Our New Adventure – Building a House Startup

I’m sure you have noticed that I haven’t been around much lately and I appologize for that.  I promise you that I am not ignoring you all; in reality we have been busy getting things all arranged for the start of our house build.  With this and the starting of dance and hockey for the 3 kiddos all the while carting an infant around; it’s been hectic, to say the least.  I decided I would blog about our experiences with building our dream home; hopefully you will find it informative and somewhat entertaining.  We have one year to build; I welcome you to post comments and look forward to conversing with all of you.

Me & Hubs in front of where our front door will be…welcome to our dirt 😉

A Little History

We started thinking about building our house last year about this time when my husband was working and living in his house located 7 hours from our current location.  I still had a residence in our current city, bought after my divorce from my first husband and before my hubs and I reconnected and later married; I cannot believe it’s been 2 years of marriage already, wow how time flies.  I won’t get into our long life story but I will say that after a lot of long distance driving and a pregnancy with our first baby girl together, we decided it was best if hubs sold his home and moved to where I lived, especially with my joint custody arrangement with my 3 kids dad.  We actually only lived together on every other weekend which was so hard.  Huge changes for everyone but luckily hubs found a great job, his house sold quickly and we had my house to live in after his move.

With the expanding family we have quickly run out of room in my small 3 bedroom house; this meant we either had to upsize by buying a home on the market or build.  Luckily hubs parents offered us 10 acres of their land about 10 miles outside of the city for us to build our home on.  Hubs, a Journeyman Electrician by trade but definitely a jack-of-all trades, convinced me that he would be the General Contractor for our house build and could then do a lot of the work himself and save us a lot of money.  Afterall, this will be the third house he’s built.  Now I will say that I was a little reluctant, not because I don’t think my husband can do all of the work, he has that natural ability and skillset, but because I know my husband.  Hubs is a work-a-holic so he will take on any and all projects, even if he has not actually completed that type of job before; he will research what needs to be done and materials needed and then get to work.  Luckily he is very good at doing this and is why he has as many skills as he does, beyond his official electrical trade, BUT he does work full-time and since I am now a WAHM, he is the main bread winner for our family.  This means that he will be working full-time, minus some time he’ll need to take off from work in order to get the bigger jobs completed, while he’s building our house.  When I say he’s building our house, I mean he will be pouring the basement foundation, framing the house, drywall, electrical, cabinets and so on.  I have convinced him to hire a few jobs out such as the excavating of the basement and some basic landscaping during this dig, the roadway leading to our acreage, the septic and cistern, the roughed in plumbing, geothermal heating installation (except the in floor heat which hubs says he will do himself) and the duct work but as for the rest, he seems to think him and his dad can do it all themselves.  He does have a few friends in trades that we will need for specific parts of the house build that he could call on to return favors, favors he has done for them in the past so this will definitely help.  So I was convinced this was the route to take; we would sacrifice a tiny home with our baby needing to stay in our room as there is no other space for her with the other 3 kids, 2 already sharing a room, and hardly seeing my husband for the year that it would take to get the house built.

We went to the bank, already preapproved for more than we would be asking for, and were assigned to a Mortgage Advisor because with a self build mortgage there is a lot of time involved….that was December of last year.  Long story short our financial lives under a microscope and a lot of complaints filed at the banks head office, I won’t mention which bank we’re using, it’s taken this long to get our self build mortgage finalized.  I’m suprised the bank didn’t want me to give them my first born as well.  Sheesh!  Now trust me when I say that if it weren’t for the fact that we would get our penalty pay out money back from the sale of my husbands house if we stay with the same bank hubs had with his last house, we would’ve ditched this bank a long time ago.  Yes the penalty pay out was a hefty one and worth trying to get it back and although the normal 3 month period for porting a mortgage is long past, the bank has honored this anyway because they messed us around so long.

Did I mention that hubs wanted to be the General Contractor, the one whom is supposed to make all the phone calls, get all the quotes, book the jobs, speak to the inspector, coordinate permits and so on?  Hmmm, well it seems I might have taken on a lot of that role and I suppose I should’ve known since hubs is working while during business hours.  I did not sign up for this job but rather was dragged kicking and screaming into it.  Well maybe that’s a bit dramatic but I’m not sure how hubs figures I can squeeze that into my schedule with everything else that I have on my plate….umm, can I go back to work please or is it too late? *chuckle*  Although it will be challenging, we are in this together and it will be an exciting and worthwhile journey….love you hunny!

Here we go…