The picking game

I spent most of the late spring and summer going over the detailed design with my contractor to get the documents ready for the permit submission and deciding on parts and materials (roof, exterior, interior). Also had to figure out a rough outline of the backyard plan and a couple of other minor things.

ROOF

My primary home has tile roof, so I had to stay with tile. Surprisingly, it was the cheapest option. I do not know what exactly my tile roof specs were, but we found a pretty close match (I would not be surprised if it were exactly the same).

WALLS

When building a house, you can choose 6- or 4-inch thick walls. After doing some research, I came to a conclusion that for a small house like mine, 4-inch walls would be good enough. One may assume that thicker walls would provide better energy efficiency, but this may not necessarily be the case. The choice of insulation would play bigger role than the wall thickness. I was a bit concerned that thinner walls would make the windows look cheaper, so I considered doing window trims (window trims look nice but even without them they would be fine). The deciding factor was that thinner walls meant a few extra square feet of the usable interior space.

EXTERIOR

For exterior, I chose the cheapest stucco option to match my primary home. I don't really like it, but two different exterior types would look a bit weird.

INTERIOR

Ideally, I'd love to have smooth, painted walls, but smooth walls require precision for which I was not ready to pay, so stayed with good-ol' orange peel.

FLOOR

Chose luxury vinyl planks (LVP): Modin LVP (Arlo Signature collection) by Flooret. They are water proof (meaning that they can be installed in all rooms including kitchen and bathrooms, so would not need to deal with different materials and transitions), have good health scores, and the best specs in the industry. I don't know if the specs are just a gimmick, but I ordered a few samples and compared them to similarly priced LVPs at local stores and I liked Modin better. I was entertaining an idea of doing heated floors, but was told that they would not be very energy efficient, so dumped that idea.

NEXT: FROM LANSCAPE TO HARDSCAPE

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FIRST: INTRODUCTION