When buying a new home, some people prefer the quaintness that comes with an older house. Indeed, older homes do have more character than the homes that you find in subdivisions where they all look alike. However, historic homes come with their own set of issues: outdated plumbing and electricity, the high risk of mold, asbestos and structural damage, and the constant upkeep.
For this reason, sometimes it is better to opt for building your own house using custom home plans rather than purchasing a an unstable house built 100 years ago, or settling for new homes that lack any personality. If you feel queasy at the sight of the cookie-cutter homes but don’t want the expense of maintaining a historic beast, the best of both worlds is to work with custom home builders to create a house that marries the uniqueness of an older home with the benefits of modern home designs. A few benefits to building your own modern homes includes:
- Getting a design that perfectly matches your taste.
When you are looking at houses for sale, you have to make compromises to your personal taste based on what is available in your housing market. However, when designing modern homes, you can make every aspect of it perfectly match your dreams. Whatever era of architecture you love the most can be incorporated into your home plans, while also getting the structural technology and home efficiency that only comes with modern homes.
As an added bonus, you can size it to perfectly match your needs. You don’t waste money on a house that has more bedrooms than you need just to get the other benefits of it, and you can add a gourmet kitchen if that’s what suits your taste (pun intended). - Optimizing sunlight.
Unless you find an older home that has totally deviated from the style of its era (or has been heavily updated), most older homes have a limited windows and natural light. Until recent advances in window technology, the more windows a home had equaled greater amounts of energy loss through heating and cooling efficiency, and air leaks. Now, building technology such as double-pained and gas field windows are available that allow a 95% of the sunlight into the house without any of the added heat from the sun during the summer or heat loss during the winter. Having lots of sunlight in your home creates an aesthetically pleasing space, and also results in lower energy bills through lower lighting needs. This is a great perk that comes with custom-built modern homes. - Optimization of space
You might be familiar with the tiny home movement, where people live in houses or lofts that were built on top of trailer beds and have a square footage of less than 500 feet. No, we are not recommending that you build a 500 square-foot home. However, this school of thought, to best utilize every square foot of your home, has carried over into modern home designs. While older homes may have wasted space incorporated into their design, most modern homes designers focus on using every square foot of the home’s space efficiently, both inside and in the surrounding environment. - Mother nature likes modern homes
We touched on this point previously while discussing windows windows, but the effieciency gained with modern homes goes far beyond just the windows. Contemporary home designs are far more energy efficient and environmentally conscious than homes that were built prior to the last decade. Now, the building materials, insulation technology, HVAC systems, airflow, and the lighting (as well as windows, which we already mentioned) are entirely designed to cohesively utilize as little energy as necessary both in the building of it, and throughout the life of the home.
This is beneficial to you for several reasons. First of all, we believe you probably like this beautiful earth we live on and want to help maintain it for your children and their children. Second of all, the more efficient your home is, the lower your energy bills will be in the long run. Having an energy-efficient homes can save you hundreds of dollars per year on your utility bills. We call this a win-win-win situation.
