Shop kitchen items HERE.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but since my last post, we built a house! If you already follow me on Instagram or TikTok, you already knew this. The whole process took about a year and it happened to be right in the middle of the pandemic. Prices were climbing quickly and a number of supplies were backordered (hello black windows that had our house just sitting and waiting for 3 whole months). It was a little stressful at times, but overall, not too bad. We feel incredibly grateful to have been able to build a home during such an uncertain time for so many and we’ve been enjoying our home and new neighborhood!
Shop dining room items HERE.
During the home building process, our design choices were broken down into a few categories: Appliances, fixtures/faucets, countertops, lighting. Other things like flooring, paint and any other specific additions we requested were done through the builder. The other main categories were done through each vendor. This took me a while to figure out because it wasn’t ever really explained to us. Every builder is different and some are more custom than others. Our builder was semi-custom and in the future, I would build with a fully custom builder, but that’s a post for another day. We definitely learned a lot this time and if I could give any quick advice without going to far into it, if you want something (like a pot filler, extended patio, extra plumbing, different flooring than what’s offered, different trim/molding in certain rooms, extra outlets, etc… ASK and ASK EARLY on in the process). There were things we mentioned at our very first meeting and were told we could do, then with how quickly the market was moving and how quickly we signed our contract before we got to another meeting, we missed out on adding certain thing, even though we had asked about them and verbally gotten the green light on. Ask, ask, ask and get it in writing!
Shop living room items HERE.
I swear, I could write a book full of advice when building but this post is about lighting, so let’s get to it. Our budget with our builder for lighting was decent, but lighting through a vendor can get pretty expensive and therefore, push you over budget quickly. Our approach to stay *near* our budget was to go big on outdoor lighting and lighting that we couldn’t easily change (for example, the two-story foyer light that I have no idea how we’ll ever change the bulbs on). Inside our home, we had our builder put recessed lights in the rooms we would add lighting fixtures to later. For us this was our kitchen pendants, dining room and office. We found so many beautiful lights at the vendor showroom for these rooms that we loved, but we didn’t love the price tags on them.
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We ended up getting lighting from a few different places like Amazon and West Elm. I’m so glad we waited because we ended up getting exactly what we wanted for at least $1,000 cheaper. This is definitely an area to save money when you’re building your home. Ultimately, we still went overbudget on lighting even with this approach but only $800 over as opposed to around $2000 or more over if we hadn’t waited it out. Feel free to send me any questions you may have about lighting or the building process on Instagram or email and I’d be happy to help!
