The prospect of building your own home is incredibly exciting and can save you some money in the long run, but you need to really stop and consider what a major step it is. There’s no clear cut answer on whether you should buy or build, it’s different for everyone, but we can provide you with a few aspects of building your own home to consider in order to decide whether or not it’s for you.
Building Your Dream Home
The best thing about building your own home is really building the home you dream of to your own specifications. If you want three balconies, a twenty foot hallway lined with bookshelves, a bathroom with twenty foot ceilings or a back porch overlooking the sunrise, then it’s entirely up to you to do so. For many homeowners, the discussion ends here. This alone makes building your own home worth it to many.
Lower Costs
The cost can also be quite a bit cheaper. If you’re not careful, the materials can add up quickly, but if you shop around and know about about construction, it should be quite easy to build a home for a fraction of what you’d spend buying one, even including the installation of a water line, plumbing, electric and so on, it can still be done for a fraction of the cost of buying.
Total Control
When buying a home, it’s not even the sticker price that gets you, it’s the lack of control you seem to have in the market, even though it’s a buyer’s market. People selling homes are often suffering from denial and frustration that the home they invested in five years ago isn’t worth what they thought it’d be, and they often refuse to lower the price to something more in tune with what it’s actually worth. When you’re buying land, you generally don’t have to contend with a song and dance about how much they put into it, you don’t have somebody showing you that these new brass doorknobs prove that you should be spending six figures on a five figure house and so on. When you buy land, sellers aren’t so afraid to admit that it’s a buyer’s market.
These are just a few of the aspects of buying a piece of land and building on it. Whether building in the city or out in the country, whether building a home or homesteading, there are simply too many benefits to building a home to ignore. Even if you have no real experience with a hammer and nails, there are ready-made kits for building homes, guides and contractors who will do the job at lowered rates. Look around and see if building is for you.