How to Elevate Your Home Build

Advice for Builders, Home Owners, Remodelers, Flippers to help elevate your home build project.

What’s up y’all? It’s John Gioffre with Revent Builds in Austin, Texas. We are dedicated to badass construction content.

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In this blog, I’m going to go over tips on how to elevate your project, how to take it to the next level. Now, this is whether you’re a developer and building new homes, whether you’re a flipper or whether you’re just remodeling your own house. You could use all of these tips to really heighten that project, get the most bang for your buck.

First and foremost. I know you’re all thinking it. “Well, I’m design minded and I want to do the design for all my own projects.” Shut up. Don’t do that. I don’t care if you’re doing a bathroom remodel, find a designer that will make you a rendering that you can see what your bathroom’s going to look like before you start. Now, if you’re doing flipping or if you’re a builder, 100% you need an architect and an interior designer.

The thing is, they don’t run the whole show. These are still your ideas. If you’re design minded, if you like your ideas to be at the forefront, bring all of those to the table. It’s a very collaborative process. Then let the professionals take your idea and bring them to life.

Now since we’re discussing design, don’t be afraid to be bold. If there’s a certain color you love or a certain unfamiliar material that you want to use, find a way to incorporate it in the design. Again, lean on your designer.

Don’t go and paint the whole thing hot pink, but let’s figure out where to use that deep, dark red. Maybe it’s a moody powder bath. Maybe it’s accents on the exterior of the home. There’s always ways to incorporate your style into the project. The key here is that more is more until it’s too much. The issue is there’s a very fine line between being very classy and super high end to going gaudy or tacky.

Okay, let’s talk about exterior materials real quick. If you’re doing a really high end project, there is no question you need to do an architectural type roof with some type of decorative material. That can be standing seam metal. That can be tiles that can be slated. There’s tons of different options. If you’re doing a little bit more affordable project or it’s your own project and you want to stick with an asphalt shingle roof, do an architectural shingle.

There’s some really cool patterns that can really elevate your home. Okay, so for cladding materials, again, if you’re going high end, you need to be looking into some really exotic woods. You need to be doing tongue and groove soffits, some beautiful masonry. Maybe take a limestone, which is really familiar in the area, but get it elongated it and skinny. Put it in a linear pattern. Really dress it up. Windows go with a thermally broken aluminum. If you can afford to do some steel accents, 100%. If again, you’re in a more economic flip, don’t go with just Home Depot Ply Gem. Go check out Anderson. Go look at some builder supply groups like Builders First Source, McCoy’s. Check out Pella. There’s so many different options. What you’re going to get in the resale is going to make up for any of the menial cost savings from going with a cheap window.

Okay. Now, don’t forget about landscaping. This is like one of the most afterthought things that I see and it really takes away from your curb appeal. Give a decent chunk of money to your landscaping allowance, to your budget. Build that in. It’s going to make a huge difference on your curb appeal. If you are doing a high end home, put in a pool, just shut up, put in a pool. It is going to help sell that house and provide so much more value.

Now, let’s just talk about floor plan and flow. To me, the biggest thing is do not be held hostage by your floor plan [inaudible]. Do not dare think about leaving that wall that divides your whole space and ruins all the flow. Take it out. Design around it. End of story. Once you have a floor plan set, that’s the end of it.

Make sure that your floor plan fits your design. I am going to say this with confidence and experience. Any dollar amount. I don’t care if you’re doing multimillion dollar homes to a couple hundred grand flip, do not do texture on your walls. You need to do a level five smooth finish, at minimum level four. The thing is, maybe five, 10 years ago, the price difference between an orange peel texture and a level five was a lot. Now it’s very minimal, and the look is substantially different. We want all of our walls to blend away to be a clean pallet for all of our fixtures and paints and finishes. Okay, your drywall’s in your level five textures looking beautiful.

Let’s talk about floors. Do not get your floors from Home Depot, Lowe’s, Floor & Decor, the same crap that everyone has. Here’s where you can lean on your designer and they can give you different suggestions and suppliers and you just do your homework.

Do not do a vinyl. Do not do a laminate go with at minimum and engineered hardwood. There is price differences from $2 a foot all the way to $15 a foot just in engineered hardwood. Another thing that you do not want to use at all costs is a click lock floating floor. They are not good. They feel hollow. They separate. Do a glue down or a nail Down or hell even both. Do not do a floating floor. I have done it. I have regretted it. I will never do it again. Just don’t do it. All right, flooring’s in. It’s time for doors and shrimp. If you can help it, especially if you’re doing a new build.

All your doors have to be eight feet tall. You might be restricted by your ceiling heights on some remodels or flips. Try to do the biggest door size you can. Always try to make your doors wider. Try to avoid doors that knock into each other or that are really small and crammed and create a traffic jam.

Another way to do something really cool with doors is do a SOSS hinge or concealed hinge door. So what that is the hinge is more just into the door slab, which is the door itself and the door frame. So you do not see the hinges on either side of the door, but one side of that door is going to be completely flush. So what you can do is set that door back in your door frame, the thickness of your drywall if you want it all to be flush or the thickness of a wood to where you can clad the outside of the door and the wall and you can make concealed doors. It is a really awesome technique. It takes some mastery and kind of playing with it, but if you just mess around with it, find those angles. It is spectacular.

Cabinets, for the love of God. Do not use a basic flat pack white shaker in your whole entire house. It is dead. It is tired. It is cheap. You get what you pay for. In my opinion, you can do paint grade, but pick some cool colors.

Try a micro shaker that’s a one-inch sticking around the door. It looks familiar. It still has the recess panel, but it’s totally elevated. Even flat Euro style doors are super clean. That looks awesome In a modern application in the most important areas, kitchen, master bath, maybe a study. Do something high end or you can go with some lighter grain hickories. There’s so many different options. Walnuts, you can really dress up your project. Go bold. Show some style in this area.

Now let’s talk countertops. There are just tons of options and it can be really hard to choose. Again, you want to lean on your designer, your architect, to help guide your way. If you’re doing a high end project, ideally, the whole entire house should be an exotic natural stone like quartzite, marble. There’s some really high end granites out there. At minimum, you want to use an exotic stone in your kitchen and master bath, and then you can sprinkle in quartz throughout the rest of the project.

If you are in a more affordable project. Doing all quartz is fine. They have some really cool patterns. I would say switch it up, make it exciting, but make sure to use three cm thickness no matter what project you’re using. That’s going to be a thicker, more expensive stone. It’s going to hold up better to impacts, to heat, all that good stuff. Now, think about really interesting ways that you can use your countertop material. Bring it up the back splash. Make sure it’s grain match, so you want to talk to your fabricator about all those grains matching and what pieces he’s going to use, where and where the cutouts will be. You can do miters, which is basically just an angle cut that meets at a perfect corner that can waterfall from your countertop down to the floor. You can make fireplaces. You can [inaudible] for the material, which is at a really cool beveled angle.

There’s just so much you can do and don’t be afraid to use some of those techniques to bring your project to the next level.

How about tile? This is an extremely important piece to any home. At minimum, do not use a schlep from the parking lot of Home Depot to lay tile. Hire a reputable contractor or a flooring and tile supplier, designer that does a full turnkey install and delivers the material. Here’s a few easy things to think about when you do tile. If you have an area, let’s say, where your cabinet [inaudible], but your wall goes higher and you’re like, where should I stop the tile at the cabinet or go all the way up. Just go all the way up. Just take it to the end of that wall. Just finish it off. It is a drop in the bucket in the scheme of things, but it’s one of those pieces that people look at and they’re like, wow, that tile goes all the way to the ceiling.

A really awesome way to completely elevate your shower is go curb-less. Now, if you’re on ground level, this is easy. You’re just going to chip out your slab. You’re going to recess that down, put in new rebar in concrete and call it a day. You’ll float that baby back up to be leveled with the floor, and I promise you, it will look so sleek. Now talking about the tile inside of a shower, the easy answer is yes. Go all the way up to the ceiling, take it all the way up to the walls, to the ceiling. That is just, again, I don’t care what level of project you’re doing, you need to be doing that. It looks so tacky and cheap if you stop it at like seven feet tall. Another thing that I really like to do that I feel totally takes it to the next level is tile the ceiling as well.

Not only is this going to be awesome for maintenance, you’re not going to have to deal with wet drywall later or something of that nature. It just looks awesome. The last thing, putting the makeup on, the thing that really makes a massive difference. This is fixtures and finishes. If you are doing high end pick high, high-end crap, import it from all over the world, go to tons of different suppliers. Pick stuff that is not easily found. 100%. I don’t care who you are. Again, any project, stay away from the Home Depots and the Lowe’s and going for the cheap crap that everyone can get their hands on. Go check out build.com. They have awesome options. You can find some super expensive stuff and then look for things that aesthetically look the same. Try to look into the parts. Are they all metal or are they cheap plastic?

Do the valves come with them? X, Y, Z. Again, this is why it’s amazing to have an interior designer. Just pick cool stuff. If you’re going super high end, just deck the whole house out.

All right, I think I covered a lot from architecture, design, to floor plan, to tile cabinets, countertops, all the way through finishes. There is so, so much more that I would love to talk about and get into detail about the actual construction methods. Contact us with your questions!