Let’s start at the beginning
Our dream began years and years ago in hopes of tens of acres with room to create dirt bike tracks (yes plural) and probably 3 homes. The search for this became literal maybe about 5 or 6 years ago. The more we learned, the more we realized this was not feasible for us. We found it was really hard to find cost breakdowns out there for building a home but what we did find made us change course.
There is a lot of work that needs to be done to a site before you a build a house; level a build site, create a driveway, drill a well, put in septic, run electricity and probably more that I’m missing or don’t even know about. My husband put in some ground work on these things and what he found was that for a lot with multiple houses, that means double of that entire list. Oh, and “most people” pay cash for all those things because otherwise it takes away from your construction loan, which is essentially the budget for your home.
Over the last 10 years my husband and I have lived with my parents in their 1,800 sq ft 70’s home. Most of the time we lived in this home together there have been 7 of us in this little 3 bedroom home. So, upon finding out the cost to just prepare a site for a home, we brainstormed the idea of building essentially 2 homes on 1 lot. We have called it a few things, “multigenerational home”, “a fancy duplex”, and “a home with a beefy mother-in-law suite”.
Once that was decided, we started looking for land. We had an area we thought we wanted to be in and we created a checklist for the “must haves” and “wishlist”:
5 ish acres
A good view
Mountains, not desert
Ridable for a dirt bike
No HOA
Trees on the lot
A prepared site (including utilities)
The day we found a listing that met a lot of those checklist items, we essentially jumped. We quickly booked a hotel and drove out of town to see the lot in person. I actually called a few builders in the area just trying to figure out the steps you should take to build a home and one builder answered my call, patiently went through all my questions, and even offered to meet us at the lot. We were ecstatic and quickly worked on an offer.
With all good stories there has to be a problem right? Well, turns out there were a few problems. This land did not have everything on our list…it was 3 acres, but most of the lot was on a hill, there was an HOA and we could not even ride a dirt bike to check our mail let alone for fun, and although it had all utilities and was build ready the price per square foot skyrocketed during our design process due to things outside our control.
For someone interested in numbers:
Land: $180,000 (3 acres near Durango, Colorado with a well, pump house, electricity, a level build site, and a 3 bedroom septic)
We are building essentially 2 homes on 1 foundation, but it was about 4,000 square feet. We did literally everything we could to shrink the house.
Architect fee: ~$7,000 and we did not leave with finished plans.
Price per sq foot estimate: began at 350-450, and we pulled out at 500+sq foot
So the lessons I would take away from this failure in our story?
Really think about that checklist and what is the most important? For us, the dirt bike-ability was extremely important and this land didn’t allow for that.
What may have helped us with cost here was coming to the builder with plans already created. We have heard that there are two ways about this; we found a builder and he had an architect that we used to create the home but that means we agreed to the builder and prices before we knew what the house would be. We have also been told we should have worked to create plans for the house first and then “shopped” builders to get the best price.
Understand what a custom home means. Our house is funky with the “beefed up mother-in-law suite” so maybe custom was the only way we could go, but that means hefty architect fees. We had originally been trying to find plans that existed (like on AD House Plans) that we could make work but when we met the builder at our lot, he had an architect so we went that direction without really knowing what it meant. Don’t get me wrong, it has been so fun to create exactly the house we picture, but it was a cost I definitely didn’t plan for.
So… our story continues with a lot of praying, leaps of faith, and the opening of doors making it too easy to ignore.
