Build Me Up, Buttercup
I’ve lived in houses before, I swear. I understand, on some level, what houses are made of and I’ve watched enough HGTV to understand terms like “load-bearing wall” and “termite damage.” But it’s just a whole different experience when you get your first house-build budget.
You find yourself saying things like, “how many nails do we need, truly?” You might even be tempted to see if you could DIY yourself some sheetrock. I don’t recommend this path, but if you really think you could do it - go ahead and add up the supply cost of making your own bricks. You’ll find that, even with the stomach-plummeting total cost to brick up the exterior of your house, you’re still saving money by letting the pros actually make the supplies.
At least, that’s the conclusion I came to. Follow your bliss, I guess.
The process for finding a builder is pretty straight-forward. You research “builders in X area.” (This is my approach for everything.) After looking through, and preferably touring, houses for each of your potential builders, you should pick 2-3 to get bids from. Why should you go see the builder’s work in person? Because everything online is a lie now. (Jk kind of.) Because this is going to be your home, and often times cheap finishes look nice in photos and are terrible in real life. Go try to open those cabinet doors you thought looked amazing in the photos of a flipped house. You. might be surprised by how much you hate them, lol.
At the end of the day, even if you know who you want to work with already, getting multiple bids helps you understand how broad or narrow the range of costs could be. And remember: it will always end up costing more. I don’t care who promises you what. It will always cost more.
Another note: this process is going to take much longer than you want it to. Much longer than you think it should. You’ll want to say, “sure, whatever, that’s fine” several times but I highly recommend fighting this urge. Custom house builds are egregiously detail-oriented projects, and decisions you make with your prospective builders can greatly alter the final bid/budget. I went in asking for every little thing I could possibly want, and my first estimates came back well north of the $1,000,000 mark.
“Oh. Oh…oh no,” was all I could say to the paper.
So you go back and say, “I guess I can live without the TARDIS-themed secret library room…” even thought in your heart you know that’s a lie. And maybe you walk back how high-end your finishes are or opt for the second-best HVAC system, etc. The point is, you start pulling the stuff you can live without to ensure the house you build functions well and will withstand a several hundred hurricanes over the years.
And then you sign the contract, and the real fun begins.
Once the permits are in place and the crew shows up, everything really starts to snowball. Suddenly all those ‘cool ideas’ you had during the early design and daydreaming phases need to turn into concrete ideas, and quickly. Think of it like a canal lock system, you know where they open the different gates and water comes flooding through? Decisions are made in grouped phases, and we were officially opening the first gate.
Here comes the water, folks.
