Home Design

The business part of building your new home is complete. You have the plans, the builder, the lot, and now it’s time to focus on the extras.

Designing Your New Home

Some people have a detailed vision of every corner, color, feature, and finish while others just have the broad strokes in mind. Either way the interior design phase of building a new home ranks as one of the most pleasurable activities in the process. Of course, if you’ve opted to build a custom dream home, the sky — and your budget — is the limit to what design features and finishes you can include.

Does Your Builder Provide The Customization You Need?

Different dream home builders offer different levels of personalization ranging from 100% customization to a varied menu of default choices. Before you sign the dotted line ask your builder for the options available for the following:

• Flooring
• Kitchen & Bathroom Countertops
• Kitchen & Bathroom Cabinets
• Interior & Exterior Doors
• Lighting Fixtures
• Plumbing Fixtures
• Hardware
• Appliances
• Heating & Air Conditioning Systems
• Paint & Trim Colors
• Exterior Materials

That may be a daunting list, but if your builder is a professional he or she will make sure every choice you make complements the finished home.

Match Your Floor Plan and Your Options

You might have a finished home interior pictured in your mind down to the color of shower curtains, but you must let the lot and floor plan guide your decisions. For example, you may have seen a beautiful oversized island on Instagram and assume you can add it to your kitchen no problem. However, your builder may not be able to move walls or increase your square footage enough to make an oversized island work without taking space away from another room.

Take advantage of the Icon Projects team to provide you will all the options available to you based on your lot and floor plan. Your sales consultants can also talk to you about popular options and ask you questions about your lifestyle to help you narrow your choices while maximizing the value of your new home.

Icon Projects also offers digital floor plans and virtual tours in their offices or on their websites that can help you make the match between your ideas and the available layouts.

How to Stay Within Your Budgets When Selecting Options

Whatever options you chose for your new home, test them out first. It can be hard to visualize the end product if you’re looking at small samples in a design center or on Pinterest. Visit homes so you can see the difference between an $8,000 hardwood floor and a $32,000 floor.

There are no rules on how much to spend on options in comparison to your home’s base price, but Icon Projects can work with you to figure out which options make the most sense in the context of your budget.

Which Options Add the Most Value to Your Home?

Everyone envisions living in their new dream home forever, but with the real estate market as hot as it is every home should be built with the future in mind.

A generation ago who would have thought that kitchen countertops and backsplashes would be as big of selling points as a glamorous master bedroom suite with a king-sized ensuite.

Fortunately, there is solid research available to help you determine which options are the most popular today — and that’s a good indicator of what will pay off at resale. Just ask Icon Projects.

Where to Get Design Ideas

Home design magazines such as House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, and Better Homes and Gardens not only publish monthly magazines, they also publish occasional guides that you can use for inspiration in your own home. These magazines have an online presence as well.

Other websites, such as Houzz.com, HGTV.com, and Pinterest, offer plenty of additional resources for home designs. A quick online search will bring up dozens of blogs and design sites that you can peruse as much or as little as you like to get ideas. If you’ve already got the design bug, you’ve probably got a file folder — online or on paper — of ideas for your new home. If not, it won’t take long to generate some ideas of your own.

While the internet is the first stop for new dream homes is the internet, Icon Projects suggests going on an open house crawls.

Understanding Energy-Efficient Features

New homes built in Canada are more energy-efficient than the homes of the past simply because of the advancement of building supplies and techniques. Icon Projects builds houses that are as close to “zero-energy” as possible with options such as solar panels, a tankless water heater, or a more efficient heating and air conditioning system.

Smart Home Features

The future is now. Your next home will be fully automated by Google, Amazon, or Apple, and Icon Projects can get you started right. From lights, appliances, thermostats, locks, and even water faucets everything can be controlled by your smartphone or smart home hub and Icon Projects can build it.