Before You Build a House

This part of getting a home can be the most daunting for people.  This is where the house is created in thought before it is physically made.  If you don’t want to do this part then your options will be: one scrap the house-building idea, two hire this part out, three skip this part and wing it (please note on this one I have never heard of this one succeeding, or if it did stand up at the end it cost way more than it should have, this version is only an option for people with plenty of extra money to use.)  I will be honest this one has taken me nearly a decade to do.  Now I am slow at everything so don’t freak out if you don’t have ten years to devote to this part.  You could realistically do this in 6 months or less.  There is a real possibility that you have already done the most time-consuming parts of this by the time you are reading this.

Step one: Fitting your house and life together.

It doesn’t do you any good to build a house you will hate.  Too much of anything is going to kill you.  Too small, too big, too many stairs, too few rooms, too many rooms, too many of xyz natural disasters, too many trees, too much open space, too many neighbors, too far to walk to closest neighbor.  Hopefully, you get the point.  Everyone is different and you need to plan your house accordingly.

Things to consider:

How many people? One, two, 12, 15, or somewhere in between?  A twelve-person family like I have, will not fit in a tiny home.  Sorry all you tiny home lovers, it is not going to happen.  That being said, if it was just my wife and myself, we could easily live in a small space like a semi-truck bunk for a very long time and be quite happy there.  Know your numbers.  Are you going to have kids added in at some time?   What about just adding a spouse? What about aging parents or other relatives or friends that need permanent help (and you are going to say yes to)?  Building for everyone may not be a realistic idea (there is the possibility that none of those will ever happen).  So maybe you need to build with the idea that it can be easily expanded or contracted.  In my case kids will be leaving, so it makes no sense to have a long-term giant mansion of a house.  I don’t want to rent out part of the house in 20 years ish and I don’t want to have to maintain a house that is barely getting used.

What type of people?  Building so that needs are met is very important.  I have a cousin who is in a wheelchair.  Is he going to visit?  Am I planning on living in this house when I am old? Do you or others in the house have hobbies that need space?  Collections, figurines, games, hunting, fishing, sports playing or watching, cooking, reading, schooling, as well as other such things need to be taken into account.  You don’t need to build a super kitchen for someone who eats out 90% of the time.  You don’t need a dining room if everyone in the house scrambles through the kitchen quickly and eats on the go or exclusively eats in front of the TV in the living room.

How long does this house need to last?  

Is this a house that will turn into a historical location or museum when your great-grandkids don’t need it anymore?  Or does this house just need to stand for 20 years?  Perhaps you need something in between?  Most homes in the USA are built to last for about 100ish years.  Many homes or buildings in Europe and other places have been around for thousands of years.  That being said many homes last only for 10-20 years before they need to be scraped and rebuilt or just abandoned.  My wife and I have been fairly transient our whole life even before we got married.  We move to a place saying we plan on being there forever (which we do), but forever terns into 3 years or less usually.  So it does not make any logic for us to build something that will outlast us or our posterity.

Are you planning on selling it or living in it till you or it drops?

This is a big one.  If you are planning on selling then you need to make it in such a way it is legal for the home location as well as desirable for others to want.  What does that mean?  Well, in places around the world (especially ‘modern first world’ type locations) there is usually a government body (or two or three or more) that will have a say in how your house can look and function.  If it is not inside of their chosen parameters, then they will usually try and take something from you (usually money).  That statement makes me sound very anti-government and/or anti-government regulatory actions.  On the contrary, I am very grateful that they have tested materials and methods to find highly functional happening and make it more difficult for dishonest people to take advantage of others.  Keep people safe, keep people honest. Both are good goals.  One of the big drawbacks to this is innovation is stifled.  Because they can only test things so fast and it has to be in existence already, it limits the use of new materials or innovative building methods.  It does not matter if it is better, it is not on their list of approved ness.  If you need to or plan to sell the house at some point in the future, stay within the approval box.  Going outside of it will cause problems or loss or both, I promise.  As for us, we have found personally that we do not stay put long enough to consider a house we live in an investment of any sort.  As far as we are concerned, housing expense is just that, expense and we plan on never seeing it again.

Buying vs building your material.

This is another one that other entities have a say in potentially.  If you are planning on buying all the materials to do your build then you need to stay within the prescribed limits of those entities.  If you are buying with a loan, then you must use material from their approved list.  If you are building where there are codes, that means you must follow them and only use the materials on the prescribed list as directed in the code.  As a general rule, it is the safest and best way to use that stuff.  On the other hand, if you are building your own material, then welcome to the land of SELF RISK.  If ‘they’ have tested and inspected, then if it fails it is really their fault.  BUT if you step outside the approved ‘box’, then you must take responsibility and therefore fault or success is entirely on you.

Getting a loan or paying cash:

This can be the biggest dictator of the end result.  Having more funding available means you can do more.  Faster, stronger, easier, bigger, all of the more takes more, and usually that means more money.  ‘Back in the day’ you could build a house on your own land at the pace of you.  Nowadays again you have to do as the entities say, or if you get a loan, as the loaning party says.  Now they (the loan people) may not care, but most of them do care.  They do not want to step into the land of risk with you.  If they are loaning money to you their goal is not to get you into a home, it is to make money.  Making money is not evil, it’s just not your goal most likely.  So understand that they are not going to ‘gamble’ on you.  They will take everything they possibly can from you to make money, so if you use them for money, understand that they too will be using you for money.  You are not a charity case they are ‘saving’.  You are an asset to make money from, the end.  We have chosen to not get a loan.  We will not be tied down in any way, and it gives us other options that were a much higher priority to us as a family than any of the ‘mores’ available.

If you have time then money becomes less of a necessity.  You can build at ‘the speed of you’.  The faster you learn and build the faster it goes up.

Where does your home belong?

There are two ways to really approach this one.  The first way is to pick a site and design your house around that.  Second is pick the house and find a location that will take that house.  For example, let’s say that you really want a full basement.  Then you will have to pick a location in the country where you can build a basement without a high water table that can make basements flood without any rain whatsoever.  If you want really big grand windows so you can see for miles then you don’t want to put your house where there are lots of visual obstructions like trees or other buildings or ugly]close hillsides.  If you are looking to build something to get away from populated areas, don’t build on main roads or in cities.  With that one also don’t pick a house design that says ‘look at me’ because then people will get curious and look.  Build based on the goals, scrap anything else.  Our house location is near the water well, the forest, as well as out in the country a bit.  These were all priorities to us.

Personal Priorities:

Except for money, this is the other consideration that is most likely to affect your house-building decisions.  This will be things like: is it green (both the image version and the care about planet version)  does it fit my life (family visits, parties, anti-people, pack rat, image for work or social life, pets or plants, work at home considerations, religious considerations, prepper type considerations) resource availability (equipment, knowledge and/or ability to learn).  All of these things can be changed if you want to make them so.  For us personally, our main goal with building a house was to give our kids the experience of doing so.  Applying science, problem-solving, resource management, and math (I am sure there are others) to real life can help you really learn in ways a desk just can’t.  Because child involvement was such an important part, we made many of our other choices because of that.  Choosing materials they could lift for example, many of them can’t drive equipment yet, so it needed to be light enough that they could do it, but strong enough to actually be more than a play house.

Based on the list above you can then move forward in the process.  

One way to do this is by getting pictures compiled of ideas.  In the internet age we live in you can do a digital version of this by going and looking up images and then saving them somewhere accessible.  The older school version of this was magazines you would either keep or cut out images of.  The super old version of this was just build what everyone else was doing in your village or whatever worked that popped into your head (because you couldn’t collect ideas/insperation from anything).  Just as a warning you can easily overkill this one.  Additionally, remember that the internet is one giant advertisement location, so everything you see is someone trying to sell it, which means they will make it look good even if it is not needed or even wanted.  If keeping with trends is important to you then this is definitely the way to go.  Also if you want ideas on alternative building availability this is also a great way to go as resources tend to also be high for this area.  We did this for years, and it was fun but also it really helped us find out what was actually important to us and ideas on how to make it a reality.

The next step is obtaining the necessary (pre) resources.  This includes location, knowledge, and skills.  Location is somewhat obvious because it is hard to build in the air.  Can it be done, yes technically but if you are reading this and if that is your goal, well I am going to stop you right there.  But if you are putting your house on the ground then please proceed.  The first thing you need to realize is that anything is possible, given enough time, money, and potentially other resources.  It can be done.  So don’t even ask if it can, the answer is yes.  Instead ask HOW can it be done within these (x,y,z) parameters?  What are the parameters?  Well, they are whatever you set.  I have this (x) money, I have this (y) much time, I have this (z) of other necessary resources (equipment, space, lack of or plentiful water, electricity if wanted, other utility, and the list goes on)  Make a list.  First absolutes.  I only have $30,000 to devote to this project. I have 2 hours a day to work on it.  I have 2 years to complete it in.  By making a list it limits what is realistic based on the resource level.  You can parse it from there, to include your priority list, highest priority first.  An example from my project would be having to fit all 12 of us, well that just eliminated tiny homes.

Now elimination of end results is the only thing you are doing at this point.  This means that some of the same knowledge it takes to build a tiny home can be applied to a 12-person home.  Be willing to learn from other sources.  For an example of this, let’s say you do not want to live in a cob house, or earth ship home, or completely detached from ‘regular society’.  That may be true but if you need off-grid living utilities or other ideas, the ‘Green for saving the planet’ group and Amish people are your go-to groups.  Why? Because they are already doing it.  Yes, they attached it to a different life than you want but that’s their house, not yours.  Use the pieces they have.  Every group has smart people, do not get trapped in a certain spot just because ‘they’ don’t live with the same belief system you have. It will be very limiting.

Chances are you are going to have to do the elimination of end results multiple times throughout the process.  Please plan but do not die on ‘plan’ hill.  Example of what I mean.  Let’s say you plan to build a wood house, maybe a log cabin, or something like that.  Anyway planning is done and you are about to start building, then the week before you buy any wood, the price jumps up by 300%.  So your house cost was in budget but not anymore.  Should you not scrap the whole build?  Well, that is an option, but could you build it with a different material? If you really want a log cabin look, could you attach wood-looking or smaller pieces of wood over it?  300% increase in price is a lot of money to hypothetical with.  Figure out a different way to get the same result and keep it within the parameters.  Be willing to adjust the plan.  When doing one-off custom homes that is how it goes.  Now if you are building a whole neighborhood of spec homes then this advice is not sound as the change will now have to be done to a few dozen or hundreds of homes.

Now that you have it parsed down, put it on ‘paper’ if you will.  Like I just mentioned use ‘pencil” so you can easily adjust it but if it is written down you will not have to keep it all in your head.  Just because you are smart does not mean a house plan is a good use of that head space.  It is recommended that you have as many details finished in the drawing before you start your build.  This is a good idea, particularly if you are buying all of your materials.  If you are sourcing materials from other places, or building your own materials, let’s be real you are going to have to adjust anyway because there is no standardized way/size/shape yet. In this case design with enough “tolerance” to allow adjustment to be made, even on site.  If you are mixing the two, then plan fairly detailedly with bought pieces and a general idea plan with made/sourced parts.  Go through every step of the whole project on paper till it works in one go without snaffles of any kind.

Once your plan works from start to finish you are ready to move into pre-foundation work.