Over the past year and half, we’ve been working hard at starting a homestead with some friends. We were lucky enough to buy about 5 acres of land from a friend who had bought 17 acres. We’ve had plenty of ups and downs, learning how to deal with small town permitting politics, understanding the construction process, and appreciating the amount of effort that goes into every house.

This experience has solidified my viewpoint on many things.

  1. Consumerism is an ingredient for corporate greed. If you despise greed, start by taming your own desires.
  2. Paying your mortgage buys the bank another house or two. The house always wins unless you leave the casino.
  3. Local governments have tremendous influence over your perception of freedom. Corruption starts locally, but you have the most control locally too.
  4. Making friends builds doors. Friends of friends will open doors.
  5. Life is short if you’re not balancing your dreams and your duties.

Practical housebuilding lessons learned:

  • Communicate clearly and often. Stay in conversations as much as possible.
  • Think about lot orientation and pull up the plans any time you have a doubt.
  • Build on the high spot of your land.
  • Good subs are 80% of the battle.
  • Keeping everything level, plumb, and square makes everything down the road much easier.
  • Keep your site clean.

Why did we do this?

Lifestyle

My wife and I were sold on the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement. We weren’t extreme consumers, we enjoyed simple things, and we knew how to invest in low cost ETFs. We were on track to retire in our 40s. By that time our kids would be in high school, and we’d have it made, right?

Wrong. Over time, I realized how backwards this movement was with kids. The essence of retiring early is time. Time to do what you want, with who you want. Money can buy your time back, but the obsession over buying your time back ironically eats up your time! Your kids are only young once, and money can’t buy a time machine.

So instead, we decided it would make more sense to use my time now to build a simple, quality home that’s worth passing down to buy our kids something the traditional FIRE movement would consider a mistake. A life filled with fields of wildflowers, goat wrangling, hunting, picking fruit from the yard, building furniture in the workshop, and not a single worry about how I’m not retired yet.

Value

Obviously being your own GC will save you the contractor fee of 15-30%. But you’re also getting more quality per dollar if you do it yourself. No one is going to care more than you. Many builders these days are hiring the lowest bids for subcontractors to throw up a house with plenty of cut corners, and then they add an extra $50k on the price beyond their regular fees. That’s instant equity in your home from a year’s worth of hard work.

You also don’t have to pay for the trending features that you don’t need. Everything in your home will be something that you use, not something that the average person thinks they’d like. For us, we realized how much wasted space there is in a lot of layouts. Why is the master bedroom and bathroom so grand and spacious? We don’t host guests in our bedroom! A house to us is a box with a roof. We didn’t need more than four walls. We didn’t want things that look pretty just to be a pain to clean, or require a lot of maintenance, or even detract from our lives. We just wanted things that aren’t ugly, affordable, and easy to maintain. Most houses aren’t built that simply anymore.

Skills

It has always been a dream of mine to build a home, and I knew I’d regret passing up on this opportunity. I didn’t have all the skills. Most of the time, it was my first time doing something. But the only thing stopping me from learning was really myself. I grew a lot by finding mentors, asking dumb questions, reading books, watching videos, and most of all, practicing with a model house. Now I’ll be able to pass down the skills of building to my kids. If home prices continue to outpace wage growth, this may be the only feasible way for my kids to own a home. And I’d be happy to walk with them on their journeys.

Getting the house plans

Rating: No regrets We wanted something that’s simple, has enough room for our familiy to grow, and is all ours. We didn’t think about the lot orientation though, so we had to pay extra to flip the plans along an axis to fit the property better. Otherwise, buying and tailoring existing plans was way easier and cheaper than dealing with (or paying for) an architect.

Fighting for permits

At first, the town played nice with us. They supported our bid to have animals, hunt, fish, and grow crops on our couty property. I applied for my building permits. Right as we were about to sign, the planning director dropped a bomb on us. He said that building on land that was within 100ft of the city forced annexation. Annexation means you become part of the town, pay town taxes, and must tie in to the town water and sewer supply line. Practically for us, this meant we couldn’t have the livestock we wanted.

On further thought though, this didn’t seem right. By his interpretation, a 400 acre plot of farmland bordering city limits would be annexed by this interpretation if you built a structure a mile from city limits. My plot directly bordered the city limits, and my current permit application had our house 75 feet away from the city sewer line. It sort of worked out, as my original permit application would have gotten us annexed. I did not want to interrupt my adversary making a mistake.

The town left my permit in a stalled state for reasons unknown to us yet. Due to the nature of Our lawyers talked this out, and the town’s representative said they were definitely not conditioning permits Mohsin and I dug into the town ordinances and found what the planning director was referencing. It turns out you must annex only if your house is within 100ft of a city utility. After clearing this up, I re-applied for permits with the house farther away from the sewer line. After my permit was left sitting again for a month, I had to poke and prod the town. Finally, the planning director told me the issue. The town was withholding our permits until we signed over the roadway to them. This is an illegal practice known as conditioning permits. The town manager told the planning director to “hold them up until we have what we need.” We felt extorted! We just wanted protections for agricultural uses, outbuildings, hunting, and fishing. We went back and forth about whether legal protections were possible, and eventually needed to lawyer up. All this left us with a distrust for the good old boys club in Angier’s town government.

I brought this issue to the I didn’t expect securing permits to take almost a year. But we had our permits and were able to break ground.

Clearing and Grading

Rating: No regrets This land was an overgrown swamp. It had incredibly fertile soil, but it sat pretty low compared to the neighborhood beside it. The water table was also pretty high, so there was plenty of boggy, wet soil. There were huge sweet gum trees, massive oak stumps that hadn’t rotted yet, and very difficult to navigate terrain. So I decided to hire a land clearing service to clear up 1.5 acres. This ended up being the best decision of this build.

After making a few calls to some site prep companies, the third company I tried picked up. We talk for a bit, and the owner Shane says he’s interested in the work. He asks where it is. I tell him, and he goes silent for a second before saying “Let me get to my computer”. He pulls up our plot on Google Maps and tells me that he grew up on that land! His family owned and farmed several hundred acres in that area. He knew the best spots for deer, the best fishing holes, the quality of the soil, the production history of the land, and so much more. He gives me a good price for clearing and a ton of guidance on how to navigate the permitting issues. Many of the subcontractors I used came from him or from their referrals. It turns out good contractors all know each other. If you manage to find a network of good tradesmen, building a house is a breeze.

Since the plot was a low-lying swamp, we needed to raise the grade by a few inches over around 1.5 acres to make a decent build site. If you do the math, that’s a lot of dirt! My site prep guy had a creative idea to said we could be a dump site for fill dirt.

When prepping the site for large projects like bridges or roads, you need to move a lot of dirt. Where does that dirt go? Civil engineers try their best to make the fills (addition) and the cuts (removal) even out to minimize the amount of soil that has to be trucked in or out to reduce the cost of a project. Dump truck drivers’ services are expensive, and they pay dump fees if they have to put their dirt into a landfill. Our site, however, could be a free dump! So while we were securing the building permits, we got over 300 dump truck loads of dirt over four months for free while we were fighting for permits.

We were able to build up a pad for the house and significantly regrade so the land pitched water to the nearby creek. What used to be a swampy low lying spot was now a peak. We had a plateau to build on with the land sloping away, which is ideal. Drainage, grading, and vegetation are the keys to controlling water. I learned this lesson repeatedly as the thick mud would continue to prove a challenge throughout the build. Right before the footings and foundation started, Shane dug the crawlspace down 18” to make the house not tower over the landscape oddly.

Footers, foundation, and patio

Rating: Some regrets The barren soil was ripe for turning into mud in the wet NC winters. I didn’t realize mud would be such a challenge for most construction trucks. Large equipment like cranes, concrete trucks, and even excavators with tracks can get stuck in the mud. Digging out the footers went by smoothly thanks to the rain holding off for a few days. By the time it came to pour the footers though, my property was a total mudpit. My footings guy drove a mini excavator that handled fine, but he suggested hiring a concrete pump truck due to the mud and the distance from the road. That cost an extra $1300, but towing out a stuck concrete truck would cost more between the wrecker (a beefy tow truck) and paying for the concrete truck’s lost time and concrete. My footings guy got the work done in one day by himself and it passed inspection with no issues.

The footers were done, and the masons were up next. I got a few quotes for masons, but ended up going with a team of two older men who are some of the toughest guys I know. My mason went through nine surgeries in one year and still was laying block for my crawlspace! A mistake I didn’t realize is that the footer is roughly one block (8”) below what you want. I wanted a 40” crawlspace, but because of the block that gets covered over the footer, we only got a 32” crawl. It’s still easy enough to work in.

They had never seen a ranch house that was dug into the ground at all, and they worried it would have issues with a watery crawlspace down the road. I worried we made a mistake by putting out house in a small pit. From everything I read, it was fine, but moisture control had to be a priority. Shane and I waterproofed the exterior of the crawlspace together, and installed pipe around the perimeter for drainage. He then installed the insulation on the walls as the first phase of a crawlspace encapsulation.

Now that the foundation was done, we could pour the patio. In Shane’s network of contractors was a great concrete company recommended by several other tradesmen. We meet, and he’s a super sharp Hispanic gentleman. Although my parents are the immigrants, we bond over what it’s like being coming to America to start a better life, and the wealth of opportunity and comfort here. He mentions he has three kids from a previous marriage to a white woman. I ask him about how to raise a mixed child without losing your heritage. He says with a sigh and slight dimming of his eyes, “it’s hard work”. He gives me a discount, did great work, and I look forward to hiring him again. We even got to stamp our hands into the back patio, although that darn GC messed up the location and put it partially under a post.

Security

While we were slowly building our house, we had some unwanted visitors. Some teens would come by our jobsite and damage materials, damage our foundation piers, and they even threw a rock through Shane’s excavator! After doing some research, we set up trail cams to have near real-time alerts for any visitors. We caught pictures of them right before our foundation piers were knocked slightly askew. This means that the framing beams wouldn’t sit level and the load wouldn’t transfer properly, so I asked my mason to come back and fix the piers. I knocked on several neighbor’s doors in nearby neighborhoods and asked if they recognized the kids in the picture. No one knew them, but they all were fired up to stay alert. At least it was a great way to meet my neighbors!

We continued building our house until one night, we saw the same kids walk onto our property. We called the sheriff’s department and told them to give them a stern warning but no charges. We caught them on camera running away right as the cop cars arrived. They got away, but we didn’t see them again. As our patios were poured and curing, I didn’t want them messing with the slabs. I staked out our house the night after the pour until 9pm and thankfully didn’t see the kids again.

Framing with the Kost crew

Rating: No regrets I originally set out on this venture to frame the house myself. Call it naievete, ignorance, or pride, but it was a bad decision. My HVAC sub convinced me of this after telling me I’d be spending every day for the next year framing this house. He asked me to imagine my kids as they are now. Then he asked me to picture my kids a year from now knowing I missed that entire year of their life nailing wood together. That convinced me to find a crew.

I struggled to find a framing crew that I trusted. The Amish builders in my state were too far away. Right as I was going to accept a quote from a father and son team, a friend of mine said he’s starting a construction company with his brother. This seemed like my God-given sign. The Kost brothers talked with me for months leading up to the build, coordinating materials, asking questions about the plans. Finally, we met up for ramen to sign the contract. John’s wife held my infant daughter as I signed and handed over a deposit.

The Kost crew was happy to let me join in the work for a few days. That experience helped me scratch my itch to frame myself. The skills to frame aren’t too complicated if you’ve done much carpentry or furniture building at all. I realized how silly I was to think of solo framing. Framing and foundation are a big job that needs a crew. There are tasks that are far more efficient if you have a team of people. After the interior walls were done, I climbed a ladder to pay John while sitting on the top plates.

The trusses for half the house were a foot short because the engineers misread the wall height in this part of the house despite the Kosts arguing they were wrong. They had to be sent back, and we needed to hire two cranes instead of one. The Kost crew and I worked on a game plan to ask for the money back. Thankfully, our lumberyard was very understanding of it and gave us a store credit for the price of the second crane rental. After three weeks of being exposed to the elements, our house was dried in!

MEP (Mechanical Electrical and Plumbing) Rough Ins

Rating: Some regrets The plumber I thought I had in my corner ghosted me when it came time for it. I had to scramble for another plumber. Most of the plumbers I had referrals from didn’t do new construction, but after asking each plumber who might I found one who does new home rough-ins. They moved much quicker than anticipated, starting the day after I met with the owner. They were done in about 4 days.

My electricians were surprisingly great! After going through four different electrical quotes, I settled on a medium priced one. They ended up being familiar with custom homes, and knew exactly how to handle uncertainty in island sizes, room layouts, or even office layouts.

My original HVAC guy was too busy to do my house himself and let me help, so he subbed it out to a guy he trusted fully. After meeting his sub, I knew I was in good hands. We walked the house and planned out the duct locations, as well as keeping an extra supply for the crawlspace.

Inspection time! I was nervous about the inspection, but I had no reason to be. We only had a few minor issues the first inspection: missing a few braces on a gable, needing to air seal and fireblock, and needing to print off the truss specs. The inspector mentioned that he couldn’t read the notes on the truss spec that mentioned the bracket loads because the notes were in too small of a font.

My only regrets are not finding a more reliable plumber the first time. Otherwise, everyone di

Crawlspace care

Rating: No regrets A lot of moisture rose up from the ground, especially since our crawlspace was sunk into the ground by 2’. Without any vents in place, the moisture just sat. The plumber put plastic sheeting down over the water to give themselves a clean area to work. I thought I’d be nice and leave the sheeting for the other trades, but that ended up backfiring on me. The ground released too much humidity, causing mold along almost all of the floor joists. After having a mold remediation crew come through, my friend and I furiously encapsulated the crawlspace.

After a full three days of work, we finished. We saved around $18,000 in labor! I installed a crawlspace dehumidifier and powered it with close to 250’ of extension cords. Concerned about the voltage drop burning out the motor, I splurged for 12AWG extension cords. I then capped off the crawlspace with a custom door. With a remote humidity monitor next to the front door, I was able to verify that we were controlling the humidity pretty well now.

Siding

Rating: Some regrets I could only get a hold of one contractor to quote me for the siding, and after pricing out the materials, $7.5k in labor didn’t seem reasonable. So I bought the materials, watched a bunch of Youtube videos, and experimented with some scraps until I was confident enough to start. Hanging vinyl siding isn’t too hard. Solo siding is pretty difficult though.

Managing long, droopy pieces by yourself to get them level is a challenge, having to go up and down a ladder every time you need something really slows things down, and one person cutting with one person installing makes things much much faster. I was blessed enough to have an occasional helper to hand me pieces, support the other end, or do the cutting while I hung pieces. Working through multiple heat advisories, eventually, I got it done.

I bought too much material and found out I couldn’t return it since it’s a unique color. I wish I had waited before ordering more. It’s money lost now, but at least I can side a future shed or sauna with matching siding.

Roofing

Rating: No regrets Originally, I was deadset on a metal roof. I had read that a metal roof pays for itself after the second shingle replacement. I was on the fence about paying for a standing seam roof or doing an exposed fastener metal roof myself. An exposed fastener metal roof isn’t too hard to install, but you have to make sure that every single fastener is installed just tightly enough. You’re punching holes in your roof and covering them up with gaskets that need to be inspected and re-tightened every few years. Additionally, very few roofing companies will install an exposed fastener metal roof because one fastener tightened incorrectly means a very expensive warranty call. This was quickly going against our low maintenance and low cost preferences.

A standing seam roof gets rid of this maintenance burden by having the screws under a ridge of metal that connects the panels together. That comes at a cost. The prices I had seen online for standing seam roofs weren’t too bad. When I got quotes though, it was 4-6x the cost of an architectural shingle! We could replace a shingled roof three times in the time it takes to breakeven for standing seam metal roofing. An architectural shingle supposedly lasts for 30 years. Even if it lasts for 25 years, that’s still 100 years of breakeven (ignoring inflation)! So we decided to just go with a high quality shingled roof.

When going with a shingled roof, we went with architectural shingles instead of three tab shingles. The old three tab shingles are what people think of as cheap, 15 year roofs that get damaged in a strong thunderstorm. Architectural shingles have proven themselves reliable at fairly high wind speeds, they last for 30 years, and the ones we went with are even Energy Star rated. I knew I wanted to sub this out, as shingling a roof is hard work.

Ethernet

Rating: No regrets Running ethernet cable was a refreshing change of pace from the siding. Mostly on ground, in the crawlspace, or on a small, light ladder for ceiling runs. I wasn’t the most familiar with Ethernet hardware, but from what I understood Cat6 was what I wanted. Cat 6a would allow me to reach up to 10gbps speeds. We don’t really game, we aren’t particular about our video quality, and our 300mbps wireless meets our needs already.

I wanted to have multiple access points across the house and security cameras on the four corners of the house, so I made sure to get thicker 23AWG cable and jacks that were POE++ rated for these runs. I made sure to keep an extra 2-3’ of wire looped in the crawlspace or soffit so we could easily re-terminate a jack if we needed. The thicker gauge made it a bit harder to work with when it came to bends. Make sure you get tools and jacks that are rated for your wire gauge.

I ran all my Ethernet drops into a single patch panel in a structured media enclosure in my office. Eventually I plan on running the cables to a rack mounted patch panel and have a homelab setup for my Jellyfin, Immich, and other servers.

A Moment’s Reprieve

After we were dried in and the Ethernet was wired, I had a lot of subs lined up. After being away from my family for nearly every free weekend, it was a joyous time to get to spend cuddling, reading, and playing with the kids. Absence truly makes the heart grow fonder. I found myself laughing at the kids’ antics that used to get me frustrated. The frustration was still there, but my mentality had shifted to gratefulness that I have kids to be frustrated with at all. The frustration is indicative of a much greater positive gift in life.