Transcript of Build Your Dream Home Podcast - Episode 5:
Mark Mathis:
This is the Build Your Dream Home podcast with Mark Mathis. Episode five.
Announcer:
Always wanted to build your dream house but not sure where to start? You're in the right place. Welcome to the Build Your Dream Home podcast, where experts in the industry share their knowledge and help you to be one step closer to building your dream home. And here's your host, Mark Mathis.
Mark Mathis:
Hey, this is Mark Mathis with House Plan Gallery and I really appreciate you taking your very valuable time out to listen to this episode of the build your dream home podcast. I can assure you that hopefully you'll get your money's worth since it's free.
So anyway, I cannot tell you how great it feels to be in this springtime weather. Now, I'm down in Baton Rouge, but our businesses is in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I know it's nothing like what you have up north as far as cold and snow and things like that goes, but it has been one of the wettest winters I can remember and one of the coldest as well. So we had snow, I think, two separate times down here which is kind of unheard of. Now, we have a lot of hurricanes, but we usually don't have that much snow.
Every single day when I get home, one of my favorite things to do is to go outside with my three little boys. Now, my oldest is eight, he's about to be nine. And then I have two identical twins that are five, about to be six. And they're little maniacs. And so they like to go outside and we do all kinds of stuff, get into all kind of trouble, give mom a few more gray hair.
So anyway, we have a good time, but we haven't been able to go outside lately. And I just really, really hated that because you want to have beautiful weather and a nice temperature and not rainy, and we've just been having a bad time down here. So if you're having bad weather where you are, I can feel your pain and hopefully, they'll be sunny days ahead for you as well.
Now I'm really excited about today's episode. We're going to be talking about some of the top reasons to build a new home. Now, it's funny that I would say that because I've never actually built my own dream home. I'm looking forward to it. However, I have a problem with long timelines. And I think my wife and I would have differences of opinion in budget and final fixtures and things like that. So we've just not done it.
We haven't really had a good piece of land here where we live to do that. However, I look forward to doing that in the future. I've been a part of dozens and dozens of new homes as they're being constructed from the ground up all the way from doing the dirt work, to the very final steps where they're moving in the furniture. That was our family business coming up.
We did house plans and my dad and brother would actually build homes for people during the summer times, typically. My dad was a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, and during the summers he drew and built homes for people. And so I went through that process and saw what was involved and I've just not built my own, for whatever reason. So I can tell you when I do build my own home, I have all the different features that I'm looking to have in that home and I can't wait. And let me give you a little background. I'm going to do myself as an example.
I have a wife and three small kids. And the things that we need and want in our house are very different from probably a 65-year-old retired couple who are looking to downsize. What we're looking for is the following. I need plenty of room in the kitchen area and dining room area for my family. I have five people, again, in my family. The kitchen needs to be usable in size, but I would like to have multiple eating surfaces. So a dining room area plus a raised bar would be great.
The laundry room is extremely important to me. In our current house, the people that we bought the house from they had college age kids, and so they made this little slit in the wall that was basically their laundry room and it's been a thorn in our side ever since that we are purchased the home. So, we're constantly having to hang clothes to dry in our spare bedroom where my mother-in-law and father in law when they come, where they stay. And so when they're there, we have to move everything back in the utility room and it's just a mess. So, I want to have a large utility room.
I also want to have a large bonus room. We have a large bonus room, currently. However, it's my wife's room. Mainly it's for crafts, for school projects for the kids and wrapping paper and all that kind of stuff for the holidays and birthdays. It's not really useful at this point. So I would like to have a brand new home where we could start off again and use that space for good, basically.
I'd like to have very large closets. She and I share a closet currently and it's a large closet. However, I like totally separate closets, one for the man and one for the woman. And also I'd like a large shower, much larger than a standard 4x4, just because I'm a bigger guy, and I like the room. I also would like to have a pool in the next house that we move into, just because of the age of the kids, so we don't have to constantly go off to different gyms or whatever that have pools and swim there.
I also want a very large workshop and ideally, a separate building all together that has all my stuff and all of our little ride on toys and four-wheelers and that kind of stuff, but also has a separate office out there as well.
Currently, I don't work out of my home, obviously, because I have three small kids. So I have an office both here in Baton Rouge and also in Hattiesburg, where our businesses located. But dining rooms, for example, aren't something that I'm interested in. Formal dining rooms, I have no interest in. I really don't need a large foyer either. That's wasted space for me.
As you listen to me talk, some of the things I say may not be in any way what you're looking for. Maybe you're at a very different point in life than I am. However, that's what we want. We like country designs, French Country, big porches, brick, and a more traditional style. That's what we build down here and that's what the people down here know how to build very well.
So anyway, that just gives you a glimmer into what I would want in my house if I built that out. And you can do that same thing for yourself, you can make a list of all the different things that you want for your family in your house.
I can tell you, it will be one of the most invigorating things that you'll ever undertake building your new house. And seeing that progress all the way from doing just the dirt work to pouring your foundation, to having the walls risen, to having the roof on, to rooms starting to take shape on the inside of your home and you can actually see the sizes of the different rooms. So I hope you have that experience. I hope I do too. And of course, if I can ever be of any service to you, just let me know.
So, before we get started, I want to read you a new customer story that we were just sent. And this is for our plan that HPG-2200C: The Avondale Court, is a beautiful French Country design, very, very popular. And this one is from Ann H. from Cleveland, Mississippi. She says “We're so happy to have found the HPG-2200C house plan, it met all of our needs and has absolutely no wasted space. We've already started the building process and it's coming along great. The team at House Plan Gallery was a pleasure to work with, and we can't wait to move in. So again, thank you so much, Ann”.
Thank you for everyone who's sending in all your customer stories and your kind reviews on iTunes that helps us so much to get our podcast out to the world. If we can ever be of any service to you, just please let us know.
So in today's episode, we're going to be talking about the top 6 reasons to build a new home. Now, you might be debating to build new or buy existing and you might be thinking, Mark, you can get houses so cheap over here where I live, that it just doesn't make any sense to actually build a home out. And I hear you, there are quite a number of very nice homes that are out there at great prices. However, there's just some things that you can't get with an existing home. Those homes were built either by builders or by people who might be nuts like the people who built our house. They built it just bizarre in many, many ways. And I don't understand what they were thinking when they did it. So you can be that bizarre person and you can build it exactly how you want to build it. And it will make such a big difference in the quality of your life in just your day to day activities.
You think about where you spend most of your time, and that's at work and at home. And if you're not able to be totally happy at work, at least, you can be happy at home, knowing that you have the space is organized in the way that you want, in the same layout that you're looking for.
Number one is fully custom. This home can be one that you design from the start to fit your family's exact needs. You don't have to go into an existing house and figure out how to work around some of the different layout challenges in a particular design. You can design it exactly as you want it to be, and you can put space where you want it to go, and leave it out of areas where it's wasted.
For example, I've mentioned formal dining room is totally wasted on my family because we have an eating area in the kitchen area that we eat in every day. And we're not having tea parties and dinner parties and things like that with friends really, because my kids are just too loud. So it's better that we just don't have that space. We've turned our formal dining room into an enclosed room with French doors, where we store all the kids toys and we play games and have basically a play room and that works extremely well for us. As they evolve, We're going to turn that into their study center. So we're going to have all their computers in their desks so they can have their own little space to get their homework done and to do different projects.
Number two. You can get exactly what you want and nothing that you don't. As you go through and look at existing homes, they're out there and available, you're going to find every single home has something the matter with it. Either the layout is wrong or the location is wrong, or some of the fixtures are wrong, or the way they did different things is just not to your liking. Some will be deal killers and some won't. However, with a custom home that you design, you can design exactly what you want and build it where you want it to, so you don't have to compromise on anything. As long as you have the budget and you're smart about how you layout your space, you can definitely get exactly what you want. And you don't have to worry with the crazy people that built the house that you're looking at because you're building the home exactly for what you are looking for.
Number three, low maintenance. When you have a brand new home that has the latest materials, the most technologically advanced materials, your maintenance is going to be lower. Because everything's brand new, obviously. Your roof is going to be brand new, your exterior paint is going to be brand new, your flooring is going to be brand new, your interior paint, your appliances, in most cases, your TVs, your furniture. All those types of things are going to be much lower maintenance to you over the next few years than would be buying an older home that may have not been maintained as properly as it should have. And so, you want to think about that when you're going into decide whether to buy an existing home or to build a new home that your maintenance is going to be tremendously lower with a new home.
Next, energy efficiency. Energy standards have changed dramatically even over the last two years. And by building a new home, you're ensuring that the house will be built with consideration and materials that will save you money every single month. It's really difficult to retrofit old homes to be more energy efficient. If you've ever done that, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Even moderately dramatic work frequently yields less than 10% annually in energy savings. That's really nothing. Even these mild amendments to existing homes can cost you well into 10s of thousands of dollars per job. And if you factor in a number of these, it would take to see even a 30 to 40% yield on energy savings, then the cost of buying prebuilt really adds up quickly.
There's also a federal residential energy efficiency tax credit to offset annual expenses, which can allow for up to 30% of certain green building materials to be deducted on your taxes. So that's certainly something to keep in mind. If you're one that's very concerned about energy usage, a newer home is traditionally going to be much better and more efficient at using energy then would be an older home built with inferior materials that are outdated at this point.
Number five, modern floorplan. Home architecture has changed significantly over the last decade. So, for example, my parent’s home was built in 1973. And the design back at that point in South Mississippi was to have one central hallway that goes down the middle of the house. And then you have rooms that break off on the sides of that hallway. So everything was built around this central hallway. That's not really a design that you see now, because there's so many more efficient ways to allocate your space. And it gives you a lot more flexibility in the layout where you want certain rooms positioned in the house.
However, back then it was a very inexpensive way to do it, and it worked well for the time period. However, nowadays with some of the new building materials, and the new innovative floor plan designs, you can do a tremendous amount with your floor plan and make it exactly as you would want it to be. So you'll definitely not have to compromise at all on the floor plan. There's some awesome floor plans out there.
And finally, happiness. This is something that you really can't place a dollar value on. If you and your family are happier in a brand new home, and you're going to be there for a long time, and it makes you feel like it's actually your home, that's bringing memories into your family. And that's going to make you to be a happier person than you would probably be if you just bought an existing home that was out there that was, again, built by somebody else for whatever reason. Whether it be a builder or just someone who was looking to build their dream home.
So, with that, I want you to seriously consider all the different benefits to building your own dream home versus buying someone else's. And even though it might not make financial sense to actually do it, keep all these different variables in mind when you're going through the process. Of course, if I can ever be of any service to you, just let me know. Again, my name is Mark Mathis with House Plan Gallery.
If you have any questions, you can email me at mark@houseplangallery.com. And if you've not already done so, you'll definitely want to get your copy of the Dream Home Success Kit, where we include a tremendous amount of different helpful items to help you go through the dream home building process and to find that dream home. You can get that at houseplangallery.com/dreamhome. So with that, I appreciate you being a part of this episode. And if we can ever be of any service to you, just let us know. Thank you.
Announcer:
Are you excited about building your new dream home and want instant access to even more bonuses? Then just head over to http://www.houseplangallery.com/dreamhome to claim our new Dream Home Success Kit which includes thousands of dollars’ worth of additional videos, training, tools, secret online resources, and much more. Again, that website is http://www.houseplangallery.com/dreamhome. It is completely free to join. So what are you waiting for?
