Custom Finesse

Customizing your home can create a beautiful place for you and your family to enjoy and can vary as dramatically as the person making the decisions. By tailoring your home to your unique specifications, from the ground to ceiling, from the flow of each space to the finessed details of your fixtures tiles, and paint, you are able to manifest your own destiny within the walls that you have built, in the space that you created in your dreams.

When you start with a blank slate, such as a lot of land, the possibilities are only limited by the environment, and your imagination. Hills and streams, land use and the orientation of the sun should all be taken account when choosing that perfect spot to build your dream home. Knowing these characteristics will not only allow you to customize everything from what you see out of your own windows but even how the sun hits certain parts of the room, at certain times of the day. You can actually have a hand in creating warmth and energy in specific locations in your home. These sorts of decisions can also help you customize the way that your house works. Taking into account where utilities will be and how those are connected to your neighborhood, can help you create an efficient and aesthetically pleasing home that is not only for show but also beautifully functional.

Once you move inside your home, customizations can be created around every corner. From large scale projects such as creating a more suitable floor plan for your lifestyle to the smaller changes such as making a more cosmetic adjustment to the molding, built-ins, and paint colors that emphasize your individuality.

Before journeying into this new world of playing sole creator there are a few important concepts to understand:

1) Know what you want before you start. Having an overall broad idea of the way you want your space to look and feel will help you when you get into the details of the planning and building. Understanding how you want to live in the space will be paramount later in how things are laid out and what functionality you will require. 2) Think about furniture at conception. This will help you understand the look and feel you're going for in your finished abode. The way that the home flows takes into account those furniture pieces that you already own, and those that are on your dream list. 3) Consider hiring a designer. Often times we have that perfect picture of what we want our home to look like in our minds. Having someone on the outside, separated from the emotional connection to these ideas, will help you stay on track with your overall plan, and give you a realistic view of what your future can hold. 4.) The planning phase may be the most critical part of the entire project. It is easy to change around floor plans, add square footage, change utilities to where they are more user-friendly to your particular lifestyle when things are merely on paper. Once materials are acquired, and once building processes are in place, adjustments become all the more difficult.

Years go into the planning of a custom styled home, whether from the ground up or just adjusting the existing interiors. This stage can go on long before you are able to make your dreams a reality.

So, even if you feel as though your customized, curated life is far in the distance, and not yet tangible, keep planning. Keep collecting ideas, continually adjust your current lifestyle to fit that Utopia that you see in your mind's eye. One day it may just become a reality.