanted to go in the home so we did the whole house one color and then we said we'd do the theater that little bit darker just so it had a bit more of a mood in there so we picked a paint color that was about two shades darker maybe and thought that it would be pretty obvious but it actually just kind of looks funny and like that room is almost a little bit darker all the time rather than it actually being an obvious different color i wish we had gone more than just a few shades or maybe change the color completely something like that that was a bit more obvious but because the colors are so low it just looks funny and was kind of a waste of time and effort doing just a few shades darker all right the fourth item on my list of regrets is in the bathroom that we have at the end of the house we've got obviously our ensuite for our master and then a bathroom for the rest of the bedrooms to share we've got the toilet in a separate room to the shower bath and vanity and i do love the configuration it does work well if someone is using the shower that the bathroom the toilet itself is not taken however i really don't like that if someone's using that toilet while someone else is in the shower there's nowhere to wash your hands and i feel like it is a little bit impractical again that's something that until you move into the home and you realize that you don't really think about until later on the next item on my list is the size of rooms and understanding where your furniture is going and how you're going to configure the space and what can fit in the room for us there are many of the rooms in this house and the size of the house that worked really really well um all the bedrooms are great we can fit beds in there with bedside tables on them our master's really really good plenty of room around the sides of the bed but one spot that we didn't really think through i don't think enough until it was uh built was in the children's activities space in our house so we had intended to put a pool table in there but i myself had never really measured out and realized the size of the obviously the pool table but then the size you need around a pool table in order for someone to play with the pool cues and not hit the wall that room has now become a ping pong table room because it needs a bit less space around it to do ping pong but we would have loved to have had a pool table in there i would have probably expanded that room out a little bit more and when you're building a home it's not that hard to slice through and just add an extra 200 ml through a space in order to get the room you need to do that again something little but something that just bugs us now because we couldn't do what we had intended to do with that space number six on my list is the color of our carpet so i know if you've watched any of my previous videos i do say how much i love our silvery colored carpet and it was really so important to me during the build process to find that colored carpet there's a few reasons behind this one i think it's beautiful and it looks lovely in the home and quite a light bright feel and keeping with our gray tones we have throughout in addition to that we also have a rag doll a cat actually two in the house and they are the same color as the carpet so for that purpose it's really really great that i don't have to worry about their cat hair being super obvious on and having to vacuum every day but what i found out with time and with wear and tear is that the color of carpet that silvery gray color that we have it really does show up every little mark so i do go out of my way to get them cleaned frequently uh which does cost a little bit more money than i'd probably like to on them and they don't look as good as i thought they would potentially look by now if you want to see what i mean about this color of carpet and the marks in it i've actually got a diy carpet cleaning video i just did during our last lockdown we couldn't get the professional carpet cleaners in like we usually do so i had a diy option that i rented so i'll link that video up above for you now and down the description box below if you want to see what i'm talking about specifically with the carpets and how that diy carpet system work the next item on my list is actually right behind me here and it's the tv in our living room so when we were in our electrical appointment with the builder we went ahead and had a bracket solution for our tv in the theater added in and that had the wall mounting bracket it had extra frame structure of the steel frame added in the wall where the tv was going to be mounted to provide support and it also got the cabling run through the wall and down to pop out underneath all of which were really really great and a good investment of our money we didn't opt to do that same package here in the living room and we had always intended to hang a tv here anyway but we didn't go ahead and do the package because we just thought we would save the money later on down the track when we ended up purchasing the tv and getting it hung here we had troubles with trying to get it wall mounted the studs we wanted weren't right in the proper position for us and directly above this tv is actually a window so i went to the tv centered to that window and there weren't studs in that location if we wanted to hit the studs that would have been off center which would have been even more annoying so if you get to add in those extra bracketing and especially the extra structure of the frame where you're hanging your tvs i would highly recommend it all right the next point we're moving on to is actually powerpoint locations so again in that electrical meeting that i just mentioned we got to pick the locations of every single powerpoint every single light switch what turned off where and everything to do with the roughings of all the electrical gas water everything like that so when we were selecting some of those powerpoint locations obviously we had complete control over them and some of the locations that i thought were great and going to work really well in actual fact turned out to be quite painful so just to name a few powerpoints that i admittedly got wrong the first one that is the biggest pain is walking in the front doorway we've got an entry hallway and at the end of that hallway there is a power point had i put it a little bit to the right it would have been hidden by the wall and you wouldn't see it as soon as you walk in but it is kind of annoying functionally that powerpoint is really great because it allows my vacuum to be plugged in there and access many sections of the house so it's in a good spot it's just maybe a meter off where it should have been the second power point in the kitchen on the main run of cabinetry i put a double power point to one end and then i just thought i would save the extra i think it was like 30 or 40 dollars and put a single powerpoint on the other end which was the silliest idea because in a kitchen it is very common for you to be using multiple powerpoints and have a coffee machine and a kettle and a toaster all plugged in so i really made a silly mistake in that one that i should have just gone for the double and the double i do have another one that's an annoying location in the children's activity again it's kind of in the middle of the wall and i should have put it to the left near the door so it wasn't kind of ruining the nice flat wall look and the last powerpoint i'll tell you about is one in our master suite walk-in robe so in our walk-in robe when you walk in the doorway it's a flat wall to your left and then to the right it kind of cuts in and that's where the racking is so on that wall when i naturally walk into the room the first four or five times i walked in to turn the power point on i would naturally hit that side of the wall with my hand and then i remembered that i had actually placed it right in front of me on the left hand side of the wall so it was a funny human nature thing that you naturally think it's going to be concealed behind the wall so i went to hit there a few times and i had just put it in a funny spot yet again so putting some time and effort and thought into that and how you use the space is really really important having electricians come back to redo work like that can be really painful and unnecessary so a bit of extra time on my part would have been good to stop that one happening so second last on my list of 10 regrets is actually another one in the electrical department and one that is very simple that i just never even thought of and during that appointment we actually didn't add in a tv antenna on the roof so when we got into the house on the first day and we set up the tvs we plugged everything in we actually thought there was a problem with the house and then the tvs weren't working properly but in actual fact the electrician that was here on the day installing my pendant light said to me no no you just haven't got a tv antenna on your roof and you need that to get the signals so simple but again something small that i never realized when i was doing my appointment so something for you to remember as well i think i also included that tip in things not to forget uh so i've got a few good videos on things you don't want to forget in your bill so i'll go ahead and link that down below as well so plenty more videos for you to check out if you want more videos just like this one and again don't forget to hit that subscribe button down below all right lucky last item number 10 on the list and this is again an easy one to fix but would make all the difference so in our front entry hallway we have two pretty straight walls and they aren't super wide it's not a hugely wide hallway but it's definitely a comfortable size hallway and i had so many struggles for the first few months when we moved in here figuring out what to do with that hallway because it wasn't wide enough to put something in there like a hall table or whatnot because it kind of cramped the space so i actually left it plain for a really long time even if you watch my full house tour of this entire house again i'll link that video up above and down below for you too but if you watch that video you'll see the entry hallway is a plane which annoys me because i like having a bag drop area or a little feature in the home i have now added in an entry haul table i found that that was quite narrow and suited the space well and again i put it on the same side that the door opens up to so naturally you're fine walking on the left of it but if i had my time again and again this is really just nitpicking small stuff i would make sure there was some kind of cut out or recess in the hallway to go ahead and pop a piece of furniture like that in or i could have even made sure that the end of the hallway the wall there was a little bit further back so you could have a piece of furniture at the end and still walk past it comfortably so either one of those solutions would have worked perfectly whether it was a recess or just slightly moving the walls but i didn't think of either of those during the plan stage so it's something i would definitely recommend you taking a look at too when you're at those initial stages looking through your plan and how you use the home alright i hope that you like my 10 regrets again as i said i was really scraping the barrel clear to find things that i didn't like about the house when you're building your own home you do really get the benefit of being able to pick so many things and the finishes and the fixtures and the floor plan and make those tweaks but it is hard to know exactly how it's going to work when it comes to fruition and you're living in the home it's a bit of a different story than it was 2d on paper thank you so much for making it all the way to the end of this video i hope you liked it don't forget to give me a thumbs up too and i will see you on the next one bye for now [Music] you

Channel: CourtneyBraz

Views: 35,035

Keywords: home, house, upgrades, home upgrades, house upgrades, construction, building a house, construction upgrades, mcdonald jones homes, mcdonald jones, building, external, internal, electrical, selections, internal selections, external selections, house tour, new house, our new house, home tour, new house tour, 2020 house tour, new home, home tour in australia, new construction, MJH, brand new house, Australia, brand new build, builder, australian homes, homeworld, australian builder, 2020

Id: M-I8-dvSBy0

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021