When we built our house, we made a few decisions to cut some costs. Nothing riveting, really. Brady did a chunk of the work himself. We found our own deals that were sometimes cheaper than our builders standard costs. We didn’t finish the basement. We chose laminate over hardwood. Laminate over granite. Stuff like that. Another place that we cut costs was the garage. We didn’t finish the inside at all. Its just a shell. We figured that getting the vehicle out of the wind would already be better than nothing (we’d never had a garage before) and we decided that we’d slowly get the inside finished and heated over the next couple of seasons. Lots of things were higher on our priority list. The basement being the most important thing. Then the deck and yard, fence, driveway, etc. Then the garage.
I understand that these were OUR decisions. I am NOT passing the buck. But man, I wish we had been given a heads up about this floor plan specifically.
We love the layout of our home, and we love having our room over the garage. That was a huge selling feature for us. But people shouldn’t be allowed to leave the garage unfinished in this house, because we are less than a week into the cold weather and our bedroom is ice cold. Like its unreasonably frigid in there. No lie. It heats up a little bit more when we have the house temperature set around 24C, and even then, only when the furnace is actually running. Last night, we were soaking in the tub, and we could actually see where all of the screws were in the studs behind the bathroom walls because they were so dang cold, and the bathroom was humid. There were spots of frost on the wall. It is that cold up there.
Had we known any of this in advance, we would likely have asked that the garage be insulated and covered with poly at least. We may have even bit the bullet and installed the garage heater. OR, we may have still declined, but done the work gradually over summer and early fall. Now, here we are, two weeks before Christmas, buying materials and trying to find time to finish our garage amidst all of our holiday festivities. I won’t lie. I’m pretty annoyed by the whole thing. Praise the Lord we have a great friend in our supply guy and he’s giving us a lovely deal on the materials. It hurts a bit less when we were very much saving that money to finish our basement.
One other thing I wish I had known about the garage was the opener. When we built a custom home, we sort of expected a list of several thousand decisions to make, and it wasn’t like that. We got our say on cabinets, flooring, paint, finishing, lighting, etc., but we had to get special permission to actually get to change our appliances, plumbing fixtures, etc. Because we have never built a house before, and we didn’t get that crazy list we expected, we missed a few things. Its bound to happen, of course, as you always are learning, and there will always be things you do differently the next time. We ended up with a fairly standard garage door opener, which is fine. It was likely the best value for cost, and in most homes, it likely wouldn’t make a huge difference whether it was standard or fancier. But we sleep above the garage, and that sucker is LOUD. In our research, a virtually silent opener would only have been a few hundred dollars more. In the mortgage, we would have absolutely taken that into to consideration and asked for the quieter one, but now, shelling out the several hundred dollars for a new opener seems foolish. However, it wakes the baby who sleeps in our room, which is unpopular for everyone. So once again, I find myself wishing these things had been considered when we built.
I know these things were on us to think about, but having never lived in a house like this before, we would have seriously benefitted from a heads up. We are VERY happy with our builder, as they went above and beyond in pretty much everything. If we were to ever build again, we would likely build almost the exact same house, and we would go with the same builder again, without question. But we did learn some valuable things. We can swing the project financially, but its all coming out of our basement fund, which stings more than just a little :/ But we’ll get there. Just not quite as quickly as we had hoped.
Wish us luck on these chilly days! Pray we find a miraculously free (and perhaps slightly warmer?) day that suits for us to finish up the inside of our garage. If it has to wait until after Christmas, that will be a long time to be sleeping with a heating pad and a million blankets!
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PS: Consider these things if you’re looking to build/buy a modified bi-level! We would HIGHLY recommend this floor plan, but we would also HIGHLY recommend finishing the garage in the process!