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Notes -
Homeowners of The Motte -- what would you differently if you could do it all over again?
I plan on building a house in the next 12 months on a lot about an hour away from the Gulf of
MexicoAmerica. It's going to be a two-story 5BR house with porches on the front and the back, built in a traditional Southern style.I'm a bit overwhelmed as I don't even know what I don't know about building, and I want to avoid making costly mistakes that I'll have to pay to renovate later (or worse, be unable to fix at all). Happy to hear both from people who built and people who bought.
Specific random things, because most things are going to be covered by smarter guys than me:
Plan one entrance to the house with no steps. Almost nobody does it, because it's difficult to handle the architecture/landscaping to make a ramp look good, but you totally can if you plan it from the start. Elderly people fall on steps all the time, and often hurt themselves. Also convenient for heavy stuff in general. If you plan for it now, you'll have it forever; if you have to rerig it later it will look bad, especially if it's at a time when you yourself are older/less capable.
Anywhere water comes into your house will eventually leak. Plan for that now.
That's a big house, think about how you're going to use the rooms. A lot of people end up with a big house with four rooms that are all variations on "couch and we watch TV in here;" or they all started as bedrooms and got adapted.
Think of the repair guy. Don't put anything in a place where it will be difficult to extract when (not if, when) it needs to be serviced or replaced. Make it easy to reach the air handler, the water heater, the septic system, etc.
Take pictures of the inside of all the walls before you close them up. Write notes and measurements. Store them in multiple places, hard copies, in the home, for the future.
Re. 2, how do you recommend planning for it? Do you have an example?
Re. 3, we have four kids and may have more. Our thinking is:
Primarily by placing mechanicals (well pump, expansion tanks, water heater, air handlers, the first drain the septic system will back up into) in places where when they do leak, they won't destroy anything. Waterproof flooring, floor drains, leak protection, don't stack all your valuables and important paperwork right next to it, etc.
I've always been a fan, if not always a practitioner, of segmenting the house in ways that let you heat and clean selectively. I just have a ranch house, but the basement is on its own mini-split system, and as such we can keep it at a different temperature than the rest of the house, saving money. We also don't need to keep it as clean as it is primarily used as a hosting space other than the workout room. There's a lot of clever solutions to this. Though anyway, I'd imagine with five kids you shouldn't have problems getting chores done for cleaning the house.
Re. flooding, that makes sense, thanks.
Re. segmenting the house, after living in a place with poor insulation, I can definitely see the value. That house was at least designed so that you could essentially separately heat and cool different floors. They did this by adding a sliding door on the staircase landing. It sounds like I might need to work with an architect to accomplish this though.
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