Building your own home is an exciting journey, and often a critical decision comes down to whether you should build a project (volume) home, or custom designing a home that is built uniquely for you.
What is the difference and what are the benefits to custom building your own home?
Volume built homes are also referred to as the project or “cookie-cutter” homes. They are usually based on a set of pre-designed plans and footprints that come with standardised inclusions for the build. Often these homes are built in ‘mass’ or volume as the name suggests.
Custom built homes are uniquely designed for the individual owner. These homes are tailor-made specifically to suit the lifestyle and needs of the client. Floorplans vary depending on each client’s requirements, and consideration is also given to the shape, size and characteristics of the land block.
Let’s explore the differences in more detail:
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Unique Designs
As mentioned above, volume-built homes offer only a generic set of plans, ever been to a street with homes that look the same? A custom-built home, however, will be a unique design of its own.
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Inclusions & Additions
Standardised inclusions with volume-built homes leave you little room for changes or upgrades. Even if you are able to make additions to the basic inclusions, the costs are commonly inflated, so you don’t get the maximum value.
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Specific Customisation
The customisation becomes difficult with a volume-built home as you can only choose from packages or bundles, again these are usually inflated with a high margin. A custom-built home allows you to customise based on actual cost with a fair builder’s margin, rather than having to ‘buy’ a whole upgrade package even if you don’t want everything in it.
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Overall Costs
With the inflated costs for upgrades and packages, you are often left with an actual higher build cost overall with a volume-built home. Building a custom-designed home will save you the hassle and disappointment of the ‘extra’ costs that you didn’t account for, as customisations are considered in the quote so that you don’t go over your initial budget.
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Challenging Blocks
Most importantly, volume-built homes have limitations with regards to the type of land the plans can be built on. If you have a sloping or narrow block, you will require a specialist custom builder who has the expertise and knowledge to provide a quality build.
Rome is an award-winning, boutique builder of custom-designed homes. We are specialists in unique, one-of-a-kind designs and dealing with blocks of all shapes and sizes. No matter how big or small, we take pride in each and every one of our projects. Get in touch with us today to discuss your new home build today!
