Some of the gotchas I’ve encountered:
- Land is very hard to finance, I ended up saving until I could buy cash
- Building ‘on-grid’ would have saved a lot in permitting and setup (luckily I had electric service at the road). If you are going off-grid, I would check the permitting requirements for sewage/water and the average depth of wells near your spot, this can get expensive quick if you have to drill deep.
- I’m working with an architect atm but we’ve pivoted to using ICF blocks for wall construction as they are made in the USA and tariffs would have killed me otherwise.
I would expect the cost of the building, using the highest quality materials (not luxury) to still beat (by like 100k) the cost of buying an equivalant old home in the area I purchased; however, if we are talking pre-housing-price-explosion of the last few years, I would say building would be more expensive.
Wow that’s pretty great savings, a lot of what I saw basically said to expect to pay over a normal listing. Seems like a pretty good deal considering the amount of customization I assume you get, you just need somewhere to live while it’s building.
Do you have any resources for what you used to plan your build? Or did you mostly hire professionals to figure it out?
Yup in a ‘normal’ housing market I would totally expect to pay more to do a custom build. House builders are like walmart, they get volume deals that you don’t have access to building a single unit. I used 'Sweet Home 3d" (basically sketchup light just for buildings) to plan the house/site over several months before using online estimators for material as a ballpark, now finally working with a professional. For site planning I hired the geotechnical engineers and the waste water engineers to submit their findings/blessings to the county.
