New Home Upgrades you wish you had...

[RND]

Things I wish we added but didn't:
1) Upgraded to rounded sheetrock corners throughout the house
2) Water softener
3) jetted tub in the master
4) ceiling fans in every room and in the covered patio
5) 3rd car garage
6) intercom system

Things I'm glad we have:
1) Granite
2) counter-height vanity in master
3) Plugs in the eave for outdoor lights
4) dedicated plug in the garage for our deep freezer
5) gas drop for bbq
6) fully upgraded cabinets, lighting and plumbing fixtures
7) carpet in the main living spaces...we recently had our 3rd baby and he would not have been comfortable playing on hard tile.
8) Faux wood blinds on every window...we still haven't gotten around to getting drapes for every window so I'm glad they are covered with something.

[jhwest]

Lots of drawers in the kitchen. This sounds like a no-brainer, but our kitchen here has mostly cupboards in the base cabinets. Only one drawer at the top of each cabinet. So there is nowhere to store tupperware or bowls except to just toss everything at the bottom of a cupboard. I would have just about everything be drawers if I had my way. Even if they were just cupboards with roll-out drawers.

And super powerful bathroom fans. And a linen closet in every bathroom. (Or at least the master.)

As big a garage as possible.

Lots of plugs. All the plugs in our house are the kind that just have two outlets. With so much stuff being plugged in, you really need four outlets per plug (or is that four plugs per outlet?)

Several phone jacks. We have one phone jack on each floor. That's two in the whole house. Two!

[uconn99]

Wire the heck out of any new home. The cost will justify it in the future, trust me!

Wire cat5e to every single room in the house. In the future you will want this for home automation, intercoms, distributed speakers, cameras ect..... The cat5 will also distribute phone, up to 4 phone lines on a single cable run.

Get each room wired for TV, RG6 cable. This is not only helpful for you but for resale.

Wire for rock speakers if you have pool.

Wire the outside of the house for cameras, use cat5 or RG59/siameese.

Wire for security pre-wire only. They will kill you on equipment costs if they offer it.

Wire for home theater surround sound, at least 5.1 in any room you want surround sound. Make sure they run RG6 for the sub-woofer location.

Wire every room you want to have speakers in. Do more than you think you will want. You wont see the wires if you never use it. Make sure they run at least 16/2 wire from speakers to volume control locations and cat5 from volume control locations back to media center location. You may also want to run 16/4 from volume control locations to media center location for traditional knob volume control use.

Pre-plumb for central vaccum or just have the entire system installed. Usually builders sub out their low voltage and many offer this great option.

Just wire the house for the future! I am in the low voltage industry and you wouldn't believe the amount of things people are missing out on now without cat5 run in their house.