One of the funny things about watching home renovation TV shows is the splash, glamour and drama of how renovation/ home building occurs. Renovations that take up to 6 or 12 months are shown in 1/2 hour, 1 hour or 2 part episodes. Although there is pain/ drama in the show, it all seems very artificial and contrived. Real renovation is nothing like that. There is pain/ drama but it is real and has real consequences. For example, if we run out of money during the construction, we really run out of money. If we screw up on our construction, it is a real screw up and fixing it is a big deal. The same can be said about the BIG REVEAL. It’s a big part of the shows. The doors get opened, home owners walk around, fake cry, hug the builder et et. Everything is perfect from the paint/ furniture/ carpetting et et.
Real Reveals from our own experience is not like that. If this is the experience you want than you should buy a house already built and walk in the front door. Our reveal experience was fantastic and amazing for us but it came in sputters rather than a big splash. The reason for this (and I believe this is common) was because the builder was behind schedule!
We had planned on selling our old house to coincide with moving into the new house. We had planned to do this during the spring market of 2014 and in fact we did sell our house. Unfortunately, selling a house and closing are different and when we sold our house, we were told the builder would be done by May so we planned our closing date in June. Of course June rolls around after we sold the house and the house wasnt finished so rather than moving directly into a finished house, we moved instead to our inlaws for the summer. This lasted about one month. The builders still rushed to finish the house but by the end of July, they only had the interior finished and than they went on holidays. So on the day we received the house, the floor was varnished, the kitchen was in, the laundry was in, three bathrooms were complete but we were still missing one vanity for the mainfloor powder room and some tiles for our range hood. I spent the next week (actually three weeks) installing our closet organizers, we had window blinds installed maybe two days after we moved in and our security/ home automation/ video remainded incomplete. In addition, the outside soffits and siding were also incomplete.
Was it amazing? Yes. Was it everything we wanted? Yes. But it is not like the BIG REVEAL on TV. Instead, when the movers came, we had boxes and boxes of stuff lying around the house. The new house lacked basic furniture to fill up the rooms because we didnt have them from our previous house. We spent days and weeks unpacking our boxes and throwing them away. This is where my wife really carried the load because on many days I was either working or fixing up our closet organizers.
Our BIG REVEAL didnt come in one splashy 5 minute finale to a 1 hour episode. Our REVEAL came in fits and spurts as we spent days and weeks cleaning and organizing rooms for our kids, buying things we needed and putting things were they needed to be.
We can now say our house is amazing! Way beyond anything we could imagine when we started this process out and we really need to thank our builders for this but it is definitely not a TV show and for anyone out there considering this, you should be prepared for the same experience.
Building Our Dream Home 