Building Your Own Home For Dummies

At some point in the process you’ll wonder if hiring a designer or architect is necessary or worthwhile. The fees these professionals charge typically fall in the range of 10 to 15 percent of your project’s total cost. If you can find a plan in a book that suits your needs as well as your lot and your neighborhood restrictions perfectly, you don’t

When you need new kitchen cabinetry, you usually don’t ask a cabinetmaker to haul his tools, crew, and raw materials to your home to build cabinets for you on-site. You pick a style at a cabinet supplier’s showroom and order the number and size you need. The supplier sends your order to the manufacturer, who goes about building your cabinets in a f

The footprint of the home is the building’s outer perimeter and how it sits upon the lot, taking into account the setbacks (see Figure 3-1). When looking at a lot, try to imagine in rough design how positioning the footprint can take advantage of the following: Drainage Noise Sunlight Topography Views Wind

Also, don’t forget to ask the contractor about his workmanship warrantees. Warrantees usually last for ten years, but can vary. See Chapter 15 for more on contractor warrantees.

After the kitchen, bathrooms are the next most expensive rooms in the house. The labor necessary for all that electrical, plumbing, and tile work adds up quickly.

Obviously, having instructions when building a new home is essential. However, because a house is a complex structure made of many different systems, your instructions (or plans) need to include many different drawings. A typical set of plans will include 30 to 50 pages of specific instructions on how to build your house.

Ask the homeowners’ association (HOA), your real estate agent, or title company for a set of CC&Rs and design review guidelines to find out about other restrictions, such as setback limits, style limitations, and height limits, before you agree to purchase any lot.

If you plan to build in a community with CC&Rs, an architectural review board may have to approve your home’s design. Because this review process may take months, add extra time into your construction schedule.

Policies set out by homeowners’ associations or local jurisdictions could restrict many aspects of your home, such as The height and size of your building Its proximity to a body of water The building materials you can use and your home’s exterior colors Your ability to raise livestock The types of vehicles that can be parked on-site Obviously, kno