Are You Ready For The Responsibility Of Building A New Home?
Unless you’ve enjoyed a long life of planning, designing, and building homes, you’re probably not going to be the one person to complete every step of ending up with your own custom-built home. However, you will have to be something of a manager for the process. Even that comes with a lot of responsibility. Fail in that responsibility, and the best-case scenario is that you don’t live in the home of your dreams. The worst that can happen, however, is that you’re living in an illegal home.
Figure out your wants and needs, first
The planning stage of the home is where you should spend the most time. You should start living your wants vs. your needs and start pricing them from different providers. Think not just about the present but the future, too. If you someday want to have kids, then you need to consider more bedrooms, for instance. Then you need to start considering priorities and which should fit into your budget first. For instance, if you had to give up on either solar power for the home or an extra bedroom, which do you choose?
Making sure you have the green light
Once you have your needs sorted, looking at plans from providers like Eplans home designers to find the home that fits or get one designed yourself. From there, you need to make sure you have all the right permits for the home. Different locales have different restrictions and needs. There are building codes to make sure that the home is to industry standard. There are also standards for areas more prone to floods or heavy winds. Then there are the permits, issued by local building departments. Once you have all of those, then you can get to work.
Get the team you can trust
Whether you get a general contractor or a team of subcontractors is up to you. With a general contractor, a lot of the work gets taken off your hands and with a subcontractor, you have to know a lot more about the building process. Either way, you should be vigilant in finding the builders you can trust. There are two things that matter most of all: transparency and reputation. Get quotes from them before you hire them and see how they price individual aspects of the work. The more transparent they are about what they can do and how they price it, the better. Then you look at their reputation online. Google reviews are helpful but you want to make sure that you can see examples of past work and perhaps even get in touch with an old client. If they have any awards, then look them up and see that they’re reputable, too.
Don’t assume it’s done when it’s done
If it’s completed to standard, then the home should be safe to live in. However, it’s a good idea to make extra sure. A higher level of investigation like a Solex Group professional home inspection often goes well beyond the type of detail you might get from municipal inspections. Having an extra pair of eyes on the home can help you catch deficiencies and even dangers like radon exposure that you might otherwise miss.
It’s a lot of work, but at the end of it, you should end up with a home that you proudly say is all your own. Don’t let any irresponsible slip-ups get in the way of that.
