Month 1 House Build

I’m so excited to be beginning this journey again and to be sharing the whole process with you!

In 2018-2019 I shared our whole building process with you all through blog posts and videos and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to do it again with you all.

Last time we built I shared long form horizontal videos to go with the blog posts and social posts, but this time I think we are going to simplify and do short form videos to go with the blog posts.

We are doing things a little differently this time around, in two ways.

First, we aren’t having a contractor build our whole house so technically we are self-contracting.

We purchased our new land at the end of last year and during the first two months we worked on prepping the land for our house, putting in a driveway, and pulling permits.

In March we broke ground on the foundation and have hired a licensed contractor (the same one who built our last house – we enjoyed working with them, know what it’s like building with them, & trust them) who will be doing everything from the foundation to framing to roofing/drying everything in.

We are doing some things ourselves along the way, like ordering windows and doors, but when we went to order roofing the company wouldn’t sell to us and wanted us to go through a contractor, even though we are self-contracting.

So thankfully we have a contractor working with us for part of the process!

Once the house is dried in, we are taking over the building process fully from that point.

But I keep joking with Roger that I hope I’m pregnant so I won’t have to do a ton. 😉

We renovated a house in 2016-2017 (tearing down walls, ripping up floors, taking out cabinets, completely new kitchen and master bathroom) and then in 2018-2019 we built a brand new house (with a contractor) with floor plans that we designed.

So we feel pretty good doing it this way – Trusting a contractor to do what we don’t feel confident doing ourselves and then doing the part that we’ve had a little more experience in.

The second thing we are doing differently is that we are not taking out a loan to build.

We’ve spent years preparing for this.

We made some big goals back in 2016 and each year we have worked hard to bring us closer to making those goals a reality.

It’s been 8 years in the making – Working our way out of debt, saving up, selling our big house (I prayed so hard for a year for the family who would buy our house and He answered every one of my BIG prayers in unimaginable ways), and now building much smaller.

So here we go!

We also had the trench dug for our underground utilities like power and water.

Then those conduits/lines were placed and buried as well.

Since we are building pretty far from the road this step actually took a fair amount of work, planning, and time to get done.

We also got a head start on our framing and dry-in process by getting all our windows and exterior doors pre-ordered too!

That way the framer has the rough opening dimensions to use when they start framing the house in mid-April, hopefully!

This first Month-1 house build update doesn’t have a whole lot going on, but April should be a big change month as the house structure begins to form with framing beginning after the foundation is completely finished!