Don’t Overlook This Detail if You’re Building a House

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Paying attention to the dimensions of every room — including the garage — can be very important when you’re building a home. 

If you are building a house instead of buying an existing property, there are a lot of little things you need to focus on. If you’ve never gotten a mortgage and built a home before, it’s easy to miss some things that you end up regretting.

In particular, there’s one thing you may not really think about that you need to pay careful attention to. Here’s what it is.

You can’t afford to miss this during the building process

One of the biggest things you need to pay attention to when building a house are the dimensions of the different rooms on the floor plan — and particularly, rooms like the garage where you absolutely need to have a certain amount of space.

When I was building my house, I made the mistake of not paying enough attention to this issue. I looked at the layout of the rooms and how they fit together and what kinds of rooms would be in the house — but I didn’t really spend a lot of time checking out how big everything was.

For most of the house, this ended up fine. My living room, kitchen, and bedrooms are a good size. But there was one huge problem: My three-car garage ended up being way smaller than it reasonably should have been.

Since I didn’t know a whole lot about garage dimensions, when I saw it was labeled as a three-car unit, I figured that would be plenty of space. The problem is, it is very short and as a result, I cannot fit my full-size SUV into it. There are also a lot of weird little spaces carved out of it for things like a staircase leading from the garage to the basement, so we really end up being able to fit only one car in it instead of three.

This has been a huge hassle since my car has to be parked in the driveway even during snowy weather and we can’t fit multiple cars in even when we really need to, like when we had a hail storm and wanted to move both of our vehicles into the garage to protect them.

Make sure you end up in a home you’re happy with

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all of the details involved in building a house. And some of them that you assume will matter a lot to you end up not being that important in the end. The room dimensions, though, can’t easily be changed once the home’s construction is underway.

To make sure you end up happy with your house and not wishing you’d made certain rooms bigger, take the time to look carefully at the dimensions and get a feel for how big your space will actually be. Doing this early in the building process when you can change your floor plan could save you a lot of the headaches I’ve had to experience since moving into my custom-built home.

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