DIY MODERN HOMESTEAD BUILD - Location, Design, Thought Process, Owner Builder General Contractor

hey guys how's it going hope you've been well we're here at my house uh this is the main floor above me we got decked a little bit not quite all of it and i'm here in the basement end of a work day so i'm pretty exhausted but i figured i should film kind of the intro video to the homestead build it's going to be a long video i'm probably going to throw the camera on a tripod because my arm's going to get too tired and talk for like an hour about everything that went into where i am now so shopping for land considerations for location what i was looking for in land and what i was looking for in the house design considerations for the house how it feels to be owner builder general contractor having never really done this before i'm gonna get into kind of every aspect of that so it's gonna be a long talking video it's gonna be long so i'm gonna put chapters down here below so in this little time stamp if you don't know how it works it's like sectioned off into little things you can kind of hover over or click it or whatever and if you're only interested in a specific thing i'll try to break this video up and then if you're like i only really care about that skip ahead whatever i don't care hit that thumbs up button though and get subscribed if you are into this kind of content so yeah i'm already getting tired because it's been a long day so i'm gonna find a tripod set it down and we'll get into it all right so the plan i filmed some of this already and my my mic came unplugged and it was it was horrible so i'm starting over uh i'm not a very good youtuber so the plan the plan this is kind of the first section i guess the plan you got to make a plan i i wasn't born into wealth my family doesn't have any money we're very middle class i don't have daddy's money i didn't just on a whim say i want to buy a property and build a house this has been about a decade long journey i'm 37 i'm a lot older than a lot of people think so a lot of people think i'm some 20 year old that just has all this money uh no it's been a long plan so this this is the house i live in right now just to give some just to give some random generic backstory the house i live in now is the third house that i've owned that i've purchased myself the first house i purchased i had i was living in an apartment at the time with like four roommates and i was like you know what we're all paying rent why don't i just take all that rent money that my friends are making and pay off my mortgage with it so i bought a house in my early 20s and lived with a bunch of friends for a while market went way up sold that house for a profit didn't buy a lamborghini saved it bought a second house and but even my first house my second house in my current house i did a lot of home renovations so i i have a lot of experience in home renovations now at this point and i have a tiny bit of construction experience i worked construction just as just a framing monkey for a few summers during college so that's kind of where i felt more comfortable handling home improvement tasks which is kind of ultimately what led me to deciding to be a homeowner builder general contractor which i'll get more into i think probably at the end of the video but anyway bought the first house fixed it up sold it for a big profit bought a second house also fixed it up market also went up sold it for a profit bought my third house which i live in currently that's the house that you see me in my driveway talking about my vehicles or whatever uh fixed that house up quite a bit and it also went up in value so i've made profit now on three houses and instead of just spending all the money and going out on fancy lavish things and buying a bunch of cool stuff i do have some cool stuff but buying a bunch of really extravagant cool stuff i didn't do it i just saved money and invested it so it's been about a decade's journey to get to where i was finally in a position to buy land and build a custom home on because it's expensive uh some places you know you live in states that nobody really wants to live in and it's way cheaper to do in colorado it's not that cheap to do uh in the future depending on feedback i get in this video maybe i'll talk about budgets maybe i'll talk about that kind of stuff a little bit more i'm not going to get into it in this video because it's already going to be so long so long term plan my goal really i used to live in the suburbs and realized i didn't like it i'm kind of a bit of a prepper if you watch a lot of my videos you'll you'll understand that not a crazy doomsday prepper but i just want to be more self-sufficient and any good prepper the end goal isn't to have a hundred thousand rounds of five five six it's really to be more self-sufficient and uh to not rely on the government or the grocery store or the grid so my end goal has always been to be more self-sufficient on a property that at least has the potential to be on grid not going to get into it too much or off-grid i'm not going to get too much into this video my house will be on grid but i'm planning to have solar battery backup everything it's on a well and its own septic system so i will have the ability to flip a switch flip a switch and then go off grid so when the power goes out i will continue functioning i'll probably get more into that as the series develops talking about what i've built into my home to kind of make it better for self-reliance so anyway ten year goal be more self-reliant eventually buy some land build a custom home so i'm finally here achieving that long-term goal of mine just so you know i wasn't just like hey let's build a house it sounds fun because it's a lot of planning and a lot of work so that's kind of a little bit of the back story of how we got here to buying land and the property and the location and i think i'm going to kind of skip into the next section here because i'm kind of talking about land so selection of location location location location that's so annoying when people say that but location is super important i switched my camera actually so you could see a little bit more of the location here we are massive pine trees we are in colorado kind of a joke on my channel whoa i live in the mountains of colorado so some people have asked me are you still living in the mountains of colorado i am but kind of interestingly enough i'm closer to town now and lower in elevation and i'll talk about the reasons why i made that decision but also on more land another question i get asked a lot is how many acres did you get i'm on 15 acres which is a good number i'd love a 100 acres or 200 or a thousand but 15 acres is enough land to have some fun with uh and it's really hard to find undeveloped 15 acres that is super commutable to denver and the airport but you're still kind of in rural america so all that aside location choosing a location so all kind of started a very broad view again most of this video is going to be applied directly to me what goes into my thought process yours may be different maybe you are a die hard surfer if you can't surf your life will fall apart obviously living in colorado isn't the place for you but for me colorado is super sweet i moved out here i think 13 or 14 years ago now after college i'm 37 years old a lot of people think i'm just some young punk 20 year old with daddy's money not the case at all i just talked about that kind of how i got here i just got those good asian jeans that i look like a baby still and i can't grow a beard really so that probably comes into play but i've lived out in colorado for a while my older brother actually lived out in colorado that's the reason i came to colorado after college so he's kind of to thank for that and then my parents followed and so my parents live here so family my family all of my near family i have one brother and my parents and they live in colorado aunts and uncles and stuff i'm not that close with honestly but my main family live in colorado and that's what's important to me being near family all pretty much pretty much all of my close college buddies also came out to colorado when i came out so i have a big friend group here i've made new friends in colorado as well and then even some internet friend like talon you guys have seen him in a ton of my videos he moved out and lives in colorado now not because of me but i'm sure i played a tiny little bit of you know some role in that and i basically just want all my friends to live in colorado because i love this state i'm gonna take a very very very tiny little tangent here because i do get this question a lot as well and that's mike you're such a second amendment supporter why would you live in that state that has horrible gun laws uh it's true i am a big second amendment supporter i own a holster company i try to be actively involved in politics and donate my money to organizations that are fighting for our rights so this is an important thing and i'm not going to get deep on it but just to just to kind of answer your question i am hardcore against running from a fight uh a lot of people especially the second community have this weird screwed up thinking of hey the the gun laws in my state are kind of turning bad let me run away from it and go to a state that has more favorable gun laws what happens with that is then those gun laws become more and more strange because everyone's moved away from the state and that state is never going to go back to a state that you want to live in and then that will just spread and spread and spread and then there will be one last little bastion of gun rights or something so don't run if anything become more active and more uh kind of involved in in local politics if you feel that way so that is that is a quick short answer to why do you live in colorado even though the gun laws aren't great the gun laws aren't great but they're definitely in the upper 50 percentile of states gun laws and then also once you get out in rural colorado it is it's much different than like living in denver or boulder i think so colorado other reasons to live in colorado this is not a sales pitch for colorado i'm just again talking about why i chose here rather than somewhere else ashley as well my wife most of her family and friends live here as well she has a daughter who is my stepdaughter and then her so my stepdaughter's dad lives here as well so logistically it just makes sense to live here uh now when it comes to preparedness it makes a lot of sense to live in colorado colorado is a bastion colorado is one of the best survival locations known to man because we don't get hurricanes we don't get earthquakes in true colorado about half the state of colorado i just refer to as kansas it's just the flats there's some tornadoes and stuff out there but in true colorado once you get into the mountains you don't have to deal with tornadoes either we could get affected by a mega super volcano or something like that but the only real natural thing that i have to worry about here again being outside of denver is blizzards uh now i've lived in the mountains now for i think seven or eight years roughly and at higher elevation than i am now and i think the longest my power has ever been out is like one maybe two days now in my current house i do have a couple tesla power walls and solar so my power actually never goes out which is what i'm planning for this house though different technologies that i have there but so living in the mountains of colorado not even just denver in the mountains of colorado i think i've only had one to two days of power outage and then i have crazy vehicles obviously so i'm never actually stuck i can always get out now if i had a little two-wheel drive car some blizzards have happened and i'd probably be kind of stuck in in my house for a few days until all the roads were plowed and dried up and everything like that so we really only got to deal with snow and even snow is super easy to survive if you have a means to heat your home and you have food yeah i could survive a hundred foot blizzard in my home i mean 100 foot not really because that would like cover everything up but i could survive a 10-foot blizzard no problem and most people can too if you just have a couple weeks of food you can survive anything in colorado and then the other reason i love colorado is sunshine sun i love the sun i love that vitamin d i love the feel of the sun on my skin so i wouldn't be able to live in a super gloomy state or location that rains a lot and is overcast i love the sun and colorado is pretty mild the winters are not too bad the summers are not too bad but we do get seasons i love wearing flannels i've talked about that in other videos so you know all that so for a specific location i've kind of talked about broad general locations why i chose where i where i chose and again it'll be different for you and sorry i know a lot of this video is going to be rambling it's going to be a long video it's just podcast style hopefully you're not even watching this video because there's very little visual stimuli so big picture location friends family support network great for survival wonderful a lot of stuff to do mountain biking camping hiking trails uh just we don't have an ocean that's really the only thing we don't have honestly other than that we have everything we've got all the major sports leagues even though i don't really care about that at all pretty good restaurants a lot to do near an airport also which is important denver international airport i can get a non-stop flight to almost everywhere it's a major hub and i travel a fair bit for work so that's super important as well so location specific location for me again i've lived higher elevation currently live at about 8 800 feet in colorado and i get a lot of snow i get a ton of snow where i live right now the you know my neighbors and other people live in the community and in the in the city or actually really more specifically where i live up high on the top of a named mountain when there's a snow forecast like it's going to snow 10 to 20 inches we're always getting 20 inches and actually the joke is uh and in my street you can take the low projection and the high protection and then adam and then that's how much snow we're gonna get so we have a ton of snow where i live and again i don't mind snow because there's so much sun it melts off pretty quick if you have sunlight so a quick story is if you're if you're planning on living in a place that has snow and you're shopping for houses maybe even just in a neighborhood i used to live in a suburb so i saw this firsthand if your driveway has southern exposure if it's facing south you pretty much don't have to shovel your driveway or anything the sun is going to melt it in a day or a couple days because again colorado is so sunny if you have a northern facing driveway this is south that's why i'm doing if you have a northern facing driveway your house is casting a shadow on your driveway and therefore it will never melt ever and so if you don't shovel it right away and you drive on it'll turn to ice and just be icy and messy and disgusting for the rest of the season not really but for at least a few days or a couple of weeks or if in your mouth if you're in the mountains it will stay that way basically for the whole year until you salt it or something like that so southern exposure super important and so when choosing a property i wanted to get a little bit lower elevation primarily because i didn't want to deal with snow as much and you also have a longer growing season again with self-sufficiency i want to be growing a lot more crops i want to have an orchard maybe a maybe a vineyard and just grow a lot of crops ashley's kind of getting more into gardening we've been experi experimenting with it kind of up at our place just to see what works and what doesn't work so we have a longer growing season down lower elevation and this property specifically i wanted more sun exposure so when i come out and i was shopping for property every time i went out i had this app photo pills there's other apps like it but it basically gives you augmented reality of the sun overlaid onto your phone screen camera so i can go and see like well when the sun maybe i can choose december and the sun is going to be low it's going to be clearing that hill off in the distance and i'm going to get a lot of sun exposure or potentially in the mountains this happens a lot you're like oh man well there is a large hill right there and now i see that for four months out of the year that's going to block half of my sun so sun exposure very important and when you have the luxury i guess of kind of shopping for a property or even shopping for an existing house that is probably the most important feature for me to look at is will i get good sun exposure will i be able to orient my house in a way i'll talk more about this in the house building section of this video kind of like my design i designed my own home with a lot of these principles so will the property where i want to hang out and work will my yard will my driveway and the house itself get good sun exposure all year round so this here is the front of my house in the summer the sun basically goes like that and then in the winter you can see that yellow line there so basically it'll rise right there set right over there so i have sun streaming in these windows this is the front of my house the south side of my house basically the entire day now in a perfect world in the summer when it's hot and you don't want the sun beating in you can orient your house or maybe there's trees or natural elements that will block some of the sun during the hot months so you got to take this into consideration when shopping for properties especially in places that get cold you don't need to you know you can just burn a fire all day or run your heat all day and just live inside but for me i like being outside again because colorado has relatively mild winter so if i can be outside in the winter in the sun it is not uncommon for me to sit on my porch with shorts and no shirt and just soak up that vitamin d on christmas it's cool but you have to be able to have you have to be able to situate everything that you want where it can get sun exposure and then depending on what you want to do my property relatively flat if i get cattle or horses or goats or whatever we're going to have chickens and goats that's kind of the initial plan and see how that goes we have chickens right now no goats so we're going to dip our feet into like the kind of homesteading thing by continuing to have chickens and then get goats and milk the goats and that's kind of the first little step and see how that goes and maybe we'll get more animals from there but the property right now i'm on 15 acres has room for grazing animals has room to plant orchards and crops and gets good great sun exposure also something to consider this is harder to find i was lucky i have it's it's a seasonal creek technically it's not a named creek you won't find it on a map nothing like that but there's a creek that has water in it almost all year round and that is cool because i will have access to the creek all year round now with with roof and gutter and rain collection it rains enough in colorado where if i have enough water storage technically i could have water forever i also have a well that is what feeds water into my house so theoretically i'll always have water but it's nice having a little bit of water on hand as well animals like water so if you need to hunt out of the world you animals come down and they drink there as well actually i've seen bear on my property and deer and elk and all kinds of stuff so that's cool and so that's the front of my house south this is the back of my house north so i'll have a deck out here a covered deck so i won't have to shovel it ever and then down there is my little creek maybe i'll build a pond one day and then kind of back in the trees here so water yeah and then you know depending on your situation maybe that's a lake maybe i can't actually fish in this thing so that's kind of a bummer but maybe you want to have a lake house or a beach house or whatever so those things are kind of important for preparedness and kind of important for what went into my decision for buying land so now we'll talk about actual house design considerations a little back story i have no history in construction i'm not a builder i'm not a licensed general contractor technically am the general contractor on my own house i'll kind of talk about that whole experience a little bit later in the video i think if i have the energy for it but i i'm not a professional i'm not trying to act like i know everything i don't i've watched a lot of youtube i've talked to some industry experts i've i've read a lot of articles so i tried i've tried to get pretty good a large swash of knowledge to pull from when designing my own house so i designed this house and i didn't really start designing a house until i bought the land because you really kind of have to design the house around the land some features slope elevation whatever where the sun is all that stuff kind of goes into how you're going to design the house so i just found some program online it was actually an in-browser app it doesn't even exist anymore i don't remember i don't remember what it was but i bookmarked it and now it doesn't work but my original design i just found something online but i kind of just drew some walls and rooms and layouts and when designing my house there's some people know of houses called like earth ships and those are more in in hot climates but they're basically built into the ground sun exposure in the winter and the idea is to use the sun's energy to kind of heat your home when it's cold and then you're shading your home and then you're using the earth's mass the constant temperature of the earth in colorado the earth six feet down or eight feet i don't know exactly but the earth itself maintains a constant temperature throughout the year dead of winter heat of summer when you go down far enough into the earth not that far it is 55 degrees and give or take five degrees and that concept helps you maintain a level comfortable living environment without using as much energy so i didn't build an earth ship but i took some of these principles and it's called passive solar or there's a lot of different names for it but essentially it's using the heat of the sun and really the angle of the sun in the winter in the winter the sun is lower it's you don't have as long of days and it can shoot into the windows that are facing south better so i designed the the house with a lot of windows maybe i'll show some renders up here with a lot of windows on the south side also with a sun with a single slope it's called a shed style roof that basically wedges out to catch all of that sunlight so i have big tall windows and it's angled to the sun comes in and basically hits the back wall of my house so i have a long east to west house and it's not very deep north to south and building a true true like if i follow all the concepts and all the principles i basically have no windows on the north side of my house because they just lose energy and it's massively insulated and all this kind of stuff i want to live in my house again colorado's relatively mild i'm not building a house that has to survive antarctica temperatures or something like that so i took some of the principles sun mostly because i just love the feeling of the sun on my body i think my house is actually going to be too hot without running the heater ever in the summer i think it's getting during the winters i think it's going to be too hot because there are so many windows and there's going to be so much sun baking me that i think i'll spend a good amount of the summer liter or the winter sorry i'm tired spend a good amount of the winter with the windows open probably because it's gonna be too hot don't don't hold me to that we'll see once the house is actually built but wanted a lot of sun a long skinny house so that way you can soak in your the bulk of your house can soak in a bunch of sun's heat then you want overhangs now i probably should have went further bigger longer overhangs because for half of the year basically you don't want that sun heating your house because then you have to run the air conditioner more or just live with hotter temperatures more so you really there's a calculation you can look it up and find the angle the sun and choose what months you want to have some passive heating or whatnot i didn't really do that i designed a house that looks cool and i have some overhangs pretty good overhands left so i have four foot overhangs in the front i didn't want posts and supports i just wanted basically the maximum overhangs we could build into the truss without getting too crazy that can still accommodate solos and everything like that so my house is designed to block a lot of that sun so my house won't get heated by the sun for half the year probably a little less than half the year and then it will get heated by the sun when i need it so that was one design consideration which played into my property and where i positioned my house on the property and that's a big consideration one of the biggest considerations for me because it's going to use less energy it's going to be more comfortable and it's going to be nicer ashley loves the sun uh she would probably get sad seasonal affective disorder without getting enough sun and i might too so we wanted to build a house that was both energy efficient comfortable uh and also really nice to just be able to sit in the sun now obviously we'll have shades and blinds we can close it when we want to the other aspect of that is having super super good insulation so i designed the house to have pretty good insulation i didn't go too crazy honestly it's a two by six framed house i have using exterior zip r which is this won't mean anything to the vast majority of you but it's basically exterior sheathing with a layer of foam built into it because then you have a continuous insulation around the whole house and there's a thing called thermal bridging this is going to get a little nerdy where like a 2x6 stud does not have nearly as much insulation as foam or bat or spray foam or anything so basically the the exterior temperature sucks through thermal bridges like a two by solid two by six and into your home so even if you have r30 insulated walls in the bat the two by six portion of the wall is not that it's r2 or whatever so i have paid a lot of attention to how i'm going to insulate my home in addition to the orientation and the windows and everything like that in addition i'm insulating the slab and i'm actually insulating the exterior wall of this giant foundation wall so my house is oriented on a hill so on this side of my house is south and sun and level and flat and beautiful my property i wanted to situate it back in the trees a little bit and it kind of slopes down to the creek way down here it's not a flood hazard never will be a flood hazard unless uh the great flood from noah's time happens then we'll all die but this thing will never flood up to a point that is remotely gonna you know i remotely ever have to worry about but it slopes down which means uh my house is basically a ranch and it has a walk-out basement below what that means is i have a massive amount of concrete in this wall right here and that's going to act as kind of a thermal battery it's called thermal mass and it's the same concept as a cooler or refrigerator or whatever the more thermal mass you have in there if you open the door and then close it your your refrigerator hasn't really changed temperature much because there's so much in there that's just maintaining the temperature now if you have an empty thing and you open it for a little bit and you close it the temperature inside has actually changed and the the refrigerator has to work harder to cool it down so that's really you should fill your if you want to be a maximum efficiency you should fill your fridge with water and just leave it in there because that has a lot of thermal mass to it and then it won't change in your your air your compressor won't have to work as hard same concept with a house again try not to get too nerdy here but basically i have a massive thermal battery that's going to maintain an even temperature and it's going to be very steady so my the temperature in my house won't fluctuate a lot now having a giant amount of thermal mass in and of itself doesn't really do anything for you because that will heat or cool if it's cold outside that's going to transfer the heat right inside and you can't really take advantage of it i have insulated exterior of it so i have r15 insulation four inches of rigid foam outside of my wall so that means i am insulating my wall from whatever temperature is outside to help maintain the temperature inside i'm doing that in slab as well i'm also running radiant pex tubing pex tubing and i'm gonna tie it into a i don't know yet i haven't designed the whole system yet but heat the slab and i'll have radiant heat in my basement but again i think my house is gonna be so warm i'm not investing a ton of money or thought into that because i may never turn it on i'm also going to have a fireplace so if you live in a cold climate and even if all your off-grid batteries and everything go out and there's extended power outage and your solar panels get fragged by an emp or whatever you should still have a way to heat your home so i'm also going to have a wood burning fireplace placed in a place that will centrally passively heat the whole home so a lot of these design principles i've thought through functionally and that's all i can really talk about because everyone's design tastes aesthetically or even how everything is situated and laid out is kind of their own personal opinion so for me i'll talk a little bit about the design of the home just because that's what this video is about uh again long kind of narrow and that is for the sun pretty much passive solar heating of the house i designed basically a ranch i designed pretty much everything that i wanted to be on the main level of the house i didn't want to go up and down a lot of stairs maybe i'll live in this house forever who knows and if i do if i'm aging in place or whatever i don't want to go up and down stairs when i'm old so i've designed the whole house to be a ranch style home basically so the main bedrooms kitchen living room actually even garage only has one step to get up into the house rather than a bunch of steps carrying groceries i when you're designing a custom house you can think of all the things that you don't like in your past houses or houses you've rented or houses you visited and you say i don't like that so i'm going to change it so i wanted to put everything on one level i have a big open floor plan again lots of windows and everything just layout just works for me i designed a little off i don't like being in an office like i write a lot of emails and do a lot of stuff on a computer i don't like to go into a room and be away from my family or anything like that granted i do do that sometimes with calls and stuff so i will have kind of an office gear it's actually where i'm sitting right now this will kind of be my gear room and office i'm not going to talk too much about safe rooms or bunkers or whatever because i'm a private guy and maybe i've built them and maybe i haven't who knows but as far as general usability i have an office here and then i i have i like to be on my computer when i can still socialize and stuff yeah it's very distracting but if ashley wants to talk to me after a long day but i do need to write some emails or monitor something or print out some shipping labels or whatever i need to do i can do that while still being kind of in a central location so i designed a little kind of office nook that was a little bit out of the way but still like kind of in the main area so there's little things like that little features like that where it's a custom home it's a one-off home that i wanted and you can do when you have a custom home the other aspect this kind of fits into property but also i could have built my house i could have built my house right on near the road like the main road that feeds my house i could have built it right there and i'm kind of up on a hill i could have built to just overlooking every one of my brothers my nice house i didn't i built my house kind of set back so you can't actually see my house from the road so this is good from a security point of view nobody will be like hey i recognize that house from youtube or whatever because you can't see it so that was important to me as well and that's kind of a unicorn feature on a house that's still relatively close to town most houses you can see from a road mine you can't until you drive up my driveway which will be gated so i won't have any unwanted intruders which means my dogs if they're barking at something i know that i should pay attention to that bark and it's just not a random person walking their dog by because anything that my house sees if my dog see it and they bark that is going to put me on alert and this is kind of not paranoid nothing like that it's just a good thing to be able to do because i have these natural security systems built in granted i'll have cameras and alarms and everything like that too because it's just what i do but my dogs for instance where i live now they bark all the time randomly and you kind of it's kind of a boy who cried wolf sort of i don't really think anything of their barking because there's always people walking their dogs around and whatever when you have your house kind of set away if somebody's coming to your house and it's not the ups driver they shouldn't they're not supposed to be there and i don't even know how they would get there so i like that personally because i don't really like people i'm really i'm really an introvert uh but from a security point of view that was important to me as well and i didn't even really factor that in like when i was looking for a property that wasn't one thing that i thought about but when i was choosing where to put my house on this property i was like that is a really cool thing to be able to do and really important so i should have added that to the property like choosing a property being able to build a house where nobody can see it because i don't i don't care about what other people think about me i'm not trying to show off my house or flex on anyone or anything like that i just want a nice house to live in and i don't care if nobody sees it i actually prefer that nobody sees it so orientation of the house is good for that as well and then i'm not going to talk too much on security aspects of the home honestly when you're building a custom home can you put put a safe room in it sure thing can you put a bunker in a sure thing it's really weird and it's kind of tough uh when it comes to permitting so depending on where and i should have talked about this in the location section but that where you choose to build a house you will be limited by that county and their permitting process and what they allow and how strange that they are for instance my house i'm in a higher fire danger zone so my house i'm my house will never burn down knock on wood knock on wood wood's flammable but uh i am required by my county but more specifically by my local fire jurisdiction the fire chief or the fire marshal or whoever has the ability to say hey your house needs a fire sprinkler so my house needs a fire sprinkler in my home so i have a 300 or 400 gallon tank of water fire sprinklers they're nice and recessed and you won't really notice them but i have my whole house will be a fire sprinkler uh so any fires that happen in my house will be extinguished by the five well i've actually done a lot of research i wouldn't have put one in honestly but i was required to and now i'm like oh it's a pretty cool thing actually to to have granted it's twenty thousand dollars uh but i'm required to have it in addition i need a bunch of class a fire rated stuff my roof has to be impervious to fire uh it's basically an under fire layman i'm having a metal roof as well my exterior siding is hardy it's basically a cement board very difficult to catch that on fire i'm using class a fire rated decking material for my deck that's an infused bamboo product i'll talk more about later i've had to do a ton of fire mitigation i actually have to cut down way more trees than i would ever want to cut out because there's a whole set of rules for fire mitigation so i have to do all of that um so i should have mentioned that actually in the earlier portion of the video we have blizzard story about and we also have forest fires it's actually the main one we have to worry about but now my house will not burn down it will be impossible for my house to burn down if my house is burned if my house burns down it deserved to have burned down that fire was aggressive uh so that uh is also as kind of a house building design consideration i i would have chosen to build my house in an as fireproof way as possible but that costs a lot more money but now that i'm required to buy code i am doing it and begrudgingly but also kind of am happy with the end result of that as well uh so fire escapes and stuff like that security is what i was getting at so am i gonna build a moat around my house no am i gonna build a bunch of bulletproof this and that no because i can't afford to if i could have made all my windows bulletproof if i was just like insanely loaded or whatever yeah i probably would have just because but no i'm not doing any of that stuff i live pretty realistically and again if somebody is coming here i have the means and the training and the tools to defend myself from them and i have all kinds of alarms and will have more alarms once everything's wired in so i'm not too worried about the defense defensibility of my home because i'll have that taken care of in different ways so i'll talk more about my home i'm going to be doing updates on the build probably like every couple weeks i'll give you an update and i'll talk through everything like home specific related so if you just want a lot of detail on the build and the materials and how i've laid things out i'll get to all that kind of in the build series but i just kind of wanted to talk about general concepts of of how i'm building the house so i think that probably wraps up that section so now let's talk about my experience so far this is kind of a random topic but i've gotten a lot of questions about the process a lot of people have asked about my background thinking that oh i'm building my own house i certainly have some some background in this no not really uh i again i think i talked about earlier in the video i worked a couple summers as a construction guy just basically uh people tell me what to do and i did it so i knew what was involved in a house so the journey that led me here wasn't like i had a whole lot of experience or even a whole lot of desire to do it what led me here was initially i found the land that i wanted and then i designed the house that i wanted and i actually took it to a builder and i took it to a modular home builder here in colorado they've been in business for a long time pretty reputable builder and i don't really want to talk negative about the builder because it was 2020 which was the armageddon of building and everyone got hit because you know coven or whatever and there's supply shortages and worker shortages and factories shutting down and things were crazy that was right when i decided to build a house it is still a horrible time to build a house but i'm pretty stubborn guys so i'm just moving through with it but originally i wasn't planning to build the home i went to a home builder and they were a modular home builder and i took my design to them and they're like oh yeah we can do basically everything in modular that you can do in a regular home so we went through mine like yeah we can do something like pretty much like that and we got down the design process i paid a big deposit this is where i lost i do your due diligence so learn from my lessons i lost about 20 grand with that builder because as i got further and further into it and further and further into the modular design a lot of stuff they couldn't do they couldn't do this span in modular i wanted a big open this is going to be like my great room in the basement and i'll have workout equipment and whatever and maybe a home theater and all kinds of stuff i wanted a big great room in the basement uh and they're like we can't well we can do that but we'll have to have a bunch of vertical supports in here because of how modular homes exist i wanted big huge windows and tall ceilings and they said oh well the max height we can really do is this on modular but you could build it you could do some of it yourself and so basically i whittled down my design which was more of my dream house design granted if i won the lottery i would have a different house than this but we'll call it my dream house design and we had to whittle it down into something that would work modular and even with modular it came to the point where all of this stuff that i wanted to do that didn't fit into the modular design i'd have to build on so i was gonna have to build the garage on site the whole basement on site a little entryway on site and so i was going for this modular builder because i wanted to build a house fast because i don't have patience and this has certainly been a lesson in patience so decided at this point i was like oh and yeah the final nail in the coffin was originally the timeline for module that was the main reason i went with it they were going to be this was like i think two septembers ago last last september maybe they're like we can have the house done by september last september over a year ago and i was like sweet awesome and then when we kind of got down the process a little more we didn't actually start doing anything yet i think i had my well drilled at that point and actually started doing anything and they're like oh sorry like supply shortages this is going to be pushed back till may of next year like a whole however many months that is right seven seven eight nine months i don't know uh they pushed it way back and so i was at a crossroads and i was like okay do i wanna go forward the primary reason i wanted to go with this builder in modular was because i wanted it fast and now it's not even fast and now it's not even the design that i wanted to do and at that point all of the on-site stuff i was like i'm going to do the onset i'm going to build the on-site stuff like i'll have my hands and i've done this stuff before i have a builder that'll do all the heavy lifting and i'll just be on site hammering away right so i kind of had accepted the fact that i was going to do some of the work myself and then this whole thing came together and i was like you know what screw that screw you homebuilder uh i'm just gonna do it myself which i don't know i kind of probably regret that decision a little bit now that i've not now that i'm into it and it's quite it's a lot being a general contractor and actually the physical builder of your house so far has been a huge pain especially in these last couple of years where everything is delayed even the county is delayed there's worker shortages supply shortages material cost is through the roof this house costs way more to build now than it did like two or three years ago and it's been an overall nightmare but basically decided to cut ties i was like all right i'm just going to take on this whole project myself luckily i have a friend jim who used to be a builder a general contractor and he has helped me with a few other projects and my parents with some projects and stuff and i asked him i was like hey would you help me build the house like all handle all of the paperwork and all that crap and you just kind of helped me build it and he was like yeah sure as long as i don't have to do any of the permitting any of the stuff that sucks and i was like oh yeah i'll hand i'll handle all that but being a general contractor i found out is basically following up with other contractors that suck and that lie to you or that don't return your calls or they commit to something and then they don't show up or that say they're gonna do something and then they don't or that say okay we can do that in a month and it ends up being four months and this is what i've had to deal with over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again it's a full-time job just following up with people to do what i want them to do which is wild because i personally jim and myself and we have one other guy skyler it's kind of a three-man crew that's going to be building this whole thing we're doing the vast majority of the work so the contractors i'm relying on actually my plumber's pretty good but the the work that i'm relying on has been a nightmare uh also just stuff takes long like for instance i'm i'm as i'm framing this area of the house over here it doesn't really matter but i was planning to put in windows and for now while we're walking in and out we didn't do the lower portion the cripples and stuff so now it's really just framed out to be big doors where the windows are so it's got the header and just open as we're walking in and out i'm like actually this is a pretty nice location for a door so i have two bedrooms in the basement that i'm like used to be windows and now i'm like oh this would be sweet i'm just gonna put some patio doors in here no big deal i already got it framed out it's already engineered instead of a window i just put in a door sweet uh i went to buy doors and then like two months two months out which is i'm gonna do it anyway but we're gonna be done and past that and we should have already had the doors in by then so i gotta figure out how to get these doors in later than they're supposed to be with the siding and all that stuff so it's certainly been difficult and it's been a huge learning curve because again i don't have any experience being a general contractor depending on where you live you may not even be able to do it you may have to use a licensed general contractor a lot of the home owner builds that you see on youtube they're out in the sticks they're they don't have super strict building codes or anything like that and i think it's easier to do where i am in jefferson county colorado if you live in colorado and you're a contractor of any sort you'll probably be like oh jefferson county that sucks because it's well known i think boulder county is worse but that's the only county that maybe is worth it maybe isn't even worse jefferson county is one of the hardest counties to build in it's very strict and it's a weird county because even though i live in a rural location jefferson county spans into the city as well so it's like half rural half city so it's kind of a unique county in that they have really strict codes that are in force down in there but i also have to adhere to those codes but i also have additional codes being in the mountain being in a high like high danger wildfire area and all this other crap so like i have to adhere to like strict city codes but also stricter mountain codes and it's just horrible uh so i didn't know any of this stuff going into it so a big portion of my battle has been with permitting waiting for the county to reply to me all of this stuff uh building now that i'm actually building now that i'm actually literally building uh it's pretty good and things are going smooth i really like to do things with my hands and now that i can build it's great but everything leading up to this waiting for engineers waiting for the county waiting for this and waiting for that it basically took a year to even be able to start doing anything which is insane i had no idea and granted if i was more experienced or skilled well not skill just more experience and knew more about it maybe i could have got it done quicker but being a gen a one-off home builder it's also hard to find contractors a lot of contractors work for builders so they say my cash cow is my builder and they keep me busy so i don't want to take off some take on some random joe schmoe's custom house project where the owner is the general contractor he's probably going to be a pain to work with and he's never going to give me more business in the future because it's just a one-off house so it's kind of hard to even find work for some areas like concrete where most the concrete contractors are super busy with other stuff and they're just like i'm not even going to return your call or i'm going to give you a quote maybe come out give you some false promises and then just kind of screw you over that happens quite a bit as well so there's been a lot of negativity and even though it's been literally the most frustrating experience of my life and i say that honestly up to this point the building of the home which hasn't even really been building like the building of the home isn't that frustrating but the building and dealing with permitting and contractors and everything has been the most frustrating experience of my life and i'm a pretty busy guy normally like just my life is pretty busy so taking this on on top of it was at times a huge regret but on the positive side it's also super rewarding like i i chose to do this i wasn't forced into it i chose it i could have found a different builder a different general contractor or whatever and i am saving some money because general contractor fees are quite high when and they're not even doing any of the work so i'm both doing some labor and also handling all the general contract work so i'm certainly saving some money but i'm also working more than full time just building the house and being the general contractor because most general contracts don't even don't they don't swing a hammer they're just dealing with everything making sure it's good and granted a real general contractor i'm sure does a way way better job than i am doing but it's tough but again sorry to look on the bright side it's been a great learning experience i i know a ton now i've gained if i want to build another house even though this was the most frustrating experience of my life and i'm like i'm never going to do it again now i know a lot more so the process would probably go a lot smoother the second time granted i will need a lot a lot of time to cool down after this but you know what's involved in your house so i've talked to the engineers about the structural design i understand why my footer is the way it is i understand the structural rebar that's going in here i know the spans and the joists i understand how that works the i i knew some of this already from working construction but understand how my house is framed i'm visually seeing where everything is going i'm here with the plumber and we can make some game time decisions i'm here framing it myself with my with my crew and we can decide like right now i'm like hey you know what let's turn those into doors i think that'll be a sweeter living experience and now i got an extra window let's just plop an extra window in there these are all things that you wouldn't really be able to do easily if you were kind of hands off and then just the pride of you know having my son later and being like i built this house son i think that would be really cool so overall the experience has been hugely eye-opening and intellectually stimulating and physically and mentally exhausting it's been super good overall as well and that's the thing that i found about building a house is all of the mumbo jumbo that you have to go through to get to where i am now and like physically building the house uh it starts all of that frustration kind of starts to fade away once you're actually physically seeing the progress and as you're making the progress physically yourself you're like working and at the end of the day you're like oh we hung those walls or did that or laid that sheeting it's quite rewarding to do so would i recommend that you do it i don't yeah i don't you couldn't do it if you hadn't like a full-time job because this is more than a full-time job so you you have to be a certain kind of person so my full-time jobs i guess are like youtube creation so fortunately i'm making this video kind of this kind of i'm integrating this into one of my jobs and then i run my holster company but my holster company is flexible i work on a lot of that stuff the admin stuff and whatnot after hours so i'm just working really really long days that are exhausting and i'm just kind of figuring out how to balance it all uh because obviously i have family life that i have to balance as well i think it'd be easier if i was just a single guy and i could commit my entire life to this not that that's what i want i might find my relationship and my wife actually hugely rewarding in the best the best parts of my life but if you do have a family and you do have other interests and hobbies like my hobbies have taken a hit i haven't mountain biked much i haven't done a whole lot of anything other than doing a little truck stuff and camping and whatnot so something is going to take a hit if you try and do it and you try and juggle more balls basically it becomes difficult and that's something i think i'm having a little bit of a hard time with all of that but it is a temporary thing and i can push through and luckily ashley is hugely supportive and understanding and is is great uh she's a great partner to have through this journey but it's tough it's tough and this was kind of i don't know what chapter of the the video this is but just kind of my experience as a general contractor uh builder so this video hope you liked it it was super it was super random but i felt like i needed to make a video just to kind of lay everything out and if you're interested in this stuff obviously you can subscribe to the channel because i will be i'm still going to continue to do truck stuff and preparedness stuff and gear reviews and all that stuff like that is still going to be the channel but for the next handful of months i am building this house and i will be doing building updates because i am fascinated by it super excited about i think it's the one of the coolest things i've done physically uh in a while so i want to share it with you guys and i think a lot of people would be interested in it so we're gonna we're gonna kind of go through the the home build and then the end goal is not just to have a cool house that i really like but it's to build a homestead so the content will continue further like once the home is built this isn't turning into a home building channel by any means there will be a season of home building and then that will shift a little bit to kind of homestead content and ashley will be much more a piece of that homestead content so i don't know if we'll eventually evolve that homestead content into its own separate channel or put that on ashley's channel or what but probably probably a lot of that will will be here too so if you're interested in homesteading self-sufficiency uh just like building a house i am not an expert i will be sharing my journey with you telling you what i've learned telling you what i've failed at and you'll see all of that and i think it'd be super interesting for you to follow along if you're into any of that stuff if you're not if you're just into you're just in tacomas or whatever i'm still posting tacoma videos so don't unsubscribe but i feel like if you're not interested you would have watched this far anyway sorry i'm kind of nasally i'm kind of stuffed up right now i don't really know why i think allergies and dirt and all this crap going on but yeah that is the journey i don't know how long i talked i feel like this video is gonna be a solid hour because it's getting late and i gotta get home to my family get some dinner in my belly but yeah i would encourage you i would really really love i would love for you to leave some comments down below uh whether that's stuff you want to see whether that's advice whether that's just hey i think this is cool i'm stoked that you're filming it or whatever i like to hear from you guys it's kind of motivating and nice to hear but also it really helps me create content that you guys are interested in because i'm going to make whatever videos i want to make because this is my channel honestly but if you tell me you are interested in something then that's easier for me to incorporate because i probably would like to talk about whatever you're interested in so let me know down below as always the build updates will continue quick quick uh build update i guess we'll be framing the main wall the main exterior of the house we might get started on this week but the plumber is basically doing all the underground work uh it's he's calling for an inspection i think in two days and once that's done we're backfilling and leveling and then it's a mad rush for me to get all the insulation in here uh radiant vapor barrier in the wire mesh in and then run all my pex tubing then i have to get that inspected and then pour in concrete in less than a week so we'll have a slab in here in the garage about a week from when i'm filming this video if everything goes as planned so that'll be a big exciting step and then we'll be on to like raise the house and jim thinks within a month we'll have this place dried in so we'll have it dried in before winter really sets in and it's coming together fast i think by the new year i will nearly have a house to fit into to fit into to move into and that may just be just in time for baby this baby's coming at the worst time if he came like two months later it'd be all good it's kind of the worst time but it's all good happy about that so yeah i should have also talked about it in the home building thing so this is a custom one-off home there's never been a home that is this i didn't buy the floor plans or anything offline i did i didn't talk about it i designed it i did hire an engineer to kind of refine my basic drawing make actual architectural drawings and then you have to work with an engineer to engineer all the spans and headers and everything so i didn't do all of that i just designed the layout how it's going to look the shape orientation and then my architect took that he tweaked a couple small things but it's really pretty much what i designed and then he did some renders for me and then when i saw the renders i made a couple other revisions like let's move that and do all that but one of the things that you can do when you design your own house is i designed everything to be as easy to build as possible so my house isn't anything crazy to build and the reason i did that was because i knew that i was going to be building it and i knew i wanted to build it quick so i purposefully designed a house that would go up quick because i knew enough about construction to build that and i also talked to my engineers and the architect and i said hey anytime you got to make a decision for something a make it more affordable for me but also b make it easier for me to build so everything was just as easy as it could be so that's why i think this house from from basically once we started framing to being done it could be four to five months if things go smooth so follow along with the journey see if that happens see if it doesn't you don't have to hold me accountable because it don't matter because it's my house but yeah sweet alright guys i know this video is visually boring but we'll change that in some upcoming videos thank you for watching thank you for hitting that thumbs up button subscribing commenting down below all those things that you do on youtube i really appreciate it and i am going to try and relax now and by relax i mean go work on some holster stuff and edit this video and upload it cool all right guys take care

Channel: Last Line Of Defense

Views: 54,382

Keywords: homestead, home build, custom home, owner builder, owner general contractor, passive solar, colorado, thermal mass

Id: oX8w76coeHc

Length: 60min 39sec (3639 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022