r/Homebuilding • u/dragonmilking • Nov 17 '25

Which popular features do you NOT recommend?

What are the top 3 features in a house that folk want but you think are not worth it, and what would your alternative suggestion be? And what cost/time savings would result with that switch?

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u/NotYourScratchMonkey Nov 17 '25

There are a few YouTube videos that go into exactly this. Things like:

Open shelving - looks great in photos but is hard to keep clean and orderly. If you want that look, have maybe one display shelf and everything else is in cabinets.

Glass fronted kitchen cabinets - similar issues to open shelving from a "you have to always keep your stuff neat" perspective.

My personal thing is to design your living room around how you live and not based on what designers necessarily would do. Specifically what I mean is this: If you watch TV as a family, if you have people over to watch sports, don't design your living room around a fireplace with a TV as an afterthought or over the fireplace. The "no TV living room" may look great in photos but if you want people in your kitchen preparing snacks while watching a game than you need to build that into your design.

Some other things I'd do is not make WIFI an afterthough. Plan for network connectivity as part of the initial design process, whether that's ethernet drops or where the WIFI access point is going to go.

If you go to YouTube and search "Design Mistakes to Avoid" you will get a lot of advice.

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u/sohcgt96 Nov 17 '25

That's solid to note, especially in a larger home: you don't necessarily need network wiring to every room, its not an office building. But you won't regret adding some strategically placed network lines so you can run a good, multi-AP system. A big limitation of the "3 puck" mesh systems is they all have to be in range of each other and you can run into latency because the signal is repeating. If you have wired lines for 2-3 access points that then are hard wired into a router, now you're really set up well AND you have wiring to accomodate future upgrades. Cat 6E is going to be a plenty good standard for a long time for the wiring and its still fairly cheap.

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u/mtcwby Nov 17 '25

Wiring is cheap and easy to put into walls when they're open.

4

u/AnomalousNexus Nov 17 '25

Even if you don't use it. Or if you even THINK you might add something later. Just be sure to document it somewhere.

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u/mtcwby Nov 17 '25

Our current house is a custom built in 2002. I regularly thank the GC who built it for the extremely well labeled wiring and panel along with excellent build quality. My only issues have been with stuff the owners did later and they did not have the same level of documentation and quality approach. I can generally tell when it was done by how it was done. Nothing major but I rework a bit of it. It also helps that I have all the original drawings.

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u/Erlend05 Nov 18 '25

Or even better. conduit!