Any Advice for Building a New Home?
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
Make the utility room twice as big as you think you need. Excavate under the garage and extend the basement to there. Make the garage a little bigger than you think so you can have 3-4 feet of space on all sides. Have a central "closet" where you can put all your electronics, etc. 4' wide x 3' deep is probably good enough. Walk-out, daylight basement. Private balcony off master bedroom. :-D :thumbsup: Balcony or deck off dining room.
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
Central vacuum is nice. Hard to install in existing house. Depending on the size, do not need many connections, just in the halls. This makes things much quieter, and all the dust definately does not end up in the house. I personally like to exhaust to the outside.
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
Don't put the second toilet in the bathroom. The unspoken rule "drop deuces in the Other Toilet" gets broken a lot (accidentally or because the Other Toilet is occupied). It's just not even funny when you want to take a shower and someone just dropped a deuce there.
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
In our remodel we created a bathroom where the toilet, sink, and bathtub are all in partitioned off from one another. It makes for a large bathroom but with a wife and three daughters we can have someone using each of those three items without privacy problems. I cannot recommend that enough. Additionally, we put the washer and dryer on the 2nd floor within the bathroom that has the shower (actually in the shower room). Laundry doesn't have to be carried between the floors as the bedrooms are on the 2nd floor as well - plus, you can drop your dirty clothes right there when you shower - not more than 3ft. from the washer. ^ That isn't a designer bathroom but we didn't build it to photograph it, we built it to use it. Put on a large wrap around porch facing east - they are glorious on cool summer mornings and they are in the shadow during the heat of the day. We can sit out there at night on the hottest day and be comfortable. Double hung windows. Always. We put receptacles on the exterior of the front porch that are wired to a switch in our living room. We use those receptacles for Christmas lights - easy on, easy off. We also included two receptacles under our bay window so that the window can be used as a buffet with heated food.
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Central vacuum is nice. Hard to install in existing house. Depending on the size, do not need many connections, just in the halls. This makes things much quieter, and all the dust definately does not end up in the house. I personally like to exhaust to the outside.
Interesting...I don't know how much that would be but I can look into that one. I'm sure the wife wouldn't mind this... ;-D
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
Andrew Rissing wrote:
Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
If affordable then add wiring conduits. Your cabling goes through that including lan. That makes it easier to pull new cable for new services, technologies, etc.
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Andrew Rissing wrote:
Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
If affordable then add wiring conduits. Your cabling goes through that including lan. That makes it easier to pull new cable for new services, technologies, etc.
The only problem with that is that you have to know where you'll be putting the new wires, sadly...
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
LAN Wiring does not cost that much as long as it is done at the same time the rest of the wiring (electrical, cable, ... ) For the return register, it is best to ask a proper heating engineer/technician; there might be building code that requires it. You need to think about storage (kitchen, bedrooms, ... ) there are never enough storage in a house. Think about natural lighting; big bright windows, ... Think about natural insulation (dense walls), natural ventilation (house and windows orientation). and ask an architect. ...
Nihil obstat
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thrakazog wrote:
You can never go wrong with that kind of extra space
Unless you live at sea level... or in a valley... or... I guess you could alway call it an indoor swimming pool.
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
we built a house last summer. i had the electrician string cat-6 to every room in the house, bringing all the lines back to a closet in the laundry room, where i also had him add a power jack. i put an 8-port switch into that closet. one of the lines goes to a WiFi router. i also had him add a conduit (ie. a 2" plastic tube) from a low-voltage wall socket on the wall where we were going to hang our TV to the spot where i was going to put the A/V receiver (and there's an ethernet jack there, and lots of outlets, too). i use that conduit to pass the HDMI & audio cables from the TV/front speaker down to the receiver. and, i had him string four speaker wire pairs around the living room, and another four out to the back porch ceiling, bringing them all back to where the A/V receiver was going.
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
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we built a house last summer. i had the electrician string cat-6 to every room in the house, bringing all the lines back to a closet in the laundry room, where i also had him add a power jack. i put an 8-port switch into that closet. one of the lines goes to a WiFi router. i also had him add a conduit (ie. a 2" plastic tube) from a low-voltage wall socket on the wall where we were going to hang our TV to the spot where i was going to put the A/V receiver (and there's an ethernet jack there, and lots of outlets, too). i use that conduit to pass the HDMI & audio cables from the TV/front speaker down to the receiver. and, i had him string four speaker wire pairs around the living room, and another four out to the back porch ceiling, bringing them all back to where the A/V receiver was going.
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
also... if you are building in a new development, or in a rural area, start the cable / phone company process MONTHS before you move in. it took us four months to get cable in our new house, primarily because we were the first house built in a section of a development that was far enough away from existing cable/phone lines that the cable co had to come out and string new wires down the road - and that took a long time. also, if you happen to be the first house on a new street, be prepared to have your mail screwed up for a couple of months, and for nobody to know how to find you (because you're not on anyone's GPS), and for web sites and companies to reject your address (because their automated address verification systems won't have your address for a while).
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Interesting...I don't know how much that would be but I can look into that one. I'm sure the wife wouldn't mind this... ;-D
I'll second the central vacuum system. Even if the house is finished and the basement is unfinished it is still easy to install one. I bought one on-line and installed it myself in about one day. Total cost was about $1000. Been using it for 12 years now with no problems. If you install one, buy an extra hose and install an outlet (inlet?) in the garage for it -- perfect for easily vacuuming out vehicles.
-NP Never underestimate the creativity of the end-user.
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I'll second the central vacuum system. Even if the house is finished and the basement is unfinished it is still easy to install one. I bought one on-line and installed it myself in about one day. Total cost was about $1000. Been using it for 12 years now with no problems. If you install one, buy an extra hose and install an outlet (inlet?) in the garage for it -- perfect for easily vacuuming out vehicles.
-NP Never underestimate the creativity of the end-user.
Still much easier to put in the pipes before hand. If you have a single story with a basement, then not too bad, otherwise a lot more difficult. I did have one that failed, but that was after over a decade. I originally bought the bagless, and the the nutone was worthless because it pulled air from the bottom. Would have thought that would have pulled from the top. Bad design
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So, my wife and I have completely outgrown our current house and have decided to build a new home. A few things I'm planning on doing thus far:
- Adding LAN drops to our media room and office (we'll have fiber internet access).
- Adding a return register for the media room
Does anyone have any advice of other customizations I should push for in the new home that are easy to do now?
Don't use agile methods for the project.
MVVM# - See how I did MVVM my way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
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Still much easier to put in the pipes before hand. If you have a single story with a basement, then not too bad, otherwise a lot more difficult. I did have one that failed, but that was after over a decade. I originally bought the bagless, and the the nutone was worthless because it pulled air from the bottom. Would have thought that would have pulled from the top. Bad design
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Good point. My house is a single story. And my vacuum is a bagged system, but I have to empty the bag only once or twice a year.
-NP Never underestimate the creativity of the end-user.
Unless there is a better design for the bagless, you are better off with the bag design, at least for nutone. http://www.vacdepot.com/article/126[^]