What a New Build Does Not Come With
The first evening in a new build, every room is lit up and visible from the road.
That is the moment most people work out what finished means. The house is complete, warranted, signed off and genuinely a better building than the one they left. The kitchen is in, the bathrooms are in, the boiler is new and the whole thing will cost a fraction of the old place to heat. All of that is real and none of it is the problem.
The problem is that the house is finished and you are not. What sits in that gap is the same list every time, and it arrives in a particular order.
The first evening
Windows first, because they are the only thing that cannot wait and the only thing you could not have bought in advance.
No blinds, no curtains, usually no poles or tracks to hang them from. Which is why the first night is lit up, and why the bedrooms are bright at five the next morning.
Everything else in a house is made to a size and then carried in. Curtains and blinds are made to the window after the window exists, measured in the room they will hang in. That is the whole reason they are last and the reason they take weeks rather than days. Order them first and the rest of the house can take its time. How to Choose Curtains and Blinds for a New Home covers the decision, and if you are in the gap now, the windows being bare is the normal state of a new build.
The other thing you notice that evening is the light. You have ceiling lights, which in most new builds means downlights on one circuit, and sometimes a pendant fitting with nothing in it. What you do not have is anything at eye level or below.
Three or four separate light sources in a living room, each on its own switch, changes a room more than anything else you could buy for the money. In October it is the difference between a room you sit in and a corridor with a sofa in it. The One Light in The Middle of The Ceiling is about exactly that.
The first month
The house is louder than you expected. Hard floors, fresh plaster, no curtains and nothing upholstered, so every sound travels and comes back. Nothing is broken and nothing needs fixing structurally. It needs soft surfaces, which is the same list as above plus rugs. We wrote about it in Everything Echoes And Nothing Is Broken.
Then the boxes. This is where people who have moved from an older house get caught, because there is no loft. Modern roofs are built from trussed rafters that cross the space diagonally, so there is nowhere to stand and nowhere to put anything. No wardrobes either, unless they were an upgrade, and no shelving anywhere.
Storage in a new build has to be furniture, and it has to be planned, because there is no slack in the building to absorb it the way an older house would.
Flooring varies more than anything else on this list, so check your own specification rather than assuming. Carpet is commonly in bedrooms and on stairs. Hard flooring downstairs is sometimes included and sometimes an upgrade taken at reservation. What is never included is anything on top of it.
By spring
None of this is urgent in October, which is the point of putting it here.
Front gardens are often turfed and rear gardens often are not, or are turfed to a line and left as soil beyond it. Fencing varies by plot, because it follows what the planning permission required, so two houses on the same street can hand over differently. There is frequently no outside tap, no external socket and no patio beyond the slab the back door opens onto.
Worth knowing in autumn. Worth doing in April.
Why the list is this list
None of it is an oversight, and the pattern is consistent enough across housebuilders to be deliberate.
Blinds, lamps, rugs and turf are the most personal decisions in a house and the most expensive to get wrong. A housebuilder who chose your curtains would be a housebuilder choosing wrong for most buyers. Leaving them out is the only sensible answer, and it is why the list looks the same whether you have bought in Keynsham, Emersons Green, Yate or Nailsea.
What it does mean is that the first month is yours to sequence, and sequence is most of it.
The order
Measure for window treatments. They take longest and solve most.
Buy lamps. Not the right lamps. Any lamps.
Then live in it for a few weeks before buying anything large, because the layout you imagined from the floor plan and the layout that works are rarely the same house.
Where To Start In A New Build is the longer version of that order, and Interior Design for a New Build Home covers how the whole first year tends to run.
We are interior designers in Bristol, and most of our work is show homes, which means we furnish empty new builds to a deadline for a living. Same list, three weeks, and the launch date does not move.
Tell us where you are
Design Seven is a Bristol studio. Most of our work is show homes for housebuilders, which means we furnish empty new builds for a living. We take on private projects too, whether that is a single room, a whole house, or curtains, blinds and lighting measured and fitted properly. We are based between Bristol and Bath, and work across the South West and further afield where the project warrants it.
Tell us the development and the house type. That is all we need.
On most sites around Bristol and Bath we have furnished that plot, or one almost identical to it, usually with three weeks to do it in. So we can often tell you what your windows are before you have measured them, which of the list above applies to your house rather than to new builds in general, and how long curtains and blinds actually take, which is the thing most people want to know in the first fortnight.
Call 0117 450 6707, email info@designseven.co.uk, or use the form on our contact page.