From Flooring to Lighting: 6 High-Impact Home Upgrades to Tackle Before You Move in

When you move into a new construction home, your builder will likely present you with a plethora of enticing upgrade options. You may think choosing your upgrades is the only piece of the puzzle you have to complete, but timing matters, too.  

Why it matters: Some upgrades are better done during the construction phase, because of cost-effectiveness, convenience, and move-in functionality, while some upgrades are easily done as DIY jobs down the road. 

Here’s which upgrades you should take care of during the building process and what can wait. 

Structural Work Now, Cosmetic Work Later 

While your immediate functional needs from your home, and your budget, will ultimately dictate when you incorporate upgrades, the general advice is that work that will be messy, disruptive, and costly down the road is better done during the construction phase. Typically, cosmetic-style upgrades with minimal renovations can wait until later.  

For example, in the kitchen, you should upgrade kitchen cabinetry and countertops during construction, but do paint, hardware and light fixtures as DIY jobs. 

If there is room in the budget, it’s easier to roll costs together and manage them collectively during construction as well. 

Here are six upgrades to consider including as you build. 

1. Lighting and Electrical 

 Make sure you have adequate outlets in the right places, best installed while your home is being built. Think about how you will move through your rooms, and where you will perform tasks that require an outlet. Will you be styling your hair and applying makeup at the vanity in your walk-in closet, requiring outlets and lights? Will your flex room be a craft room that needs extra outlets? Lighting, and lighting rough-ins, are best addressed during the building process.  

• High-traffic rooms (i.e. kitchen and bathrooms) should receive the most attention.  

• In the kitchen particularly, task-oriented lighting is helpful for cooking and prep. 

• In bathrooms, make sure you have enough lighting, especially if there isn’t a window, and consider features such as dimmers.  

 2. Finish the Basement  

A popular builder incentive is a finished basement, but if you are footing the bill for this upgrade, you may wonder if it’s worth it to hold off.   

Finishing your basement should be done immediately. A finished basement is great if you need bedrooms for family members or home office space, or for earning some rental income. It’s convenient for logistics at the construction phase too, says Erica Bell, marketing manager at Miller & Smith.  

“The builder is doing all the work from permitting, electrical, drywall, as well as all of the required county inspections.”  

3. Flooring  

Upgraded flooring is recommended as a builder upgrade. You can do it on your own down the road, but flooring plays a key role in design continuity, along with creating value. It’s the foundation for your aesthetic, literally. And redoing flooring later means removing and storing all your furniture, paying to remove the old flooring, living in dust, or maybe being barred from that section of your home. All in all: less hassle and cost to do it now.   

“In a production home, you get higher value by having hardwood throughout the first floor for example, instead of hardwood in a smaller space and then tiling your kitchen and carpeting your family room. It’s worth the spend to create that systemic, aesthetic flow,” says Susan Hill, principal and owner of Susan Hill Interior Design. 

 4. Plumbing 

 Future-proof your home by roughing in plumbing, even in rooms that are earmarked for other uses when you move in. Keep your options open, especially to accommodate aging in place or if illness or injury hinders mobility. 

 With plumbing roughed-in, you can easily convert a main floor home office to a bed and bathroom, or flex space into a rental suite. 

 5. Energy-Efficient Upgrades 

 Energy-efficient upgrades will start to yield benefits immediately, so for that reason, and because a lot of energy-efficient upgrades are structural, we recommend incorporating these at the construction phase. 

 Consider triple-glazed windows, upgraded insulation, energy-efficient doors, HVAC systems, or smart tech that can reduce energy use. 

6. Landscaping: Now or Later? It Depends 

Typically, you should wait until you have lived in a home for a while to do the landscaping. You may be in a construction zone, with dust and debris affecting soil and vegetation, or you may want to get a better understanding of light conditions and other influences, achieved by daily observation over time.  

However, if yours is among the last homes to be built in your development, or if you are using a designer to plan your home, there is benefit to extending the design during the build phase, at least from a planning perspective, to preserve design continuity inside and out. It’s an important aspect of establishing an indoor/outdoor connection.