What would you do if your builder offered you an awesome, state-of-the-art entertainment system for your new house? Jump for joy? Pepper him with questions about the finer points of plasma? Or, maybe, like Mr. and Mrs. C., you'd get right down to business. As any buyer of a production or even semi-custom home knows, there's little time to fiddle around when you're working around the tight schedule of a builder – in this family's case, Taylor Woodrow. As the family discovered during the rigorous homebuilding process, you've got to make many important decisions, and make them fast, otherwise you'll miss a golden opportunity to own the exact entertainment system you want and have it integrated properly into the structure and design of the house.
Custom Creations
It's a growing trend among home builders to offer entertainment packages to their homebuyers. A package from one builder might pull together a home theatre consisting of a big-screen TV and a set of five speakers; another builder might bundle all the components needed to feed music to four rooms of the house. The packages are pretty much set in stone, with little room for modifications and additions. If the package includes five speakers, that's what you get – no more, no less. There's a good reason for this cookie-cutter approach. It saves the builder time and money, and homebuyers the arduous process of sifting through and selecting their entertainment components piece by painstaking piece.
Mr. and Mrs. C., however, hooked up with a semi-custom homebuilder that was much more flexible with its home entertainment offerings. They worked with the builder's home systems installation partner to completely customise their home entertainment system. They could choose from a wide variety of TVs, speakers, surround-sound systems and remote controls – and have those components installed wherever and however they wanted. Good thing. The homeowners packed their home with some of the best components around, including several stylish touchpanels to control the audio/video equipment, architectural speakers and wall-skimming plasma TVs.
