Building a house for ourselves
Recently Sydney and I acquired a piece of property. It’s our first concrete step in a multi-year endeavor to build a house for ourselves.
The land is a gently-sloping five acres of ponderosa pine, western juniper, sagebrush, and bunchgrass. It’s about twenty miles east of the crest of the Cascade Mountains, where the pines give way to the waves of sage and juniper that spread over the high desert.
Why build a house?
We’ve wanted to do this since we first met in college. I don’t think we have strong motivations other than it’s what feels right. But here’s a couple of the more distinct reasons that have emerged.
We both want to have full control over the space we live in. We have a lot of ideas about the way a house should be, but existing homes we’ve encountered are missing the qualities we’re looking for. We want a house that’s built for the environment it’s situated in and the way we want to live.
A motivation for me is that I don’t know how to build a house. I think that’s exciting; my feeling is the more I learn in life the better. Building a house is the largest possible project with the most diverse set of new techniques I can imagine.
This is a risky project
We’ve heard the advice: don’t build a house unless you have eons of free time and buckets of money. That’s likely good advice. But jumping in and giving it a go is worth more to us than being conservative and waiting for a future state that may never materialize. That said, we’ve adopted two values we hope will limit the risk of this project.
First, we’re going to try and keep things towards the simpler end of what we consider to be acceptable. That won’t always be the simplest way to do things, but it will be an important guiding value. Simplicity means a smaller vision.
Second, we won’t rely on debt. The mentality “if you can’t pay for it in cash you can’t afford it” may be simplistic, but it does minimize risk. Since we’ve never done this before, we’re going to take it slow and invest only what we can afford to lose. We’ll be in the position—in another one or two years—of being able to finance this project ourselves.
Documenting it
I plan to document the process of building from start to finish. My hope is that this can be of interest to other people who are considering doing the same thing.
We’re going to develop everything on the property from the ground up. That means putting in an access road, installing a septic system, drilling a well, and pulling electrical from the nearest utility pole. There’s more infrastructure to install than many other house builds. I’ll be documenting the options and trade-offs for all these components, permitting, the process of development, and the costs.
That’s all at least a year out. For now, more planning and tree thinning.
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