Features You Can Get In A Custom Home That You Can’t Get Anywhere Else

Whether it’s saving money, environmental stewardship, or simple convenience you’re after; consider these design ideas uniquely available to custom-home builds.

Save Money By Building Green

Energy efficiency is becoming a more and more important part of the average Canadian’s home investment decision. Perhaps nowhere is the opportuntity greater for the average person to have an environmental impact than when it comes to buying their home, but the wisdom of considering a homes energy efficiency goes beyond environmental stewardship.

In Ontario, hydro rates are skyrocketing. We pay more for energy than other province in Canada, and the situation is only predicted to get worse over time. Measures that can make a home more energy efficient provide homeowners opportunties for Ontario residents to insulate themselves from this unfortunate trend.

Nowhere is the opportuntity greater to make your home energy efficient than custom design. Consider the ways that a custom-designed home can contribute to protecting the environment and saving money for the life of a home.

Reduce or Eliminate Utilities Through Passive Design

Passive Design is a concept that we’ve gone into in previous articles. If you’re new to our blogs, Passive Design is all about designing a home so that it can take advantage of its unique environmental circumstances to maintain consistent temperature throughout a home in all seasons.

One of the most popular methods of passive building custom homes in Ontario is through Passive Solar design. By desigining your home to take advantage of the natural heat generated by sunlight, passive solar design can reduce, or in some cases entirely eliminate, the energy requirements required to heat and cool your home.

Passive Design is accessible to those building custom homes, but not generally to those buying pre-built or factory-fabricated homes. Passive design requires each building to be specifically designed for the lot it is built on. As mass-building homes does not allow for such major variation from structure to structure, not only does electing for a custom home provide unique opportunties for environmental stewardship, but energy savings as well.

Reduce Water Consumption With a Grey Water System

When you start a shower, theres always a peroid where you wait for the water to warm up. Simply by waiting for the water to warm, every month you waste hundreds of litres of water.

But what if you could plug your tub, collect the water, and use it?

A greywater system allows you to do this, but also so much more.

A greywater system collects the water you use in your home every day, filters it, and allows you to re-use it in many ways.

Obviously you wouldn’t want to drink the water you used to bathe in, but that doesnt mean you cant use it to flush your toilets and water your garden. Using drinkable water to pressure-wash your driveway provides no benefits over using greywater.

By collecting water from your bath, sinks, washing machine and more, filtering it and allowing you to re-use it in ways that don’t involve human consumption, graywater systems can increase your home’s water efficiency by upwards of 50%.

Not only does this cut your utility bills in half for as long as you live in the home, but greywater systems are an accessible way for home buyers to massively reduce the environmental impact of their home. Whether you’re living in it or not, the house you build will provide these benefits for the life of the structure.

Improve Home Life With Thoughtful Design

Thoughtful home design is the difference between a home that provides you a space to live, and a space where life is made better.

A home is designed around the unique needs and wants of your family provides considerably more value than one designed for mass-markets, and this kind of design is only available through a custom built home.

Sometimes it’s the general features of a house that provide value. Things like general layout and spaces designed to suit your needs do a lot to make a house easier and more comfortable to live in, but there are also small details that go a long way to providing substantial value to every day life. Consider the following features only available for those building custom homes:

Magnetic Door Latches

By installing magnetic door latches into your home, you can entirely bypass the need for light switches! Lights will immediately turn on when you enter, and turn off as you leave!

While it may not be your choice to install these in every room of your home, switches like these can provide convenience in spaces you typically have your hands busy when entering/leaving. Laundry rooms, storage rooms, your garage, attic, pantry, etc. Not having to worry about putting down whats in your hands may seem a trivial, until you open the garage door at a friends house only to wonder why it’s so dark.

Choose Your Outlet/Switch Locations.

Having light switches at either side of your bed is an inexpensive touch that can provide great convenience to daily life. Not having to fumble in the dark to navigate your room is a little touch, but provides great benefit.

Too often home entertainment set-ups are left at the whims of poorly thought-out outlet locations. Either you have your TV set up in the wrong spot, or you deal with ugly extension cords all over the place. When custom building your own home, you get to inexpensively choose your outlet locations beforehand, and don’t have to deal with this problem

Cable Management

Whether it’s surround sound for your entertainment center, a sound system for your living room, or Ethernet throughout the home; custom home design provides you opportunistic for cable management you don’t get from regular home purchasing.

With a regular home, either you are forced to lay cables for power, sound, and internet along the floor and baseboards; or you have to invest time, energy, and money routing cables throughout your walls.

Before drywall is put up, your house is a blank canvas regarding cabling. Taking time to consider where you want your electronics, and how you expect to use each of your rooms every day, can go a long way to making every space a better place to live.

Little things like having wiring routed to a kitchen island can allow you to avoid unplugging your coffee machine to plug in your blender. Having an Ethernet port on every floor means you never have to worry about weak wifi signals anywhere in your home. Having speaker wire integrated into your walls reduces their unsightly presences, and spares you devoting an afternoon to routing them through your drywall.

Windmill Construction

Custom home building provides a series of advantages not available from regular home purchasing. If you’re considering a custom home, maximize the value of your property and your daily life living in it, by taking advantage of all the benefits custom home building provides.

With informed design, for the same price as a factory-built house you can build a home with substantially less environmental impact, minimal on-going costs, and increased daily convenience. All it takes is the right design and construction, and you can access a home that provides you and your family substantially more value than anything you could purchase from a factory builder.

Custom home building is not just about building a home around your needs, but can also be about the needs of the world. If you value environmental stewardship, then there are few opportunities where you can make more meaningful decisions than the construction of your home. Whether its passive design, grey water systems, or any other design features that can increase the environmental benefits of your home; custom home building provides you more and more meaningful options to reduce the environmental impact of you and your family than anything pre-built on the market.

If you’re interested in hearing more about the options available for custom homes in Cornwall and beyond, then feel free to get in touch with Windmill Construction. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just got a few questions, or comprehensive designs and are in search of a builder. No matter your stage in the custom-home building process, we’d be happy to help. Get in touch.