Designing a Custom Home on a Tight Budget

Custom homes allow buyers to completely personalize their future homes, with every detail being handpicked. But how do you achieve the unrivaled experience of a custom home without a lavish budget?

A home is usually the most significant purchase an American can make. Still, many of us are building on a budget. The overall cost of designing and building a custom home can vary dramatically. Design choices will have you either saving or splurging.

G.J. Gardner Homes’ customization capabilities offer home buyers the unique opportunity to not just make sure the home reflects their preferences but the price tag does as well. Our clients are empowered to design according to their budget through our wide range of custom fixtures, plans, and details.

What is the cost of building a custom home?

One of the significant benefits of custom home builds is total flexibility, which extends to everything from colorways to costs. The final figure will drastically vary regarding the average cost of building a custom home. A standard 1,200-square-foot home can cost anywhere from $140,000 to $700,000, with Forbes’ most recent home building study claiming an average of $300,000.

This final cost depends on many factors, like labor and land, but when it comes to materials and design features, it’s up to you to name your price through your choices. We have another blog post discussing custom home pricing in more detail, which may help.

The cost of a custom home is an excellent investment you can make in your living arrangements by perfectly personalizing the space to your lifestyle. With a custom home design, you avoid excess costs in the future by starting out with the ideal floor plan, size, and style for your taste. G.J. Gardner Homes offer the ease of fixed prices that are decided by your customization choices before we even break land.

The process of designing a custom home

With decades of building experience, G.J. Gardner Homes has developed a unique approach to custom builds. When working with your local G.J. team, you are supported by unparalleled home building and design expertise, as well as our masterfully crafted home plans. Homes are universal, so G.J. Gardner Homes don’t seek to reinvent the wheel through our processes and make our clients carry the costs. Instead, we draw on our famed frameworks and patterns and adapt them to match your brief.

For new home builders, you can decide how custom you want your home to be. You’re free to choose from G.J. Gardner Homes’ existing home plans, make changes and tweaks to the original design, or go straight to the drawing board and start anew. When making edits to an existing house plan, you avoid overspending on consultation fees for draftspeople, building designers, and potentially architects.

By building custom with G.J., you can still design a home that’s individualized and in line with your preferences without overspending on the architects’ and designers’ fully bespoke home costs. Our custom home design process wants to make your money work harder and lets you invest in features that will make a real difference to your family rather than fees.

How to design a custom home on a budget

So, if you’re designing on a tight budget, here are a few of our custom home-building mistakes to avoid to keep you under budget.

1. Strategically Splurge

Home designs shouldn’t be a matter of all or nothing. In fact, strategic splurging is the best way to get the most out of your money long term. This involves spending big on specific areas to make the most difference in your daily life. Ultimately, skimping on the most crucial home elements will have you paying even more, to replace damages or wear and tear. Where to spend more will depend on your lifestyle, from the kitchen floor to the bathroom fixtures. In turn, elements of your home that are likely to receive less use daily are the best places to save.

2. Home Plan: Stories, Shape, and Size

Size and shape are some of the most deciding factors regarding home budgets. Of course, bigger homes over multiple stories demand more materials to complete and more specialist constructors. These requirements naturally end up costing more.

Tight budgets don’t demand tiny homes but require effective use of space. Building a home that matches your lifestyle without excess spaces that’ll go unused can be a great design choice for those on small budgets. G.J. Gardner Homes’ small home plans prove that square footage doesn’t decide how spacious your home feels.

Regarding stories, keeping your home on one level is often more affordable than extending it to a second. Even if the house ends up being the duplicate square footage, building a home that’s one story tends to be kinder on tight budgets. A single-story home is simpler to build and requires less expertise to build the structure.

3. Materials

One of the most effective areas to save when designing a custom home on a tight budget is the materials you use. G.J. Gardner Homes offer our clients plenty of choices regarding the materials for your home, working with a diverse range of suppliers.

Some of the best materials for custom homes on a budget include:

• Concrete sheets
• Reclaimed wood
• Metals
• Stone veneer
• Bamboo

Our G.J. Gardner Homes designers can work with you and your budget to find the perfect solution for your home so you can stay within budget.

4. Location and Land

The cost of living differs from coastline to coastline, so the location will majorly contribute to the final price of your custom home. Not only will certain cities demand higher spending than others, but where you choose to build in that city will also affect the labor costs. Finding a block with easy access for building can majorly impact the prices as well.

Although this is a step in the initial planning stages, where and what type of land you choose to build on significantly impacts the final costs. Considering the impact location and land choice can have let you allocate more to the design features and avoids excess spending on making an unfit plot work.