Building Your Dream Home

Welcome to Our Dream Home Site

Hello everyone - our site is full of information that will assist anyone considering building a home themselves.

Home construction is a major effort and probably the single largest investment the average person will make during their lifetime. Because of this, it is not something you should begin without a full understanding of the effort involved.

When this site was originally published in 1993, it was to let you know the pitfalls of building your own home by taking you through the construction of our original dream home.

Since then, we have also reported on the construction of my son's log home and now, because of our age and my husband's health, we need to downsize our home and acreage. We started by getting our home ready to sell, a project lasting more than 14 months.

Our dream home was put on the market and sold within 3 months which was quite a bit quicker that anticipated. We were not prepared to start our new home and had to come up with temporary housing in a hurry!

Our new "dream home" will get underway very soon and I will be letting you know how it's going. Since my husband is unable to help, I will be acting as general contractor myself. A daunting task to say the least. If you would like to follow our progress, bookmark this page as I will be posting weekly updates.

If you find any missing links, please drop me an E-Mail or click on the link above to our blog and post a comment.

Here is my disclaimer for the rest of the information on this website.

"I do not claim to be a professional builder of any kind. The information below is simply an outline and does not in any way guarantee success in the construction of your home. It is not intended to be complete but is merely one person’s view of some of the difficulties involved."

How Do I Know This???

In 1985, my husband and I decided to buy some land in the country and build our dream home – a place we could enjoy after retirement!

Sounds wonderful - doesn’t it! Well, before you make such a decision, there are a few things you need to ask yourself first.

1. Have you and your spouse ever undertaken a joint project? (If so, were you able to complete it without disagreement or, if you did disagree on something, were you able to work it out to the satisfaction of both parties. The ability to communicate and resolve issues is critical to the enjoyment of building your own home. Don’t attempt it if this is not possible!)

2. Can you complete the task in the time allowed by your interim financing company? (Do you know what interim financing means?)

3. Do you have the necessary construction skills to do the work yourself or do you plan to hire subcontractors to do the work? (If you hire others to do the work – are you knowledgeable enough to know if they are giving you "your money’s worth" and if the job is being completed according to "code"?)

4. Can you look at the work and determine if the "quality of workmanship" is acceptable?

5. Do you have a job that will allow you to make frequent trips (daily) by the construction site to check on progress.

If you believe you have the right answers to the above questions then lets proceed to the next hurdle! Let's start with First Things First.