Designing your own home is a strange experience. You make hundreds of decisions across months of planning, you build the thing, and then you live with those decisions every day — including the ones you can't undo. It's one of the most honest forms of feedback a designer can receive, and I've paid attention to it.
This entry is about the decisions that held up. Not in theory — in practice, since we moved in April 2023 and with nine full-time occupants. Some felt obvious at the time. Others I had to fight for. All of them are things I'd do again without hesitation, and most are things I now recommend to clients whenever the project allows it.
Infrastructure: the decisions that live inside finished walls
The infrastructure decisions I'm most grateful for are the ones I made early — conduit, wire, and networking runs that are now inside finished walls and would cost real money to add or change today. These decisions have a specific characteristic: they cost don't cost very much to correctly during construction, and they are impossible to add cheaply after the fact.
Multiple Ethernet runs to every room that matters
I pulled multiple Ethernet drops to the rooms where connectivity would matter — the offices, the basement family room, the library, the garage, the barn, and even the generator. This felt like mild over-engineering to some people at the time. We've changed ISPs. We've changed how we route traffic. We've added equipment I didn't anticipate. Every time, the wired infrastructure was already there. If you're deciding whether to run one Ethernet drop per room or two, run at least two. The marginal cost is wire and the labor is the same. The marginal benefit compounds for the life of the house.
Antenna wire to the roof at multiple locations
I coordinated with my wireless internet provider in advance and pulled ethernet to several roof penetration points during construction for their antenna equipment. I hate seeing wires running down the sides of buildings and the sloppy installations that come out of these installers.
Conduit for solar PV wire and pre-wiring for rapid shutdown
Every wire that transmits solar power in residential construction has to go in steel conduit. It's a safety issue with high voltages. Often that conduit gets run on the outside of the house and it is ugly. Not my house. It's all in the walls where it belongs. The electrician and solar contractor are almost always separate people that are not coordinating their work, so even in new builds you end up with conduit on the outside of the building. Solar is always changing, but electricity physics is constant so I can easily specify conduit in the design and where to put in the walls to allow for a clean future solar installation and its only going to cost a couple hundred dollars to install it.
Branch circuit level power monitoring and logging
I monitor power consumption at the individual circuit level and log it continuously. When something in the house is pulling power unexpectedly, I know immediately rather than at the end of the month. For anyone operating a home with solar and battery storage, circuit-level monitoring isn't a luxury — it's the instrument panel for the system you're responsible for.
Kitchen and pantry
The kitchen and pantry are where I put the most thought into daily workflow, and it shows. These are some the decisions I feel best about in the whole house — and the ones that generate the most comments from visitors. The layout is comfortable but not too large, there's a place for everything and it is easily accessible, and the lighting is incredible.
Drawers as primary cabinetry
I specified drawers as the primary storage format in the lower kitchen cabinets rather than doors with shelves behind them. Every item in a drawer is visible and accessible when you open it — you don't have to crouch, reach to the back, or pull things out to find what's underneath. Pots, pans, baking equipment, utensils — all immediately accessible. The cost difference over standard cabinets is real but worth it. The daily quality-of-life difference is significant. This is my default starting place when designing kitchens now.
Planning exactly what goes in every drawer before the order was placed
During design I printed a view of each cabinet and wrote everything that would be stored in each cabinet. This forced the layout to be designed around actual use rather than generic storage. There are no drawers that were sized for a general purpose that turned out to be the wrong size for everything. Everything has a home and everything is where you expect it to be. Storage planning sounds tedious in the design phase. It's among the most valuable hours you can spend there.
Small appliance area in the pantry
I designated a specific zone in the pantry for small appliances — outlets, dedicated counter space, enough clearance for a stand mixer, a toaster, and equipment that gets used regularly but doesn't need to live on the main counter. This keeps the kitchen counter clear without requiring anyone to hunt through cabinets. The pantry outlet is on a dedicated circuit so multiple appliances can run simultaneously.
Two dishwashers and two ranges
With nine people in the house, a single dishwasher creates a permanent backlog. Two running simultaneously handle the load a large family generates without requiring hand-washing or multiple loads per day. The two ranges have been incredible for cooking or daily meals and there's always enough room and capacity to teach or to cook for the big holiday events. For large families this is a great affordable option to consider compared to a professional range and it can be pretty attractive.
Mechanical systems
Heat pumps
I chose heat pumps over propane heat and condenser units. This is a huge decision in an off-grid context where every kilowatt-hour has to be produced on site. Heat pumps move heat rather than generate it: for every unit of electrical energy they consume, they deliver two to four units of heat depending on outdoor temperature. The system has performed well, including in the coldest temperatures we see. For anyone building a high-efficiency home — particularly off-grid — heat pumps deserve serious consideration. The efficiency ratio changes the sizing and cost calculation for the entire electrical system.
Hybrid heat pump water heater
A hybrid heat pump water heater extracts heat from surrounding air rather than generating it from resistance elements. They are roughly three times as efficient as a conventional electric water heater when running in heat pump mode. I didn't believe the marketing about that. But I have monitoring data for years comparing it to my backup electric water heater, and to it's own resistive element draw during the Saturday night shower rush. It has been excellent. One planning note: it needs to be placed in a space with enough air volume and ambient warmth to operate effectively. That placement decision needs to happen during mechanical design, not after the space is already constrained by other equipment.
Multiple HVAC zones
Rather than conditioning the entire house as a single zone, I designed independent zones for the main level and basement. The basement has about 1/3 the heat loss of the main level so it would get way overheated and cooled if on the same system.
Spacing between garage bays
I gave the garage bays more lateral space between vehicles than the standard layout calls for. The difference is the ability to open a door fully without dinging the vehicle next to you. This feels minor until you're loading car seats, carrying groceries, or managing gear with young children — at which point the extra eighteen inches is the difference between a frustrating space and a functional one. Standard garage dimensions are optimized for cars, not for the humans who use them with cars.
Details that affect daily life
Nightlight outlet covers
I installed outlet covers with built-in LED nightlights throughout the house. In a house with young children, not needing overhead lights for middle-of-the-night movement is a genuine quality-of-life difference. These don't cost very much, but you have to make sure your electrical plan includes outlets where you know you need light. The details that affect daily life deserve as much attention as the systems that make the news.
Kids' cubby under the stairs
My home has a U shaped staircase. A gigantic waste of space, but it fit our home. Instead of wasting the space under the landing I designed a short ceiling area with a light there for young children to play in without feeling scared. It turns out even the bigger kids like to hunker down in there with a book and it's even been used for "camping".
Nursery in the master suite
I included an extra large closet adjacent to the master bedroom with a connecting interior door. This is a flexible space with different value at different times. Right now it is a nursery. Having a newborn in an adjacent room rather than down the hall matters at 3 AM in ways that are hard to overstate. Two of my children were born in this house. The nursery was used for both and the baby we had when we moved in. If there is any possibility you will have young children during the years you live in the home you're building, this is worth serious consideration. We will repurpose this space later as a sick room, a sitting room, an office, a closet, or even a laundry room.
Lighting quality throughout the house
I spent significant time on the lighting plan — fixture placement, color temperature, layering of ambient and task lighting, dimmer control, and bulb selection. The result is a house that is genuinely pleasant to be in at night. Good residential lighting is surprisingly rare. Getting it right requires thinking about it as a design problem: which zones need what level of light, what color temperature suits each use, where task lighting needs to be independent of ambient. Lighting is worth the attention during design, when it costs little to change. After rough-in, it costs real money and time.