Building a Home (Part 1)

In August my wife and I enter into the world of new home construction with our eyes and wallets wide open. What no one can prepare you for, regardless of their instances, is the time committment that will be required for the selection of all of the personalized items for the home. Imagine for yourself the exterior of your home or a home you know well (if you don't live in a house). Now try to catalog all of the items that make up the house and list their color, location, size, etc. Let me help, there is the siding, the doors, the windows, the garage door, the posts, the shutters, the roof and don't forget those vent looking things that serve some purpose that escapes me (something to do with moisture and air flow). So this is just the outside and just the big things. Everything has to get a style and a color. The hardest part is that you can't really fully imagine just how these decisions are going to effect the way the home appears. Sometimes you can ride around the neighborhood and look at similar homes with similar colors. Sometimes they even have samples of everything that you can hold side-by-side. But ultimately it is impossible to fully envision how things will look. So most of the time you end up making a guess at something that is going to put you in serious debt for the next 30 years. I'm sure there are hundreds of computer based systems that could be used to help home buyers see what their home will look like before it is built, but our builder has decided not to use any of these tools. So we are relegated to taking pictures and doing drive-bys to convey our ideas. Our conversations often going something like this, "We'd like the siding from home A and the shutters from home B, but with the shutter color on home C and the garage door on home D." I'd love to just be able to sit down in front of a computer and slap the options together there and have the computer generate a rendition of what the home would look like. If done right the computer could then generate the options list and e-mail it to the builder. How simple! Maybe by the time we're ready to buy our next home, in 30 years, they will have figured this one out.