Fixer Uppers and New Builds Part 2

by | Sep 19, 2019 | Building

Ok here goes part 2…Our old house closed in September 2018 and then the land closed end of October. Brian and I researched a few different ways to build the house and thankfully our lender was allowing us to basically be our own general contractor. Since we didn’t have the skills to build a house from scratch, we hired a builder that would build us a shell. Basically, it’s a box with drywall and then Brian and I would go in and finish it with paint, flooring, and cabinets. We also found out our shell amount did not include excavation for the foundation, and we had to find a company on our own to do that part.
**Do your research when picking a builder! It is so important to look online, read reviews, and contact people in the area that have used them so they can give you all the nitty gritty.

**It’s also important to find a builder who uses quality materials and knows what they are doing! Keep in mind there are moments in the build process you will have inspectors from your area come out and sign off or shut down your project.

So, we finally break ground end of November and the foundation starts after all of the plans were finally signed off by the county. This is where our first bump in the road happened. We needed an extra $5,000 on top of the $10,000 already needed for the foundation because what we thought was a super level piece of land, wasn’t so flat and the foundation needed to be raised on one side of the house to accommodate. Big-ticket item to get hit within the first round but I guess the bright side was instead of a 2ft crawlspace, we would get a 4ft one which makes it a little easier to get around underneath the house. I have heard nightmare stories from house inspectors needing to scoot on their bellies under a house with all of the creepy crawlies that have taken up residence under there for an inspection only to get stuck.
Prepare for a muddy mess at this point. The hole for the foundation was dug and of course, it started to rain and rain and rain some more! It was soupy out there and I ruined a couple pairs of shoes. A tip…invest in some muck boots.
We were so excited when everything finally started rolling along and then dun, dun, dun, the county came out to view the building site and they about lost their minds with all the mud. We were told to cover all the exposed mud with plastic sheeting and that we would also need a silt fence. Off to the store we went to buy 100s of dollars in plastic sheeting to cover the mud. Brian went out there and started to cover everything up and weigh the plastic down with rocks so it wouldn’t blow away. Done! We got this right??? At this time, we had also put up a temp structure to house some of the bigger tools and things needed on the property. Well, the next day we had a horrific wind storm! We traveled out to the property to check on everything and the temp structure we put up was blown into the trees, our port a potty blew away and, to top it all off the plastic blew off all of the mud that we covered! LOL!!! What can you do at this point but laugh about the whole situation because it’s a hilarious mess! The plastic wasn’t working, and we kept getting wind storm after windstorm so we found out that we could put hay down on the property to appease the county. Yay hay! We went out and bought a ton of hay and thankfully we somehow convinced our friend Hannah to come and help us sprinkle farm glitter all over the property. It was nice to have someone else help us pass the time and make a super tedious job go by fast! Thanks Hannah! : )

A few weeks pass and around the beginning of January the framer came out and started building out walls. I was shocked that they sent one guy to frame our whole house by himself but he moved fast and it was exciting to finally see some sort of structure on the land. Now its end of January, beginning of February and we get a really weird out of the norm snow storm that put the building process on hold for a bit and we had to go shovel snow out of our future living room. LOL! I’ll stop here for the 3rd part where I will go into a couple of things we did before the walls were closed up to make things easier and designing the interior.