Yes, that's partly true, it's totally "our" project because of all the personal work we've put in.
But still, we just can't realize ourselves the way we had hoped.
I think Rick's patio furniture, for example, is great, and our house will also get quite a bit of color.
This "anthracite-colored windows and otherwise all white" is not individual enough for us and doesn't suit us.
So color will definitely move in with us :)
But we had many more ideas that we financially simply skipped/will skip.
For example, we would have liked trapezoidal windows in the attic, but the extra cost, especially for the shutters, is too high for us.
Then we would have liked the fall protection railings for the floor-to-ceiling windows somehow with a triangular pattern or glass, but the almost €1000 extra cost is again a lot for us.
And since almost all special requests cost extra, our house unfortunately ends up being more of a standard house off the shelf than we like.
I understand. It is always the case that you reach your limits and would like more or better. It just happens at a different budget level, but the "problem" is no different.
We ourselves have to forego a lot of what we would like, sometimes even things that are considered standard elsewhere or among young home builders. Instead, we invest selectively in things that are very important to us, basically in smaller "heart projects."
When reading here, I often get the impression that home builders have often already spent their budget fulfilling certain promoted standards. I have experienced this myself before, and in the end, I could have saved 10-20% of the construction cost or invested it elsewhere, and my house would not have been any worse.
This starts with the choice of the building site, the craftsmen or the general contractor, the possibly limited willingness to provide years of exhausting personal work, the patient waiting until you can afford something later, and continues with partly overloaded demands on technical "gadgets," love of cars and garages, and much more, which is why in the end, the standards for the sofa or carpet rapidly drop.
I explicitly do not mean you here, as I do not know your project; but as a repeat offender, I am often surprised here what sums people spend and consider completely normal.
If nowadays so much money is spent almost by default on high-tech kitchens, children's bathrooms, full automation, garage complexes with corresponding cars, garden landscapers, lawn-mowing robots, server technologies, convenient services, and more, then you decide on that and often against things like classic furniture or a higher budget for directly perceived living quality.
For me, the "special" would therefore not lie in a "trapezoid window" or "triangular pattern"; I believe such things no longer make the house special, but rather how you live in it and make it individually special. That is why you often see large, pompous houses that are nevertheless not special, no matter how big they have become. Usually, they look like the display floor of a hardware store.
In a building like, for example, 's, you can become just as depressed as in a simple bungalow. I even believe this risk increases on the upper levels of the stairs.