Choosing the design of your new home can be an exhilarating experience, with every visit to display villages breeding a ton of new ideas. Display homes are styled by highly-skilled professionals and often spruced up with many optional upgrades.
While not many future homeowners can afford everything the designer has envisioned, it’s important to choose extras that offer great value or return on investment, when the time comes to sell.
Here’s a list of the best optional upgrades you can include in your new home design.
Kitchen and bathroom extras
Kitchen and bathroom extras are usually designed to have a broad appeal, increasing the elegance and style of these, primarily utilitarian rooms. In contemporary home design schemes, the kitchen is increasingly being seen as the heart of the home, where your family will spend a lot of time.
Spending on features like the dining island counter is encouraged from both aesthetic and functional points of view, as you can expand one with innovative storage solutions built-in cabinets and pull-out recycle bins.
The bathroom design, on the other hand, can be upgraded with modern features like frameless or semi-frameless shower stands, double sinks, and vanity tops made of durable natural stone-like composites.
Sustainable upgrades
Sustainability is becoming an important aspect of every newly-built home. A recent analysis by Domain.com reports that 95% of millennials and baby boomers hold sustainability as one of the most important features when buying or building a home.
Extra features like rooftop and solar panels and hot water systems, cool roofs, rainwater collectors, double-glazed windows, ceiling fans, and motion-activated LED downlights are just examples of home upgrades that are said to return the invested amount with interest to homeowners who are willing to include eco-friendly elements from the early start.
Heating and cooling
Winters in subtropical regions such as South Africa or the Australian Pacific coast van be increasingly unpredictable, so it’s important to consider the best heating and cooling options in the early phases of the design process.
Ducted or split-systems AC units are difficult to retrofit and are best installed during the construction. Although the initial cost can be steep, air-conditioning adds value to your home, makes it more comfortable in extreme temperatures, and becomes a great selling point down the road. AC aside, gas fireplaces are a popular upgrade these days, as, besides the functional, they add an aesthetic value to your living space.
Outdoor room
Many home design studios now recommend homebuyers to include outdoor living space in their builds. What is more, homebuyers in regions with long streaks of warm and temperate weather such as Australia, are also more interested in homes that have a dedicated outside living area.
Despite the garden size, you should look to include a covered and fully furnished alfresco area for outdoor dining, entertaining, and socializing. This collection of outdoor furniture in Sydney has some of the most inspiring outdoor seating and dining sets, whether you prefer wicker and steel designs inspired by the city’s harbor-side bay, or organic weave and powdered aluminum coatings.
Carport or garage
Despite the initiatives for cheap public transport, the popularity of bikes, and e-scooters, the reality is that we’re becoming more dependent on cars. Still, it may sound surprising that not many home and land packages include car parking in its standard package. However, a garage or a lean-to carport is an extra you should strongly consider.
A garage, on the other hand, gives you a lot of flexibility, both as parking and indoor space. It’s important to decide on time how many garage spaces you need for your family. Even a two-space carport with a covered footpath to your front door is an extra feature that will give you great value both in comfort and property value. Experts such as The Patio Factory carport builders can help with both free-standing and attached carports, even providing DIY Carpot KITS.
Lofty basement
An extra foot or two to the ceiling of your basement can make all the difference between a cellar and a useful underground space that can be furnished for living one day. This especially makes sense if your basement is delivered unfinished, but you intend to finish it in the future. Also, consider asking your builder to install plumbing down there.
The basement is an extremely versatile space that can be configured as an extra guest room with the adjacent bathroom, or even a home spa area with a hot tub, sauna, and plunge pool. When talking about new construction upgrades, bear in mind that a deeper basement is one of the more expensive ones, still its very unlikely that you’ll ever regret spending the amount.
With so many extra options to choose from, staying within your budget can be challenging. However, it’s important to prioritize correctly, ensure a quality storage unit before the building starts, and spend money on features that add value to your home both while you’re living in it and when you decide to sell it. Things that aren’t worth their price or can be done relatively easily, later on, shouldn’t be your concern at this point.
