So you are kinda feeling some anxiety about your home building process. You don’t know how you can afford the build if you hire a GC, nor do you know how much time you can devote to the build if you do it yourself because you have a full time job, sound familiar?
As our followers know, we were in that same position. As the years went by our savings account seemed to grow slower than the increase of the cost of building material, so we decided we better just jump in and get started.
As a farmer, there are certain times of the year that I am swamped with work for a month or two, and other months that I can get away for a few hours a week to even a couple hours a day. Basically not a ‘building a house’ friendly schedule.
When we started breaking ground on the house I was just starting harvest, which is a month or so of pretty busy work so I knew I wasn’t going to be a part of much of that process. We had a couple guys lined up to get started and I told them I would help out whenever possible. Luckily they were ok with my inability to commit consistent time. I figured whatever time I could work on the house, I was at least helping advance the work.
For a while we only had one guy working on certain projects and I was needed, and other times we had 3 or 4 people but needed 5 people, so I had to drop what I was doing on the farm to go help out for a couple hours. (concrete day, the day we stood walls, the day the trusses were delivered)
So from breaking ground in August to mid October my work of the house was sporadic, sometimes I could devote full days, other times I only came by at the end of a work day to check the progress of that week. It is definitely my personality to be a part of everything.
Oh and did I mention we were trying to get the house dried in before winter? And that in Central Washington you don’t know when winter is going to show up? or how bad it will be?
Basically it drove me crazy when I couldn’t be there to help out. I felt like it was ‘my fault’ if we weren’t progressing fast enough. Well, fast forward a couple years to the present and things are still ‘my fault’ but we have tried to take the stress out of it. No we are not done building, no I do not work on the house everyday, no we do not see progress very often, but most of all, No we do not freak out about it! WHAT!?!
How did we get to this point? Basically our crew did everything possible to get our house protected for winter. We had one of the worst cold weather winters in recent history, we had to shovel snow out of our house a few times, the wind was unbearable and made things dangerous, and things just didn’t go as planned at other times.
We got dried in (for the most part) right before Christmas and had to say goodbye to the crew. Happy Holidays to them as they could return home to warmer weather in Southern Utah. With that goodbye, that meant more work/responsibility was on the GC-us.
And with the new year, I knew farming would start back up soon. I had to repair equipment, get ready to work ground, and finish farm projects-not house projects.
Wife would carry the load for the next little while as she lined up subcontractors to handle the HVAC and plumbing. We have a friend that helped with our electrical. At that point, we had insulation delivered and piled in two or three rooms in the house that we had to work around or move elsewhere for the umpteenth time….always fun.
But luckily I could go to work and still feel ok that things were getting done on the house. It’s a good feeling, especially since we knew that as we moved down the list in the house, more was going to be done by the two of us and not Mr. Outside Hire.
We had deadlines to meet and subs to keep in front of, future subs to line up and hire, oh and inspections! I hated halting progress or leaving the site with half a day left because we couldn’t move on to the next step without first getting inspected. This usually happened on a Thursday or Friday which meant we got to wait til Tuesday to have that inspection. AHHH!
I guess this is honestly just a lot of rambling, and as a home builder on the weekends or whenever there is time type person, there was a lot of scrambling. Wife and I decided to save money and install our own insulation because our labor could save a few thousand dollars….That meant we got to work in cold weather, work through the night, move our insulation a few more times, and get covered in the insulation which is itchy! YES!!$$$
I remember one time we were insulating the roof. We had rented (free 24hr rental with purchase of insulation at your local Lowe’s or home depot) the blow in machine, well we have a 4000 sq ft home, we had hundreds of bags of insulation and we had no experience.
We put the kids down for bed for the night and drove our 500 feet to our home site and got to work, stopping so Wife could go check on the kiddos every so often. Any way we got lost in our work feeling good about what we were getting done….until….we started noticing that things were starting to get lighter. It was getting easier to see things.
We had been working all night with head lamps or one light for her as she loaded the machine and one light for me so I could see where to pile the insulation. The increased visibility came from the rising sun which meant that we had just worked all night long, and no, we were no where near finishing. What did we get ourselves into? How much were we saving again? How many more times were we going to have to do this to finish our insulation?
We were trying to get moved in right after insulation because the house we had been living in had tenants already lined up. Well it took a few more of those types of nights and a couple more trips to Lowe’s for more insulation. I think I was applying it too thick-which isn’t a bad thing, if I over insulate it should pay for itself pretty quickly in energy savings right?
We ended up moving in before actually finishing the floor and ceiling insulation because of our time crunch and have periodically been working on it. We were ready to be in the home because of the amount of time we spent here working on things, it just made more sense to sleep here too. Everything was very unfinished. We were actually still using a port a potty as our bathroom and my moms house (1 mile down the road) as our shower.
We installed all finish electrical items like outlets and switches and bulbs for our can lights and started accumulating and installing light fixtures and fans. That actually didn’t take very long-a couple hours here and there for a week or so, but it was way more convenient living in the house so I could work on it whenever I had even a few minutes. Time was not wasted in travel and prep work.
The next step was to get a bathroom finished and kitchen sink installed. We found some tile on sale that we liked and started putting in flooring. It took two evening to set the tile because I didn’t know exactly what I was doing and I only had an hour a night or so to get what I could done. But we got it and set a toilet.
We lived like that for a little while as we were researching shower wall options and got a used kitchen sink installed-my mom had recently remodeled her kitchen so we took a lot of throw away items from her to get our makeshift house a little more habitable.
Fast forwarding a few months of much the same style work and you really wonder what we were/are thinking. Life got busy with farm work. Paychecks got used up in life and accumulation of items that we were needing for our next products.
More bathroom flooring so we can have another functioning bathroom in the house. Black Friday shopping for laundry and kitchen appliances. Doors for the bedrooms. Shopping clearance aisles for anything that we can find basically. By the time I was ready to do very much more work we had quite the pile of things to do and where to begin. As we worked on our second bathroom I set just enough tile to get started with the pattern on the floor and set the toilet, that was in August, I didn’t finish that flooring til Christmas.
We are obviously still going about things the same way. A little time here or there to do a little project or to start on a bigger project knowing that a big project may go undone for any length of time. We are still installing siding! We have been at that project for two years. But we feel good getting something done.
Our neighbors might not see any progress happening on the house, and honestly sometimes we don’t seen any progress, but if we step back and look we know the process to get here. We know where we started, where we have been.
I may be a farmer but we don’t farm money trees. When we have a project that costs $10-15,000 for supplies we know it will take a while to come up with that kind of money to be able to afford it. I wish that was my monthly wage, but that’s very unrealistic. As money comes in, things get done.
We are a “slow and steady” gets us to our goal type gameplan. We constantly have to remind ourselves that it was our decision to get started when we did. To build with cash we had to get as far as we could knowing that when we ran out we would have to take things slow.
It’s not always easy. Not always fun. It’s hard to stay positive at times of construction stand still, but at least we aren’t paying rent and trying to build. At least we aren’t fighting sub contractors that don’t show up on time. And we don’t have to worry about a bank loan and deadlines. To us that means a lot, and every project we get done is done! Our list is long but is getting shorter and we know eventually we will make it to the end of it debt free.
I share these experiences and ramblings to show you that yes it is a grind, but it is still doable and worth it. If we can do it, anyone can do it. ANYONE CAN DO IT.
Don’t lose hope. It’s just time and money, even if you hired it out it would still be time and money, which is easier to come by for you? Don’t get down on yourself. There is always someone out there that knows what you are going through.
We are not the first to move into an unfinished home. We are not pioneers in the building for cash, paycheck to paycheck, department. People may think you are crazy-let’s be honest-there might be a little crazy in all this, but it’s a good crazy. It’s crazy for a cause!
The Wife and I always talk about the Dave Ramsey saying, “You gotta live like no one else, so you can live like no one else.” We subscribe to unconventional wisdom. Haha. And if it was truly easy, would we really appreciate it for what it is in the long run?
~Farmer
P.S. There is more than one way to owner build without getting in over your head financially. CLICK HERE to check out 5 ways to build your house debt free.
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