Year-one feedback is mostly excitement and nesting. Year-five feedback is honest. Here are the regrets we hear most often from Burnaby and Greater Vancouver clients, and the conversations they trace back to.
We stay in touch with most of our clients long after the warranty period. It's how we learn. Year-one feedback is mostly excitement and nesting. Year-five feedback is honest. The regrets below come up across Burnaby, Vancouver, Coquitlam, North Vancouver, and Fraser Valley custom homes we've delivered over two decades. The pattern is remarkably consistent.
Worth saying up front: year-five regrets aren't covered by BC's mandatory 2-5-10 home warranty insurance. The warranty handles defects in materials and labour for two years, building envelope failures for five, structural defects for ten. The regrets below sit outside warranty territory because they're brief-stage and design-stage decisions, not construction defects. Which is exactly why catching them before they become regrets matters.
"I wish we'd built one extra closet"
Always. Without fail. The closet that didn't fit the original plan turns into the most-mentioned absence at year five.
Three specific closets that show up over and over in year-five conversations:
- An oversized entry closet for coats, boots, sports gear, and the chronic seasonal overflow. Burnaby and Vancouver winters are wet, the Fraser Valley adds mud through more of the year, and households with kids accumulate gear faster than anyone plans for.
- A linen closet near the bedrooms. Sheets, towels, off-season comforters, the things you need within ten steps of the bed. A linen closet that's tucked into the basement gets used once a season instead of weekly.
- A deep utility closet near the kitchen. Vacuum, mops, cleaning supplies, the thing that holds the actual vacuum rather than wedging it under the basement stairs.
Plan two more closets than you think you need. You'll use them all. The marginal cost during construction is nominal; the cost of adding closet square footage to a finished home is not.
"I wish we'd planned for older us"
A wider doorway here. A zero-threshold shower there. An elevator-shaft-shaped closet that could become an elevator in fifteen years. Aging-in-place adjustments cost almost nothing during the build and roughly the entire whole-home renovation budget afterwards.
Most owners we work with aren't old when they build, and the temptation is to design for the family they have now. The reality is that a custom home in Burnaby is a 25-to-40-year decision. Aging is going to happen during the home's life cycle, not after it.
Specific items worth designing for at the brief stage:
- 32-inch minimum doorways at primary openings, 36-inch better. The cost differential is essentially zero at framing.
- A primary suite or guest suite on the ground floor. Even if everyone is currently sleeping upstairs, a ground-floor option exists for later or for parents and in-laws visiting.
- At least one zero-threshold or low-threshold shower. Walk-in roll-in capable, with the right grading and drainage. It will get used eventually, design it in now.
- Reinforced walls in bathrooms for future grab bars. Blocking installed at framing costs nothing; cutting drywall to add blocking later costs real money.
- An elevator-shaft-shaped closet stacked vertically through the floors. A 4-foot by 5-foot closet stack with proper structural framing can be retrofitted into a residential elevator without major surgery.
- Lever door hardware rather than round knobs throughout. Easier to operate at any age and required for most accessibility certifications.
"I wish we'd skipped the formal dining room"
Repeated almost word-for-word across many clients. The room photographs well. It gets used twice a year. The square footage would have been more valuable as a small office, an oversized pantry, or just bigger circulation around the kitchen.
The data we hear at year five is telling. Most families with formal dining rooms describe using them at:
- Thanksgiving
- Christmas (or equivalent winter holiday)
- One or two milestone events per year (milestone birthdays, anniversaries)
- Occasionally for guests when the casual eating area can't accommodate
Total annual hours of use: often under 50.
What that square footage could have been instead:
- A working pantry / scullery off the kitchen, which gets used multiple times daily
- A home office or study, which gets used multiple hours daily for many households
- A second family room or library, which gets used most evenings
- Generous kitchen circulation that handles two cooks, eat-in seating, and cleanup all simultaneously
The brief-stage question: if your family entertains formally three times a year, can the casual dining space stretch for those three occasions, freeing the formal dining-room square footage for daily use?
"I wish the laundry was somewhere else"
Every household figures out its own laundry rhythm. Basement? Mudroom? Hallway off the bedrooms? Almost all of our year-five regrets in this category trace back to the laundry being too far from where the clothes actually live.
The most common patterns:
- Bedroom-level laundry. Closer to where clothes live. Faster turnaround. Reduces the basement-to-upstairs hauling. The drawback is plumbing routing, which has to be planned at the design stage, and acoustic considerations for the wash and spin cycles.
- Mudroom laundry. Catches clothes coming in from outside. Particularly effective for households with kids in sports or for Pacific Northwest weather generally. Drawback: drying and folding sometimes happen far from where clothes get put away.
- Basement laundry. Traditional, plumbing-friendly, acoustically out of the way. Drawback: every load is a stair trip, and at year five, the family rhythm reveals whether that's tolerable.
Test the assumption before committing. Walk through what a typical laundry day looks like. Where do clothes accumulate? Where do they get washed? Where do they get folded? Where do they get put away? If the answer involves crossing the house with armloads of laundry, that's the regret showing up early.
"I wish we'd specified the windows up"
Windows are the one decision that gets harder, not easier, to upgrade later. Triple glazing. Better frames. Deeper sills. None of those is the place to value-engineer if the brief tightens.
Builds with disappointing window specs are the most common deep regret we hear, for several reasons:
- Window failure modes are gradual. Seals fail slowly, gaskets harden over years, operating hardware loosens. By the time the windows are noticeably underperforming, the home is six to ten years old, and replacement is a major project.
- The energy code is moving up-market. Step 3 of the BC Energy Step Code, the minimum for new Part 9 homes since January 1, 2025, requires window performance that bargain vinyl can't deliver. Step 5, on track for 2032, effectively requires triple-glazed thermally-broken-frame units. A bargain spec today will be obsolete during the home's life cycle, but replacing it as obsolete is much more expensive than installing properly the first time.
- The Pacific Northwest tests window performance. Burnaby and Vancouver get persistent humidity through the cool half of the year. Cheap window seals fail faster here than they do in drier climates. Coastal influence reaches surprisingly far inland.
- Windows interact with everything else. Wall assembly performance, insulation continuity, condensation control, daylight quality, acoustic performance, all of it depends on the window. Cheap windows compromise everything connected to them.
The brief-stage rule: don't value-engineer the windows. Find the savings elsewhere.
A sixth regret we hear less often but worth naming: HVAC sizing
Year five often surfaces a quieter category of regret: HVAC systems that were sized for the home as designed, but that don't match the home as actually lived in.
The two patterns we see:
- Oversized systems that short-cycle, dehumidify poorly, and run inefficiently. Particularly common when a builder defaults to an off-the-shelf system size rather than performing proper Manual J calculations against the envelope.
- Undersized systems that struggle in the cold extremes, particularly with the move to heat pumps under the Step Code. A heat pump sized for the heating load without backup capacity can fail to keep up in a cold snap.
Step 3 and Step 5 of the Energy Step Code make this more important, not less. A well-designed envelope cuts the heating and cooling loads, which means the HVAC system should be smaller and more carefully matched. Under-or-over-sizing becomes more apparent in a high-performance home.
The pattern across all six
Every regret traces back to a single conversation that didn't happen, or happened too softly. Most would have been solved at the right moment, and become close to impossible afterwards.
Icon Projects Team
Notice that none of these regrets are about luxury. They're about utility. The parts of a home that get used every day. The choices that need to age with the family. The small ergonomic decisions a glossy magazine doesn't tell you to think about. The architects we love most are the ones who ask about laundry on day one.
A second pattern: every one of these regrets is a brief-stage or design-stage decision, not a construction defect. The 2-5-10 warranty doesn't cover any of them. They sit in the uncovered space between specification and lived experience, which is the space that requires proactive, deliberate thinking up front.
A practical brief-stage checklist
Before locking the design on a Burnaby, Vancouver, Coquitlam, North Vancouver, or Fraser Valley custom home, the six brief-stage questions that prevent year-five regrets:
- How many closets does the family realistically need, and where?
- What aging-in-place adjustments are worth designing in now, even if they don't get used for fifteen years?
- How much square footage are you allocating to formal entertaining vs daily living, honestly?
- Where does laundry actually happen in your current home, and what would you change?
- Are the windows specified for where the energy code is heading, not just where it is today?
- Has the HVAC system been sized against the actual envelope performance, with proper Manual J calculations?
A custom home that answers those six questions cleanly will read differently in year five than one that didn't think about them at the brief.
What to do if you're already in year three, or year seven
Not everyone reading this is at the brief stage. Some are five years into the home they built, nodding along.
For owners already in the house: none of the six regrets is terminal. Some are more fixable than others.
Closets can be added in underused spaces, a bedroom corner, a landing, a section of hallway, if there's structural room. The work is real but bounded. A good finish carpenter can assess options in an afternoon.
Aging-in-place improvements are harder if they require doorway widening, but zero-threshold shower conversions and grab-bar blocking installation (if the walls weren't originally blocked, surface-mounted grab-bar plates are often a reasonable intermediate) are livable solutions.
The formal dining room is easier than it looks to convert. Remove the table, add built-in shelving or a window seat along one wall, and the room becomes a library or an overflow sitting room that gets used twelve times as often. The square footage is the same; the programming changes.
Laundry re-routing is the most disruptive to move, but a laundry cabinet on an upper floor, served by a recirculating pump on the hot water line and a drain through the floor, is a real solution when the bathroom is nearby.
Window upgrades are a significant project. The case for replacing before the seals fail is real but hard to time. When a window fails, visible seal failure, fogging between the panes, operating hardware that no longer closes, replace the whole opening, not just the glazing unit. Frame and hardware age together.
HVAC right-sizing is typically addressed at the next equipment replacement cycle. Replacing an oversized system before it fails is rarely cost-effective unless comfort complaints are severe. The opportunity is at replacement: commission a proper CSA F280-12 calculation and specify the new equipment to match, not to replicate the old one.
Why year five matters
The first year is excitement and nesting. The second year is settling into rhythm. By year five, the family has lived in the home long enough to know what works and what doesn't. The judgments at year five are the most accurate honest assessment a custom home will ever get.
For owners about to start a custom-home brief, the year-five conversations from clients who built five years ago are the most valuable input you can collect. They're not in marketing materials. They surface in honest conversations with builders who stay in touch with their clients beyond the warranty period.
We do, and we listen. The list above is the result.
Related on the Journal
- Five mistakes that show up by year three
- 8 things to know before designing
- Materials that age beautifully (and the ones that don't)
Frequently asked questions
- What's the most common year-five regret among Burnaby custom-home owners?
- Wishing they'd built one extra closet, cited almost word for word across clients. Owners consistently mention wanting an oversized entry closet for coats and gear, a linen closet near the bedrooms, and a deep utility closet near the kitchen. The marginal cost of adding closet square footage during construction is nominal, while adding it to a finished home is not.
- Do year-five regrets count as construction defects under warranty?
- No. Closets that turned out too small, doorways that should have been wider, or windows an owner wishes they'd specified up are brief-stage and design-stage decisions, not workmanship failures. BC's mandatory 2-5-10 home warranty covers materials and labour for two years, the building envelope for five, and structural defects for ten, but none of that coverage reaches a decision made before construction even started.
- Why do formal dining rooms show up so often as a regret?
- Because they photograph well but see little daily use. Clients report using a formal dining room for events like Thanksgiving, a winter holiday, and one or two milestone occasions a year, often under 50 total hours annually. The same square footage as a working scullery, a home office, or extra kitchen circulation gets used far more often.
- What aging-in-place features do owners wish they'd included at year five?
- Wider doorways at primary openings, at least one zero-threshold or low-threshold shower, reinforced bathroom walls for future grab bars, and a closet stack shaped so it could later become a small elevator shaft. These adjustments cost almost nothing during the build and roughly the cost of a full whole-home renovation to add afterward, since most owners weren't old when they built but the home is a 25-to-40-year decision.
- Why do window specifications come up as a regret years after move-in?
- Because window failure is gradual. Seals fail slowly and hardware loosens over years, so by the time performance is noticeably worse the home is often six to ten years old and replacement is a major project. Step 3 of the BC Energy Step Code, the minimum for new homes since January 1, 2025, already requires performance that bargain vinyl windows can't deliver, and coastal humidity in Burnaby and Vancouver wears out cheap seals faster than a drier climate would.
- Where do laundry-location regrets tend to come from?
- From placing the laundry too far from where clothes actually accumulate and get put away. Bedroom-level laundry cuts hauling but requires planning plumbing routing and acoustic isolation at the design stage. Mudroom laundry catches clothes coming in from outside but can separate drying from where clothes are stored. Basement laundry is plumbing-friendly but makes every load a stair trip, which becomes the sticking point over time.
- Is HVAC sizing a common source of year-five complaints?
- Yes, though it surfaces less often than closets or windows. Oversized systems short-cycle and dehumidify poorly, while undersized systems, particularly heat pumps sized without backup capacity, struggle in cold snaps. A well-designed high-performance envelope reduces heating and cooling loads, which makes properly matched sizing through a Manual J calculation more important, not less, on a Step Code home.
- Can year-five regrets be fixed after the fact?
- Most are fixable but more disruptive than getting them right at the brief stage. Closets can sometimes be added in underused spaces like a landing or hallway section if structure allows. A formal dining room can be converted into a library or sitting room with built-in shelving. Laundry relocation is more disruptive but solvable with a recirculating pump and a floor drain. Window upgrades are the most significant project, usually addressed only once seals visibly fail.
