How To Build House, The Backstory

I want to give you the how to build house backstory. I'll give you an overview of our past situations and projects here. Then, in some future articles, I can go into detail about any of them. If you're interested in anything in particular, please let us know.

When Tonya and I got married, I was living in an apartment, so she moved in with me. It was a small one-bedroom space that was too cramped for us. The walls were thin, and our bedroom shared a wall with the creepy neighbor that liked to watch adult movies too loud. I had lived there for long enough, and we didn't last there very long once we married. One of my friends was looking for a place, so our apartment ended up going to him when we left.

We decided to get a townhouse, because they were cheaper and didn't really have any upkeep. That lasted us almost two and a half years. Being a townhouse, there wasn't much to do on our own (which is one of the reasons we wanted it), so there isn't much interesting to discuss there. I think the only "improvement" we did there was to build a shelf in the garage. I think we had to fix the garage door spring one time, too. Other than that, all we did is fill up the space until our 1200 feet seemed too small.

The search for a "real" house began, and we looked at a bunch nearby. We hadn't considered building a house (here meaning having a house built for us) until one day we stopped by a new development a couple of suburbs out. We found that we could get a new home for about the same cost as an older home near our townhouse. That combined with the fact that our townhouse was selling for considerably more than we paid for it brought us to the decision to buy a new house a bit further out of the city (which we weren't exactly close to anyway).

The transition wasn't exactly the most smooth, but the "building" process was exciting and interesting. I mention the transition, because there was about a five month gap between selling our townhome and moving into the new construction. We lived at my (Ed's) parents house. Looking back, it was a bit funny, because they moved into their basement and gave us their bedroom. Of course, by "a bit funny" I mean very nice of them. They were also building their own home and doing some traveling at the time, so it worked out. The main issue was the 1-hour commute (each way) from their place to work, and that is when traffic was good.

During this time, we got to go to the Centex design center to make choices about our new house. If you haven't done this before, you can probably imagine how it goes. You drive into a new development, and you see something like "Houses From The Low $200s." That price is for the cheapest cookie-cutter house with no upgrades. Once you decide which lot you want (which may have a premium associated with it, like ours did) and which cookie cutter floorplan you want (again, potential premium), then you can go hang out at the design center. You could say that this is where our how to build house journey really began.

The design center is like a tiny Home Depot or something like that. There's a place that you can look at different carpet, linoleum, and wood floor choices. There are some mock kitchens and such where you can see countertops, appliances, sinks, etc. Then you can discuss which options cost extra and which are included. Here's a good rule of thumb to use when you're looking around the design center. If you like it, it costs extra. If it's kinda ugly and junky, it's included.

This is also where you meet with Centex people to discuss your house design. They will offer help with all kinds of different things. Again, anything extra and out of the norm costs extra, but I have to say that I didn't find them pushy. If you wanted some cheap included item, that seemed fine with them. I'm not sure if most people know this, but they will also let you choose to remove items and you get a credit for doing so. For example, we didn't want a garage door opener, so we got a credit for not having one installed. Then I just bought one and installed it myself. I think I saved about $100 on that deal. We did the same with some of our appliances.

One upgrade that we wish they would have helped us with a bit more was the heating and AC. They mentioned that we could install a dual-zone system, but they never really explained why we would want such a thing. When you're being bombarded with costly upgrades, you start to assume that everything is a bit of a scam. Well, I don't know how much that particular upgrade cost, but, after living here for a while, we understand why it would be nice to have different zones for the bedrooms and living spaces.

We moved in to the new house right in the middle of 2002, and it's still our home. You can see a picture of the kitchen taken on 6/11/02. We've done numerous projects here. We repainted the entire living space. We hung all our own window dressings (some of which we actually made ourselves). We put storage shelving in the garage. We finished the basement. We planted trees and landscaped in the yard. I will go into more detail about many of these things in my upcoming posts.

Part of my motivation to do this "how to build house" thing is because I feel that we have not properly documented our projects in the past. I have pictures here and there, but I don't feel like I have any good record of the things we've done. I am going to try to dig some of the pictures that I have, but I know there isn't much. For example, the basement finishing was a large project, and I probably have less than 10 good photos of it. I'd like our new home building project to be be better documented.

I'm working on getting Tonya to start posting. I told her that her first assignment is to discuss the land purchasing effort of how to build house. She was heavily involved with that, so I think she'll do a good job of filling you in.

Stay tuned for more how to build house.