re: New Residential Construction Must-Haves/Nice to Haves

When in the plan development stage, get a set of 1/4" scale plans and print and cut out a set of 1/4" scale furniture (you can google templates for this). cut out the furniture and lay it out on the plans. see how close stuff will be together, does it flow, are there dead areas, does it make sense, are there door conflicts? We did this and it helped a lot with layout.

In addition, on some smaller rooms were we were trying to see how the layout would work, i actually laid out the room on the floor in our old garage with blue painters tape and walked through the room.

it's SOOOO easy to catch things on paper instead of waiting until it's built.

Also, study your plans, learn them, read them, know what every thing means. Because there might me something that you assume will be one way when in reality it will be another way. Case in point, my cousin built a house and thought they had discussed steps up to the front porch. They didn't look at the pans one bit, and when everything was poured they realized there was maybe a 1 brick single step. It's not what they had in mind but now it's set in stone.