We’ll be living on this cute street soon!
My childhood dream is coming true. We’re building a house!
As a kid, my favorite pastime was drafting house floor plans. I was happiest with a pad of graph paper and a pencil in my hand. I designed hundreds of “dream homes.” Everyone, including me for a long time, thought I’d become an architect. But that wasn’t the path for me. However, wanting to build a home from the ground up has always been a dream of mine.
Now, for our fourth home, we’re finally doing it. Two of our first three homes were new construction, but they were ready-to-move-in spec homes, so we were not able to choose any of the finishes…not even the paint color.
This time will be different. We get to choose everything and build a house designed just for us. Some might call it a dream house. My husband doesn’t believe in having one dream house or forever house, which I mostly agree with because our dreams change with the season of life we’re in. But for right now, we are building our dream house for this stage in our life.
Wait, what happened to your old house? In case you need to catch up, we sold our house in Minnesota in June of 2018. (I can’t believe it’s almost been a year already.) In August 2018, we moved to Texas, a long time dream of ours. We live in Frisco, TX now—Money magazines top US city to live in for 2018.
Where We’re Building Our New Home
It turns out, we love our current Frisco neighborhood (where we rent an apartment) so much, that we’re building our home just a stone’s throw away in the same development. My husband jokes that we could get a few wheelbarrows to move all our stuff to the new house.
Our neighborhood is a unique multi-generational community with a senior living facility, apartment complexes, townhomes, and single-family homes. It’s located minutes from the heart of Frisco—old downtown Main Street and the newer Frisco Square area. We’re only five minutes away from anything we could want—great coffee shops, restaurants, shopping, a year-round farmers market, parks, and trails.
When we fell in love with the neighborhood and our kids’ new schools, it was a no-brainer to look for homes in our community. But we couldn’t immediately find a house that was right for us.
You might remember, when we sold our house and left Minnesota we wanted to downsize.
Our old home was 4300 sq ft. We moved into an apartment that’s over 60% smaller, about 1760 sq ft. Except for not having a home office and the dining room area being too small, the apartment has been a good size for us. So, we decided to look for a new home that was under 2500 sq ft.
Finding a smaller home in our area was a struggle. In our zip code, the average home size is 4,000+ sq ft. That means half the available homes are larger than that! Most of the houses on the market in our size range were in Active Senior 55+ communities. Ha!
When we couldn’t find a smaller home, we decided to look into building one. Luckily, we were already in the perfect neighborhood. As a multi-generational community, the builders in our neighborhood offer a wider range of home sizes to appeal to different buyers. The single-family homes in our community start as small as 1800 sq ft. They also offer several single-story plans—another plus for us, as we’ve always wanted a one-level home.
The plan we ultimately selected is just under 2500 sq ft. As we told our realtor, the exact size didn’t matter as much to us as having the right layout and number of rooms, specifically three bedrooms and an office. We did NOT want any extra spaces, like additional bedrooms, game rooms, media rooms, lofts…another challenge to overcome in the Texas real estate market. As our realtor reminded us, “everything’s bigger in Texas.” But we wanted to buck that trend. We’ve had the house with a rarely used guest room, a formal dining room we never ate in, an empty loft, and a large basement. In our new home, we want an efficient space that we use to its fullest.
Our builder said our floor plan is one of the most popular in the community…especially with retirees! Haha! What can I say, we’re wise for our age. We’re probably the only people NOT in retirement buying a single-story, small (by Dallas standards) home. And we don’t care in the least. All the better if we love the home and want to stay in it, we won’t have to downsize later.
Our New Home Elevation
At this point, I bet your dying to see the house. But first, I have to tell you the other unique thing about the house we’re building.
It’s a mid-century modern inspired style! Another dream come true.
If you’ve ever driven around a Dallas suburb, then you know how unusual it is to find a modern home. Dallas suburbs have an architecture style all to themselves. Most houses are clad in brick and stone like these ones featured on McMansion Hell. The turrets (yes, like a castle) are a real trend here people.
Our neighborhood is very different. The homes are colorful, unique, and most of the brick ones are painted. The architectural styles include Colonial Revival, Modern Farmhouse, English Tudor, French, and Craftsmen.
Can you see why I fell in love with this neighborhood? It has personality and I appreciate the architecture inspired by real historic home styles. (I’m 99.9% positive there are no turrets in our community.)
The builder we chose, Cambridge Homes, recently started offering mid-century inspired elevations and that sealed the deal for us. They said it’s their most requested home style, which isn’t that surprising since our city is growing by about 10,000 people per year… mostly coming from out of state, many from California.
Here’s an illustration of the elevation we’re building:
Here’s another home under construction with the same elevation we chose:
As I’m writing this, our builder only has six lots left in the neighborhood. Although our floor plan is popular in the neighborhood, only one other person has chosen the modern elevation. There are a few other modern elevations for other plans under construction. We love that there will be only a handful of modern elevations in this community, which means our home will be unique and will someday be a selling feature.
Our New Home Floorplan
As I said, our floor plan is all on one level. Before I show you the floor plan, you need to know a few things about our neighborhood:
- All the homes are rear-entry—the garage is at the back of the house with access via an alley.
- Our home is a “patio home”—instead of a backyard, we have a narrow side yard that runs the length of our lot, which is a nice set up with the rear-entry garage. It also means our lot and yard-size is smaller, which we prefer because we’ll have less yard work to do. (No one wants to mow a huge yard in 100 degrees July weather!)
- Most of the windows are on one side of the house—as a patio home with a side yard, all of our clear windows are on the front and one side of the house. The back is mostly the garage, and no windows are facing the alley. The other side of our home cannot have clear windows per our Home Owners Association. We only have one glass block window on that side in the laundry room. Likewise, the wall of our neighbors home adjacent to our side yard has no windows on it. This setup gives everyone a completely private yard and private home.
- We have skylights—to compensate for not having windows on one side of the house, the builder offers skylights in the kitchen. They’re centered above the kitchen island. With skylights instead of a window, we have a wall of uninterrupted cabinets in our kitchen…tons of storage!
This is our floor plan:
What’s Next
I have so much more I want to tell you about the build process. We are currently two months into the 7-9 month process. We just signed off on all of our design choices and upgrades, which I’m excited to share with you. They should be breaking ground on our house in May, and we expect to move in this fall.
From here on out, I will be posting frequent updates on the blog, Instagram, (@schoolofdecorating), Facebook (@schoolofdecor), and YouTube (follow me in all the places 😉). I want to take you through the whole process chronologically and share our experience, decisions, struggles, and ultimately reveal our new home. I hope you’ll follow along.
Congratulations on your exciting new venture! So looking forward to hearing more from you and following along on your adventure!
Thank you, Michelle!
Congratulations and I am sure you are ahead of the pack on the downsizing trail. I will follow your progress on Instagram.
Looking at your plans I don’t see a skylight in the bathroom. Shavondra has talked about her one room challenge bathroom being transformed by the new Velux skylight.
Being English I am surprised that skylights are a novelty in the US, I have had them for over 30 years. Two in the bedroom of my last house ( dreamy to lie in bed looking at the stars, but a bit noisy in heavy rain) and Five in the top floor of my newly built home.
Shenley, I wanted a skylight in the bathroom. Unfortunately with our elevation we could not have a skylight in the bathroom. It is available on one of the other elevations. When we couldn’t get it, my husband reassured me it was okay because now we won’t have to worry about light coming into the bedroom at night from the bathroom. We prefer to sleep in total darkness.
How exciting for you and your family. I look forward to your updates on this fantastic project!
Thanks, Karen. I plan to share everything.
This home and neighborhood look like a wonderful match for you and your family, Jackie! I’m so happy for you having this opportunity to build a home and pick all of the finishes! I’m looking forward to following along~
Thank you, Karen. We’re so excited to finally be able to do this. You know I’ll share all the design decisions we make :)
Congratulations Jackie! So exciting for all of you. Love the look of your house. Great floor plan and I like the mid century modern look too. Curious about the master bath door opening and the two doors (linen and toilet) swinging into the path of the main opening. I see much pain and suffering there.😩
Danalee, Thank you! Yes, I had the same concern as you. Since we don’t store extra linens and we have a 10 ft vanity full of storage, I wanted to remove the linen closet, but our realtor advised against it. She said it would be important for future resale, especially since we removed another closet in the house.
From the bedroom, it’s actually two small doors that swing into the bedroom. And, since we don’t have much to put in the linen closet, I don’t think we’ll be in and out of there often.
Don’t tell my hubby, but I’m claiming the sink at the far end near the master closet.
Congratulations, Jackie! This is exactly what I did 4 years ago when I joined School of Decorating with a lifetime membership! Building our own home and designing it exactly as we wanted made our dreams come true! Enjoy the process; it’s a lot of fun!
Linda
Thank you, Linda! I am definitely enjoying the process.
Congrats, Jackie! It’s so impressive how you and your husband “just go for it” … most would be hesitant to uproot and start over – kudos!
Denise, We have made some bold moves lately, but girl, it has not been without worry and stress. My husband likes to remind me that in under a year we did three of the five most stressful life changes—moving across the country, changing a job, and building a house. (The fourth and fifth are getting married and having kids.) But now that we’re almost on the other side, I can tell you it was totally worth it. Everything is falling into place.
Love the floorplan.
Look forward to seeing the updates as you build.
My sister lives north of you in Denton.
So when I visit her from Mississippi we have come down to the IKEA store.
Best wishes
Roberta, That’s fun. We are in Denton County. Can you believe, I haven’t been to the IKEA hear yet? I need to go.
Congratulations! Enjoy the process.
We designed our home with graph paper then gave it to a professional to draw blueprints. We couldn’t find any floor plans that took advantage of our waterfront view. This was a second home at the time and had to keep finances under control. In reality, there are very few changes we would make to our house. We have a skylight in our bathroom and love it! There is one in the kitchen, too.
Thanks Debbie.
So happy for you and your family. You’ve made some wonderful decisions for this time of your life; ENJOY!
Thanks Jennie!
Congratulations, Jackie! How exciting for you and your family. Looking forward to tracking the progress on the blog! All the best!!
Thank you Terri!
I adore the style and absolutely love love love that you can get this in TX! I live in your old area and met you once at your kiddos old school in MN where I was teaching. How fantastic for your family and I’m glad you love the school that’s so important. Cheers to the mid-century modern style I love!
Hey Jen! We were so excited to find a mid-mod elevation. At one point, we thought it’d be fun to renovate an old house. But I’m happy we’re going to get the style now without the renovation or maintaining an old house. Wait until you see what we’re planning for the inside!
Love that floor plan.
Congratulations!I am really looking forward to following your home building adventure. We built our dream home over 30 years ago. We still love our house, especially since we remodeled the master bath and repainted all the rooms using your color guidance.
Thank you, Rosemary. I’m happy to hear I’ve had some small part in keeping your dream home dreamy :)
OMG Jackie. Not only am I super excited for you and your family, I can’t wait to see what you do with this awesome home! I love the layout! It’s nice that your bedroom is away from the kids rooms. We have a small front and backyard as well. It’s so easy to care for. I love it!!!
Thank you, Lisa! We are looking forward to a low maintenance yard. The last two years in our old house, I got my husband a lawn mowing service for his birthday. Otherwise, I wouldn’t see him on Sunday afternoons 😂
https://www.facebook.com/202239293252144/posts/1419418924867502/
We are so excited to have y’all in the neighborhood :)
Even though i will see your home going up in person, am really looking forward to following it with you here. Love your blog!