Perhaps the Most Overlooked Facet in Building Your Dream Home

by Michele Weaver | Dec 4, 2020 | Great Design

There is an under-appreciated aspect of our homes that is a critical component of our overall physical and mental health. One that can contribute to, or adversely affect, our enjoyment of our homes. It is the embodiment of caring for our families, or when ignored, can cause us great embarrassment.

No, we’re not talking about what your home costs or your mortgage payment, though both might be affected. This isn’t about cooking healthy, having a place for everything and everything in its place, or thoughtfully designed outdoor living space, even though each of those is a worthy goal. We’re not even talking about building a stronger/safer home or integrating the latest technology to make out lives better.

No, this is something far simpler and more obvious. Something to be carefully and thoughtfully considered in our home’s design, in how our homes are built, and in product choices made throughout the home. And it’s not something new. Perhaps you heard (or are old enough to remember) the Simon and Garfunkel singing about it in the mid-1960s?

The Sound of Silence

We long for our homes to be our retreats. We yearn for sanctuary, for extended moments of peace and quiet, for an escape from all that life is throwing at us. We want our kids to be healthy and successful. We treasure time spent in our homes with good friends. Still, amidst the myriad of competing goals and decisions to be made when building a home, scarce attention is paid to what we can do to achieve the freedom we seek from unwanted noises.

Loud and annoying noises bring about stress, and stress is a contributing factor in many physical and mental health maladies. Couple that with the difficulties in getting to, and staying, asleep, brought on by interruptive noises, and you have a glimpse into how noise affects our health, well-being, and quality of life. In fact, we at Design Basics discovered that “de-stressing” was one of the four primary lenses women use when evaluating a home’s suitability for her and her household and design our homes accordingly.

Since the majority of us retreat to our bedrooms for maximum privacy, lots of attention is paid to not only the location of bedrooms but also which areas adjoin the bedrooms, in terms of noise potential. Sound isolation can at least partly be achieved through good design, with further steps including additional sound-deadening measures undertaken during construction as well as selecting quieter products such as solid core doors, bathroom exhaust fans, and even cabinetry hardware.

Noise distracts from concentration, learning, and performance. With so many households involved in remote learning and working from home, this benefit’s importance should not be understated. Kids doing homework at the kitchen island or table? Maybe not if you have a loud dishwasher. Do you foresee the sound of Fortnite infiltrating your home office and competing with your ZOOM call? There are multiple ways to help soundproof that wall shared with your family room.

It’s Thursday, and you’ve been looking all week toward having friends over tonight. Dinner’s coming along nicely, but you can’t quite hear what’s being said over the range hood’s whirr. Tomorrow is the big presentation, and you need that blue shirt that’s in the wash. You find yourself wishing you had a quiet, relatively low-vibration laundry pair. You find yourself becoming quite self-conscious when you seemingly hear everything when guests excuse themselves to use the bathroom.

Our relationships are enhanced by the attention we pay to sound deadening in our homes. We make better decisions when we’re not stressed out. Life is good when we get a full night’s sleep. From reading to meditation, pursuing hobbies, connecting on social media, and even taking classes, the absence of irritating clamor is music to our ears. Now you know – taking a little extra time and perhaps shifting your new home budget a bit can help you achieve serenity.

Sound like a plan?

Read more about the importance of quiet homes: Your Health Depends on It!

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Quiet Homes – Your Health Depends on It!

by Michele Weaver | Nov 30, 2020 | HER Home

Builders and home buyers alike have been putting a higher priority on healthier homes, in no small part due to increased time at home because of COVID-19 and its long-term ramifications. In fact, one of our recent blog posts (Healthier Home = Healthier Household) discusses this very topic. But all too often, “healthy” focuses on indoor air and water quality, overlooking the impact of noise on our health.

Though they don’t receive lots of press attention, numerous studies have linked unwanted noise to poor health. In, Decibel Hell: The Effects of Living in a Noisy World, published in Environmental Health Perspectives by the National Institutes of Health, Ron Chepesiuk identifies, among noise’s adverse effects, elevated blood pressure and increased heart rate, which increase your risks of heart disease, stroke, and heart attack.

Chepesiuk also cites the July–August 2002 issue of the Archives of Environmental Health, wherein a team of government and university researchers concluded that exposure to sound “acts as a stressor.” Stress also makes your heart race, and the Mayo Clinic links stress with headaches, fatigue, and stomach upset. Stress is also known to negatively affect your immune system and can aggravate diabetes and breathing problems such as asthma and COPD. The American Psychological Association suggests stress can also adversely affect cholesterol levels.

Obviously, noise can impact our sleep, and lack of sleep has its own detrimental effects. From sluggishness and fatigue to irritability and heightened aggression, sleep deprivation is bad for our physical and mental well-being.

Many of our environments we can’t control. Restaurants can be noisy. Same with our workplaces. And with our modern-day concessions to always-on cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices, we’ve actually invited more noise into our environments. So, we retreat to our homes to be our havens from all the noise. Like the flip side of a coin, quiet places help our bodies relax, decrease stress and anxiety, promote concentration, learning and productivity, and improve sleep. Medicaldaily.com reports quiet environments can even help to improve memory.

Working from home, noise affects our performance. Ditto for our kids who are learning remotely from home. For our general well-being, for our relationships, for our overall outlook on life, we must focus on noise issues in our homes – noise from the outside and noise generated within our homes. In our next three posts we address steps to creating a more serene environment for your home, starting with how the home is built; then addressing design-related opportunities; and finally, smart product choices for creating a quieter home.

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What Your Home Says About You

by Michele Weaver | Nov 23, 2020 | HER Home

You have found what just might be the perfect home plan. You love to entertain and admittedly, when visitors say, “Wow!” or “I love your home,” it feels good. You also enjoy being outside as much as indoors. The home doesn’t have to be large. From what you’ve seen online, 1,500 square foot with at least two bedrooms and bathrooms should work, but the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic taught you there also has to be space for working from home. You’ve kind of “mentally moved in” to the Carter (plan #50015). You want your home to make a statement, and the Carter’s exterior is as stunning as its views from the front entry. Out the back, there are twin covered outdoor living spaces – one for entertaining and one for relaxing. You love the big closet in your bedroom suite and the convenience of its connection with the laundry room as well as its separation from the second bedroom. You order the study print* and get the pricing back from your builder. It’s higher that what you expected and at the top end of what you’re willing to spend, but still doable.

The Carter (below), comes with both 2- and 3-car garage layouts. The curving wall of windows out the back, open layout, and curving kitchen peninsula/eating bar make this a very memorable home!

The Carter – #50015

A resale home comes on the market that seems almost too good to be true. Priced a little bit lower, it’s considerably larger than the Carter, with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. You schedule a walk-through. The home fits right in with the rest of the neighborhood. Very traditional. The mature landscaping is a plus, though the shrubs in front have gotten woody and need attention. There’s a little bit of tile in the front entry, flanked by the open dining room on the left. Straight ahead is the living room with a higher ceiling. You realize the other ceilings are lower than new model homes you had walked through, probably eight-foot high. The breakfast area is visible through an entrance at the back of the living room, but the kitchen is closed off. Some of the appliances are new as is the kitchen sink and laminate flooring. You find out there had been a dishwasher leak and wonder about further damage or mold. There are a decent number of cabinets and amount of prep space, but no island and just a two-foot pantry cabinet. The breakfast area also has an entrance to the family room, which also isn’t open to the kitchen. You like the secondary bedrooms being on one side of the home, in front of the family room, and your suite being on the other side, behind the garage. There’s a big whirlpool tub in your bathroom, but a smaller shower than what you want. Overall, it’s a nice house – simple and functional… but unremarkable.

New vs. used. As in this example, so often that decision comes down to what you want, value, and the tradeoffs you are willing to live with. Purchasing a resale home means inheriting the former owner’s choices. Are your tastes the same as theirs? When you walk into a room, will it make you smile, or bring to mind the changes you would like to make? The long drapes in that resale home provide privacy, but you want easy-clean cellular shades. Mauve was their primary color; you want to see tones of gray. The natural oak cabinets are fine, but they would look better, and you could do more with the kitchen if they were painted. And those basic, boring lighting fixtures appear to have been an afterthought. You find yourself asking, “What were they thinking?” when it comes to all of the different flooring in the home.

Below: Examples of modern design and product choices. (photo credits: Renee D. Calvin Photography)

As with studying home plans, one of the benefits of looking at resale homes is discovering what you like, as well as what you don’t particularly care for. The amenities that will make your home “just right.” Harmonizing design with innovative product solutions that reflect you and your priorities.

The exterior styling, colors, details; the floor plan layout, thoughtful design touches and amenities; the products used, particularly finishes such as flooring, colors, cabinetry, countertops, and lighting; all of these speak volumes about you, the homeowner. They reveal your priorities, values, and aspirations. What others see – is that who you really are, or the home’s prior owners?

Finally, how will the home you purchase make you feel? New carries a distinct status as compared to used. Opting for a new home allows you the opportunity to get exactly what you want, which appeals to most of us. So much in our lives are outside of our ability to control. We have to play the cards we’re dealt. That’s not the case when we can choose to purchase a brand-new home rather than a resale listing. New home buyers have much more control over their purchase, the design, neighborhood, products used, construction quality, etc.

*Study Print: A complete set of drawings to use for estimating purposes only. When you join our BudgetWise Bundle℠ program, you can receive up to five study sets for just $100 each. It’s a great way to narrow down your favorite plans to get construction estimates without breaking the bank!

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Cover photo: <a href=’https://www.freepik.com/photos/food’>Food photo created by mego-studio – www.freepik.com</a>

Futureproofing: Another Reason to Buy New

by Michele Weaver | Nov 16, 2020 | HER Home

Your expectations for the future will have a big impact on identifying the best home for you. How long do you see yourself living in the new home? Life happens! What will likely change, such as kids moving out or parents moving in? Are aging-in-place features important? Is your home easily adaptable to future needs? Wider doorways may not be feasible at a later date. You’re single, so two sinks in your bedroom suite’s bathroom and a private toilet area may not be important to you but ignoring such amenities could be a real drawback in the future.

None of us has a crystal ball. Prior to 2020, who imagined the impact the COVID-19 pandemic would bring? Still, when it comes to our homes, looking at what’s popular today provides some insight into what we can expect to likely be popular five to ten years from now. Continuing the bedroom suite bathroom example – large showers are in demand, particularly “curbless” showers with no lip or threshold to step over. Safer and more comfortable, choosing such an amenity when building your new home is a wise choice, especially compared to a resale home with combination tub/shower or a tub with separate, modest-size shower. Even something as mundane as cleaning the shower is a factor – small showers are harder to clean because there’s simply not enough room to move around when you are standing in that shower.

Storage and organization has become a higher priority with today’s home buyers. Neighborhood restrictions prohibiting sheds, coupled with our seemingly insatiable appetite for more stuff (along with our reluctance to part with it!) has fueled the interest in larger garages with more room for storage. In the Palmer (plan #42057), note the parcel drop at the front porch alongside the garage for securing home deliveries – freeing you up from having to wait around for the delivery driver to pick up/drop off packages for your home-based business. Increased storage extends to the bigger closets in our homes, deep walk-in kitchen pantries and flexible storage areas – particularly those that can be accessed from outside. As a rule of thumb, more square footage is being devoted to storage in today’s new homes than what you usually find in resales, a trend that is likely to continue.

The Palmer (below) provides extra storage in its 3-car garage as well as storage accessed from outside (behind the garage). Look at that kitchen pantry! Another draw – privacy for the covered porch.

The Palmer – #42057

Outdoor living space, already a “must-have” for many new home buyers, gained even further importance during the pandemic. Better than a simple patio or deck, prospective buyers wanted a roof over that space so that they didn’t necessarily have to cancel their outdoor plans just because it was raining. The Palmer plan has its covered patio to the side, behind the pantry, providing yet another desired amenity – added privacy. Sure, many resale homes have outdoor living spaces, too, but do they integrate with the home’s design, or look as if they were merely added-on at some point?

We assess an amenity’s value by both what we ourselves personally know and our experience with it. Something as elementary as a pull-out wastebasket drawer in the kitchen. Once you’ve experienced that simple pleasure, you’ll never settle for less. We also observe the value we see others place in it, especially if we think its popularity is increasing. Millennials have largely ignored and passed over those 5,000 square foot-plus “McMansions” popular with their parents’ generation. Older homeowners have sometimes lost money when selling those larger homes they no longer need or want due to a lack of buyers. But 32-inch wide interior doors throughout the home and laundry rooms that don’t double as the entry from the garage – those are futureproofing must-haves. When it comes to resale, Realtors tell us that regardless of the presence of a tub in the primary suite bathroom, if there isn’t a nice shower, many of today’s prospective home buyers are simply going on to the next home.

There will come a point in time when your new home goes on the market as a resale. Thoughtful design today translates into better resale tomorrow. Take curb appeal. It not only makes your home more attractive now, but it can also have a significant impact on the future resale of your home, both in terms of how quickly you get offers and the perceived value of your home. Example – the humble garage door. As with your front entry door, an attractive garage door enhances curb appeal!

The Rainey plans below share a common floor plan, but exude distinctive exterior styling. While a fairly traditional garage door style can work for the Rainey Gables (left), that simple 32-panel garage door would detract from the Rainey Chase’s contemporary design (middle), and the Rainey Farm’s Modern Farm House design (right).

Rainey Gables – #42457

Rainey Chase – #42458

Rainey Farm – #42459

Choosing a brand-new home, with today’s most-wanted amenities, will be significantly more attractive to most prospective future buyers than if you’re trying to resell a home that was already 30 years old when you bought it.

Next time – What Your Home Says About You.

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Cover plan featured: Palmer (plan 42057)

New vs. Resale Homes: Peace of Mind

by Michele Weaver | Nov 9, 2020 | HER Home

Over half of all home buyers consider new construction according to Zillow’s Consumer Housing Trends Report. Maybe it’s because they get grossed out by toenails.

We were touring an open house as was another couple when all of a sudden, we heard, “Eeew!” Apparently, the current owners had a habit of clipping toenails in the owner’s bedroom. Having removed her shoes, one of the other visitors had stepped on something and bent down to see what it was – a yellowed toenail clipping. That couple left without finishing their tour.

Our oldest child was two years old when we decided to replace the living room carpeting in our first home. Even though it was a starter home built in the 1950s, most of the rest of the floors were hardwood. We were aghast to discover all of the former resident’s apparent pet “accidents” staining the back of that living room carpeting, which our son had been crawling around on!

It’s not just toenails and pet urine. It could be smoking odors or allergens, or multitudes of dust mites in the air ducts. It could be mold trapped behind a fresh coat of stain-blocking paint caused by an unseen water leak. Some things are just hidden, even to professional home inspectors.

We value certainty. Stickers on the furnace and water heater of the resale home you’re considering indicate both are 10 years old. While you didn’t climb up there, the roof shingles looked okay. And though they are by no means new, the seller is leaving all of the kitchen appliances. Those items represent some of the potential expenses when buying a resale home that can wreak havoc on your budget. You don’t know when they’re going to fail, and you don’t know how much it will cost to repair or replace them. In contrast, your new home warranty and all of the associated warranties behind the products installed in your new home, mean you can budget and buy with confidence when choosing a brand-new home.

Beyond the dollars, there is a parallel – your time, knowledge, skill, and ability. You may want to tackle rebuilding that old deck yourself. You watch a couple online videos on the subject and can block out two weekends plus schedule to take the afternoons off during the week between. Still, you’ve never done this type of project before, and aren’t sure you have the right tools to tackle the job. And when you’re all done, will you be happy with the result?

Current technology. You may not yearn for the newest tech gadgets, but you’re used to a smart thermostat. You hope there’s an instruction manual for the “programmable” one in the used home. There’s no structured wiring, but a good router should provide a strong wi-fi signal throughout the home. Replacing that old doorbell with a video doorbell shouldn’t be too difficult; however, installing a smart garage door opener means hiring someone. From security to entertainment, technology offerings in new homes allow you to enjoy that new home more.

(Photo courtesy: Chamberlain; myQ SMART Home)

Technological advancements are also evident in new homes’ energy efficiency. As reported on energystar.gov, “In a typical house, about 20%-30 % of the air that moves through the duct system is lost due to leaks, holes, and poorly connected ducts.” But to meet today’s stiffer energy codes, many builders and their HVAC contractors employ advanced testing to reduce conditioned air leakage in ductwork down to 3%-4%. Energy-efficient products and construction have resulted in homes built today being as much as 60% more energy efficient than homes built 20 years ago.

Originally designed with 2×4-inch exterior walls, the Buckland Showcase (plan #9170) can alternatively, like most plans available from Design Basics, be ordered with 2×6-inch walls, allowing more insulation in those outside walls. The outside dimensions do not change; inside, the rooms get slightly smaller when plans originally designed with 2×4-inch walls are revised for 2×6-inch exterior wall construction. For even higher performance, the Buckland Showcase ICF (plan #9170BTX) is designed for building with 10-inch thick Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) construction. Because of the added wall thickness of ICF construction, ICF-adapted plans do increase in overall width, depth, and square footage so that the interior rooms don’t become too small.

Below: The Buckland Showcase as originally designed for 2×4-inch exterior wall construction (left: main and upper level floor plans) and adapted for 10-inch thick ICF walls (right: main and upper level floor plans). To accommodate the thicker walls and minimize cutting of the ICF, the ICF home grew three feet in width; from 1,984 to 2,218 total sq. ft.

Buckland Showcase – #9170
(As originally designed: 1,984 sq ft)

Buckland Showcase ICF – #9170BTX
(Adapted for ICF construction: 2,218 sq ft)

Technology shows up in healthier new homes, too. You see it in in “hands-free” toilets and faucets as well as water purification systems; in having lots of natural light; and in having a quiet home, which minimizes internal and external noise. But perhaps nowhere else is technology more evident than indoor air quality. From air quality monitors that turn on ventilation fans if/when indoor pollutants exceed healthy levels, to air purification systems that can trap and kill most bacteria and viruses, high-tech solutions available mean new homes can be considerably healthier than used.

Join us next time as we look at how “futureproofing” considerations affect your home purchase decision.

For more resources on thoughtful design and products:

View other articles on our blog
Browse our Her Home™ Magazine
Thoughtful Design Concepts

(Product spotlights are for informational purposes only.)

Perhaps the Most Overlooked Facet in Building Your Dream Home

Quiet Homes – Your Health Depends on It!

What Your Home Says About You

Futureproofing: Another Reason to Buy New

New vs. Resale Homes: Peace of Mind

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