Top 5 Projects To Upgrade Your Builder Grade Home

Everyone wants their home to be unique to their style and needs. You don’t necessarily get that when you buy a builder grade home. The finishes in these types of homes are usually beige, bland, and boring. Here are few popular ways we have found to help our clients create a beautiful custom home for years to come.

WIDEN & UPGRADE A MAJOR WINDOW

Windows are expensive and so most builders put small ones in. OR you have a dated home and windows were just smaller back then due to style and priorities. There is nothing better than having lots of natural light shine through on a sunny day. It makes your home feel bigger, brighter, and better connected with nature. We often recommend to our clients to enlarge the windows in key rooms in order to modernize the space.

Now, if your windows are a great size and fairly new, another way to make the windows look

more custom is painting them. We love the look of a black frame in a light room! Sherwin

Williams carries a great paint called Pro-Industrial Multi-Surface Acrylic which can be applied to vinyl windows. We recommend a spray finish to give it the best result.

UPGRADE YOUR DOORS

Sadly, most builder grade doors are hollow, lightweight with no sound barrier. This can become quite the annoyance if you work from home and have children playing in the next room or have someone in the family who insists on listening to their music at the highest volume! We also have clients who are re-building their homes to accommodate for multi-generational living. In these instances, our team of Contractors will highly recommend solid wood or solid core doors throughout the home. Clients always notice a major difference is sound transference.

To take your new doors to the next level and make them unique – try playing around with different hardware options.

UPGRADE YOUR KITCHEN OR VANITY COUNTER TOPS

Builder grade kitchens are notorious for thinner, cheaper materials. See below for an example of a thin ½ quartz counter top. By simply upgrading to a 1 ½ mitered edge, it looks a lot more luxe and can even be brought up the backsplash for a complete transformation.

UPGRADE YOUR LIGHTING

Changing the lights in a home can make a dramatic difference. The builder usually installs an outdated flush mount light in each room that is always too bright! Once you have a better understanding of how you live in your house and in each room, creating a lighting plan will be easy. Our clients typically like to add more light switches and have all of them be on a dimmer. Depending on the room and amount of natural light, a mix of pot lights and flush mounts are a great addition to customize your house. Adding showstopping pendants in the kitchen and in the foyer are always a good idea. To fill in the gaps we love to accessorize with floor and table lamps throughout.

We hope that sharing these 5 different upgrades is helpful. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help create a custom home for you, click here to get started!

AC Team