How to Avoid Stress When Building a New Home

Hannah and John** were thrilled. It was their first time building a new home and they couldn’t wait to pick out everything themselves. But two hours into the first design meeting, they hit a wall. 

Hannah suddenly turned to John and said, “I’m done. I’m not making any more decisions about anything. This house is going to give me a stress ulcer! Let’s just live in a tent.” 

Choose Your Stress

There are different kinds of stress in life. Bad stress, or negative stress, like when you experience grief, illness, job loss, or a breakup. And good stress, or positive stress, like starting a new job, getting married, the birth of a baby, or building a new house. 

The truth is that every choice comes with its own difficulties.

• Living in a house that doesn’t meet your needs and expectations is stressful.
• Living in a house during a lengthy renovation process is stressful.
• Building a new house is stressful.

The question is, which choice will provide you and your family with the most rewarding results in the end? 

As much as we would all love for the construction process to be completely stress-free, building a house is stressful, at times. But it can also be a very positive and rewarding experience if you are well-prepared.

We want to help you avoid stress on this journey. Here are some ideas to make this process a lot easier on your mental health.

4 Types of Stress and Strain Associated with Building a House and How to Tame Them

When you hire a team to design and build a house for you, stressful situations may arise, at times from the following sources:

1. Financial Stress

The financial cost of building a new home can be quite significant. If you feel you have overcommitted, you will feel stressed out.  

Avoid financial stress by not maxing out your budget. Choose a builder who will honor your budget limit.

2. Family Stress

Relationships with family members can sometimes be stressful even when you aren’t building a new home. Adding lots of decisions, a time crunch, and the budgeting issues involved in building a home can add to the tension.

Check out our marriage tips for the building process here.

If you are bringing another generation into your home, more people means more opinions and different priorities. 

We recommend having a family agreement ahead of time about what is most important to each person and who gets the final say if there is a dispute.

3. Decision-Making Stress

Designing your custom home is a big job. There are dozens of choices to make. This can be the most fun part for a lot of people. But during the design process, some people feel a bit overwhelmed.

You can either just plow your way through it, take a few breaks and do it in smaller chunks, or hire an interior designer to lift many decisions from your shoulders.

4. Unrealistic Expectations 

People who have been through the process before tend to be less stressed because they know what to expect. If this is your first time building a home, talk with your builder and experienced friends and family members about reality. 

If you can go into the home-building process with realistic expectations, you’ll find you have a lot less emotional stress/mental stress. 

5 Additional Tips to Manage the Stress of Building a New Home Successfully

Need some suggestions to cope with stress? Here are some of our pro suggestions.

Ways to reduce stress for yourself and your family during your home build

Lower your anxiety level by:

1. Hiring a builder you can trust. 

Knowing you are in good hands with an experienced, qualified team limits potential problems.

2. Taking some vacation time from work at key times in the process.

This will give you a bit more bandwidth in your life so you won’t feel as overwhelmed.

3. Scheduling fun things with your family weekly. 

Spend time doing things that have nothing to do with the house for a few hours. Your family is the whole reason you are building a new home.

4. Deciding to see this time as a grand adventure.

Consciously choose to focus on all the great things about your life and your dream house build. A positive attitude makes every situation in life better.

5. Having a healthy sense of humor.

Laughter really is great medicine. Approaching life with a sense of fun lowers everyone’s stress levels significantly.

Back to Hannah and John's stressful design session…

John gently reached for Hannah’s hand, flashing her an encouraging smile. “How about we take a break for a few minutes. Then let’s try to keep going. This is our dream house! It will be totally worth it in the end. Just picture us living there together, making memories.”

Hannah’s shoulders relaxed. She smiled back at John, suddenly remembering why they were doing this and took a deep breath. He was right. This moment was a gift. Something she was really thankful to be able to do. 

“Okay,” she said, “Let’s pick out those bathroom fixtures!”

Ready to Start the Luxury Home Building Process in Lexington, SC?

We treat our custom home clients with the utmost respect and are very upfront about all costs so you don’t have to worry about unpleasant surprises down the road.

Contact us today and let’s get started!

We build luxury homes in the Greater Columbia area in places like Lexington, Pine Ridge, West Columbia, Columbia, Ballentine, Chapin, Lake Murray, Forest Acres, Lake Carolina, and more.

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**Hannah and John are a fictional couple who represent the kind of conflict and stress that can come up during home building. Their names and conversation don’t represent any actual people or situations.

• Home Building