The upgrades your builder will never bring up
50 pre-drywall calls, in the order your house gets built, with the exact words to ask for each one.
About six months after you move in, you are standing in a friend's house.
Their pantry has a glass door drink fridge. Or you plug a lamp into an outlet in the middle of their living room floor and realize there is no cord running across the room. Or you notice their master bath has two separate toilet rooms instead of one.
And you think, I would have done that.
Nobody offered it to you. Not because anybody was hiding anything. Your plan set tells the crew how to keep the house standing. It is not a menu of the things that would have made it your house.
The frustrating part is what those things actually cost. Not the ones you skipped on purpose because they were expensive. The ones nobody mentioned, that would have been a few hundred dollars and a note on the plans.
The floor outlet is about $200 at rough-in. After drywall it means cutting concrete or pulling up finished flooring.
Cheap on Tuesday, brutal on Thursday, and nobody tells you it is Tuesday.
This is not a 500 line list. It is a menu.
Flip through it on your phone, find the two or three upgrades you actually want, and lock them in before the drywall goes up. You are not trying to do all 50. You are trying to not miss the one you would have wanted.
The window is open walls, no drywall, subs still on site. That is it. Once the rock goes on, every one of these stops being a conversation and starts being a change order.
Every call has a price now, a price later, and the line to say out loud.
- The menu of 50 upgrades. The calls nobody brings up. Find the one you would have regretted missing, and get it now for a fraction of what it costs later.
- Word for word scripts. Stop wondering how to ask. Read the "ask your contractor" line out loud and get what you want without the pushback.
- The now versus later numbers. What each upgrade costs today, next to what it costs once somebody has to tear open finished drywall.
- Plan at home. Use it on the jobsite. Illustrated, in build order, with clickable contents that take you straight to the items that matter most to you.
Written by a builder with 84 homes behind him and more underway, not someone who watched a video about it.
"We are getting ready for a custom build, and I was just starting to feel overwhelmed that I would not be able to watch all the random Instagram videos from builders giving tips and was afraid that I would be missing something. This is so assuring to have everything in one list and with such great detail and wording to share with the builder."
Shyla, verified buyer
Find one upgrade you actually want in your house and this already paid for itself several times over. If it does not, email jon@builtwiththis.com inside 30 days and I refund you. No hassle, no questions asked. Keep the file either way.
My house is already framed. Am I too late?
No, that is the exact right time. Everything in here happens between framing and drywall. If your walls are open, you are standing in the window right now.
What if drywall is already up?
Some of it closes. A lot of it does not. Plenty of these are still doable, they just cost more, and the guide tells you what the later number looks like so you can decide instead of guess.
Is this for builders?
No. It is for the person paying for the house. If you are in the trades you already know most of this.
How do I get it?
Instant download after checkout. It is a PDF, so it works on your phone standing in the house and on your laptop at the kitchen table.