When you build a custom home you get to customize plans and features, so that your new home matches your sense of style and your family’s lifestyle. Frankly, that’s one of the things we love about building custom homes for our clients. They can get exactly what they want. We do caution our clients, however, about balancing their short-term needs and their long-term needs when they customize. Here are a couple of areas where that can be important. 

Your Family’s Needs Will Change

Let’s say you have smaller children when you’re building your home. You may want to customize your home to accommodate the needs of the kids. You could create a bathroom where everything is scaled down to make it easier for smaller children to use. That can work great—for a while. What happens when the kids get older? A teenager won’t want a sink he has to bend over to use or a mirror that only allows her to see herself from the neck down. You probably don’t want to customize to the point where the room(s) no longer meet the needs. Even if you don’t have kids, you want to be careful about building something so customized that you’ll have to completely remodel the room if your needs or desires change.

Your Personal Needs Can Change

If you plan to stay in your home a long time (and an increasing number of mature adults are planning to remain in their own homes rather than move to retirement communities), you’ll want to make sure that you’ll still be safe and comfortable in your home years from now. That means planning with the future in mind when it comes to hallways, countertops, stairs, and access to laundry. 

Keeping Resale in Mind

What if you eventually decide to sell your home? Maybe a job will take you away. Perhaps you’ll move to be near family. Whatever the case, you don’t want to have difficulty selling your house. Let’s take an extreme case and say you love the sound of running water, so you decide to build an indoor fountain in your family room. You love it, but others who may consider buying your home think it’s terrible. You may have created a significant obstacle to selling your home. (By the way, here’s an example of a home in the UK where something similar happened.) These are extreme examples, but you get the picture. 

Building a custom home is a great way to make sure you get the home you really want. Here are some great floor plans that can help you get started in that process. You can take these plans and modify them to meet your needs—as you see fit. But as you do, keep one eye on your current needs and one eye on the future.