Design Ideas
One of the most challenging parts of building a new house is figuring out what you want it to look like. You may already know a basic floor plan or how you want the exterior to look. But these things change with time and with changes in design trends. For us, coming up with the floor plan was the easiest part. This new home will be our fourth residence. We have learned so much about the things we liked and disliked from those previous homes, so we had a general idea of how we wanted the home laid out. For most, this will be the easiest decision. What we were unsure about was how we wanted the exterior to look. We live in a smaller town with plenty of new construction, but there really isn’t a whole lot of variation in exterior designs locally. We decided to go one Saturday to a parade of homes, put on by the builders’ association in a nearby city, to get more design ideas from a wider range of builders and designers. This really was the best thing we could have done because it gave us the opportunity to see the participating builders’ best work. All of these homes had just completed construction, were lavishly staged, and were for sale. What was so great about this whole experience is that this city was about an hour away from where we live. We weren’t their customer. We weren’t tempted to sell our lot and buy any of these houses — although it would have been tempting if some of them could have been ripped from their slab and transported to our empty, lonely lot — . We were just there to take it all in, taking pictures of what we liked and collecting brochures from the home builders and suppliers to take back with us for ideas. And although these home builders do not build near our area, many of the suppliers are the same ones used by our local builders. And because there is nothing like this parade of homes where we live, this was the only way to connect with them other than going to a home show in that same large city.
We were very fortunate to find a participating home builder who specialized in building the type of house that we liked the most. We were able to explore a few homes that he built and some really great ideas and pictures to use later. We then went home and search through the vast image gallery on his website and Facebook page. This is where we found a home with an exterior design that checked all the boxes for us both. What we took away from this experience was an exterior design and a few great ideas for interior features. We also discovered that home design, just like automobile and clothes design, is trendy. We had been to this same parade of home 6 years earlier, and you’d think there wouldn’t be a whole lot of change in home design over so few years, but there was plenty. We both realize very quickly that we needed to weed through all of the trendy designs to find one that would stand the test of time. Of course, this is always just a guess, but sticking to timeless designs in certain areas became our focus as we moved on to the next step, drawing up the plans.

