The Dirt: Finally Moved In! Should You Be Your Own Contractor?

welcome to the dirt my name is jamie and this is jeremy the dirt is where we tell you a little bit about who we are why we do what we do what we think what we think and today we are going to talk a little bit about our house build this is the house that we build ourselves uh we are not contractors and yet about five years ago we moved to what was considered somewhat raw lands and we built this house you all have been probably following along over the past three years as we've gone through this journey it's been a crazy crazy adventure if you're newer to the channel we bought this place at the end of 2017 with the intention of finding a builder to build us a home in that spring the following spring and that didn't work so and a lot of you guys are facing that right now as well if you guys are trying to build a home yourself you're finding that you cannot find a contractor or that the contractors are booked out two to three years or you're finding supply shortages and perhaps you're considering building your own home being your own self-contractor and we're just going to talk to you a little bit about our experience share that with you guys uh tell you about some of the highlights some of the pitfalls we ran into just to kind of give you a heads up and give you a little bit more information to make that decision for yourself so we haven't seen you guys for a couple weeks i haven't posted a video because we've been busy moving in um getting things sort of organized as best we can there's still a lot to do but it's so nice being moved in finally especially with the heat wave coming yeah this week's 95 98 100 degrees 100 degrees in charlotte i don't want to mess with that so we were lucky fortunate got moved in air conditioner works everything works so i'm happy all right so for those of you guys that are new to the channel we're going to give you a real brief overview as to how we got here and what we built for ourselves on this property so we moved here 2017. we bought this place in november of 2017 with the intention of building the following spring hiring a builder i had an idea of what i wanted to have done it's kind of similar to what we ended up with but nothing worked we could not get a builder especially around here out here in the middle of nowhere and we couldn't find a builder that would be able to do kind of what i wanted to do they probably could have put together a basic house like you can get plans for like 84 lumber and everything but that's not really what we wanted to do we wanted to build a permanent forever last forever home that we're going to have forever so so the house that we built is entirely our own design we built a 30 by 40 footprint we tried to design the smallest footprint that we could with the best resources that we could find which is icf now the basement is a 30x40 icf build the first floor is a 30 by 40 icf and then we have a partial half story on top of that which has two guest rooms the whole theory behind that was that we wanted to try like i said and have the smallest footprint possible the house actually looks much bigger than it actually is just because of the way that we designed it we wanted it to be very open and some of the features of the house are that we designed all of the first floor has all the main features such as the laundry room the kitchen the master bedroom bathroom everything that you would need should there be any incident where you know we would be in a wheelchair for example and that includes the showers which are curbless showers so that we could access the shower if we were incapacitated we have wide doorways we also have a wide walkways as well so we took a 30 by 40 footprint and i designed this in a program and trying to make three foot wide doors and four foot wide walkways and fit all of your stuff into such a small footprint was a challenge but we did it and it like she said it looks huge on the outside people always say how did you why did you build such a monster house it's not actually that big it just looks really big the way we designed it another thing that makes it look real big is this huge wraparound porch which was part of the design from the from the beginning if we had not done the porches it would just look like a box so it was all thought out and intentional all the materials all of the features everything were well insulated long lasting low maintenance no maintenance aluminum rails and columns steel shingled roof you know insulated concrete you know concrete's not going to go anywhere so i'm confident that we have a very solid build and so far having lived here full time now for about three weeks i'm pretty happy yeah i'm pretty happy too so in 2017 we moved out here we came up with these plans and we tried to find a builder to build it and we looked for a year and a half and we could not find a builder and it was getting to the point where we're living in our temporary residence which is a no value trailer that is on the property it's down over the hill our intention was to only live in that trailer for about a year maybe a year and a half maxim max and our intention was to move here in november and start building in the following spring so yeah nine ten months maybe was our intention and a year and a half later we cannot find a builder we have this house design no builder and we're at the point where we're like either we need to move or we need to figure out something else yeah nobody would return phone calls and if they did they wouldn't show up so i was faced with do i try to build something myself maybe scale down what i originally planned maybe do like more of a cabin type of deal and neither one of us wanted to do that we wanted to build our forever home and we wanted to do it right with quality materials that would last forever so i wrestled with that for a while and i went through a bunch of designs that i made for different places and different places on the property we finally settled on this place and this design and i decided however long it takes we're going to do it and if you've been with us for that duration you know it took a while so so i want you to talk a little bit about like your process so as someone that doesn't really have a contracting background your background's actually an i.t you said you know you know how to swing a hammer but you really don't know how to build a home i would say now having done this if you're out there and you're trying to figure out if this is something you can do i think if you're relatively handy and can figure out how to read blueprints and take your time and work through a process sort of like a project management sort of thing break things down into tasks i think anyone could do this to whatever degree you want again it for me it took a long time because i i did crazy unconventional things like the way this house is built it's not a stick built normal frame it skin it dried in rock and roll everything about this is weird so that's why another reason why it took so long but i was pretty confident that i could do it and i went down that rabbit hole and i first thing i did was get my design done and as we said we designed it with certain traits to make it less expensive so it's a rectangle four corners fewer corners you have the less expensive it is it's tall instead of wide so the footprint you know you're not pouring a ton of concrete the trade-offs there are you have stairs so when you get into your later years you may have stairs the answer to that is like she said we put everything on the one main floor so having come up with that design now it's time to figure out how all the materials we're going to put into it because you have tons of options you can do simple you can do more higher end better grade materials and it's all about budget so we try to do this debt-free while we're off grid and that also was a huge challenge so i guess my background has been in project management for quite a while and it came down to figuring out every penny where it was going to go where we could get deals what we could substitute if we couldn't find what we needed to find and getting all the materials lined up and then finding subcontractors which is just as much of a nightmare if not more so than trying to find a general contractor to run your build the biggest challenge that we ran into in this location is we're new to the area and the subcontractors around here deal with contractors that they're already familiar with so to have some homeowner come up to them and say hey i need you to do x y and z when they already have a long list of contractors that they know are going to pay them and that they know we're going to give them work it's kind of hard to get them out there so really we had to build a rapport with several of the get to get a subcontractor in build a rapport with them and then we went from uh referrals from there and that was really a big key thing it took a long time to get ramped up in terms of finding subs but once i found the one guy that i really wanted or actually i ended up talking to the someone who someone referred me to the lady i bought the windows and doors from who was excellent and she referred me to the guy who framed it did all my framing he was awesome at it and then from there it kind of you know they work with people all the time and then they weed out the guys who aren't that good and they stick with the guys who are good so that made it a lot easier once you find one that's a good contractor they can help you find all your other trades electrician plumber the guy stand the man who did our tile he did a great job and then she or jp who did our stucco and all of our stone we did have quite a few subs and i did do quite a bit myself so you can do it it's just hard and it takes a long time takes a while depending on if how much of the work you want to do yourself the more work you do yourself the more money you can save the more sweat equity you have do all your own painting and all the things that you definitely can do and sub the rest out you can take on as much or as little as you want and adjust your budget accordingly and but you can do it okay so we got our icf up and we are building our second floor we got our lumber for that and we have our project we have our budget we even have a little bit of extra accounted for in case of inflation and all of a sudden bam covet hit why don't you talk a little bit about that right we were fortunate that we had bob just finished our framing and then a week after that uh coveted hit and lumber started going up through the roof we couldn't couldn't get lumber and a lot of people who were trying to build houses at that time ended up spending like 30 or 40 000 more just for their lumber package so that was a big hit like i said we got a little lucky there but in other ways we weren't so lucky because it got worse and worse and as the lockdowns happened and the supply chain was interrupted and all this other stuff you just could not get materials windows and doors now if you're trying to build right now good luck getting windows and doors about getting a lot of things that's that's one of the big things though and our appliances we ordered two years for our refrigerator 2020 we ordered and paid for our appliance package and we just got them three weeks ago we and the hold up was the refrigerator because kitchenaid just shut down so we were fortunate that we were on the tail end of that in our process but and the other thing that was okay was i was doing a lot of this myself ordering the materials and if it said six weeks for the stuff to come in which would normally be the next day i would be okay with that because i could work on other projects and just schedule so that kind of worked out for me but for guys who are trying to build a house and boom get it done it's like ugh you cannot get stuff so that's one thing to be concerned about and aware of if you are considering building your own house right now availability of materials and the cost so the big question is would we do it again you know we're later on in our years and we when we started this it was five years ago we didn't had no intention of this project taking five years when we did our research it was like always it's always going to take a lot longer than you think it is and you know we we added in that extra six month buffer time just in case on top of that year and it from the time we moved out here until we just moved in it took us about five years the whole actual building process itself from the time we broke ground about three years and a lot of that is because you know we're working linearly waiting for a project to complete before starting the next one waiting for subcontractors waiting for prices to come down waiting for supplies to come in one of the reasons that we built this place is so that the kids would have their own rooms and have more space and so that we could expand on our homesteading and now the kids are off to college so um you know time just went by got away from us and this project just kind of consumed us and to be perfectly honest it was very very hard the last couple years have been very challenging for for that reason alone and would we do it again i personally at this phase in my life knowing what i know i would not do it again would you i would if i were still in my mid-30s i would absolutely do it again but at this point in my life i don't think i could do it again i just mentally don't won't i can't go there anymore i'm so glad to be finished with this i enjoy building things and designing and making things but doing a whole house is a challenge and you got to be 100 all the time it was uh every day seven days a week for three years quite literally he got up every single day he came up here and built this house and at one point he got injured and and we were a little concerned about that that that was going to you know impede the project it actually set us back almost a year when that happened because uh i couldn't pick things up and that that's that's bad and i was concerned but eventually it healed and uh i was i'm better now than i was so you gotta be wary of that too especially when you're working by yourself you gotta be careful you have to be always thinking you know so i mean now that it's done i'm so glad that we have this house i love this house it's beautiful um at this point we plan on staying in it uh forever but boy it was just it was a tough run and you know if you guys are considering doing it consider your age consider how long it might take consider how much money it might cost um the price of things did go up significantly and um yeah that's all i have to say about that so i'd like to be a little more encouraging than that but that's the reality we are happy we built what we set out to build and we're finally moved in and so i guess the the other big question now becomes what's next for us and where do we go from here so for me many of you guys know that i started back at school i'm trying to seek a degree in radiography and eventually after that i'm going to go on for ct kind of short term plans at this point because it'll take me about another year to finish up school and then jeremy's going to continue working on the house there's still a lot to be done we still have trim that we need done tile that needs done a lot of finish work inside he's going to be building all of our furniture and i look forward to having that that done because i know he's going to do a fantastic job making beds making tables let me talk about that for a second we went to a huge furniture mart a couple weeks ago because we live in an area where it used to be the furniture capital of the country and i don't think there was anything there for less than a thousand dollars it was all exorbitantly expensive and it wasn't very good quality so that was that's when i decided all right i can make a lot of this and make it exactly to our specification for a lot less money with a lot higher quality so there'll be a few of those projects that i'm going to video for you i just wanted to talk about that because i couldn't believe how expensive furniture was so we're looking forward to that so he's going to be making some beautiful furniture if you guys want to see how he does that stick with us and like i said the finish work and of course outside landscaping we're going to be working on that that's going to be a whole project probably starting in the spring and a lot of the things that we're going to start incorporating are raised beds we talked a lot about that we want to do a lot of berry bushes we want to do some fruit trees i want to improve this view maybe do a little bit of permaculture on the property and once we get this home base set up we'll start spreading out from there and we're still working on the rest of the property we have a lot of ideas a lot of plans that we want to incorporate into this property some ways to make the the property pay for itself if you're considering building your own home if you guys are in that position where you are debating whether or not to wait to two to three years to find a contractor or start one yourself i hope we provided some valuable information to you if you guys want to know how we built any of this house we have it entirely on video we have a playlist that we're going to leave down below every step of the way and one of the things that we are looking very much forward to is putting this getting going back off grid not entirely upgrade but we're going to have off-grid capabilities um we did a whole video segment on how we took our trailer off-grid or was off-grid but we implemented solar down there and we're going to bring all that up here and we're going to make this off-grid as well at least the primary components right so the trailer has been off good the entire time we've been here for five years and it's performed really well this house is now connected to permanent power so when we bring all that stuff up here we're going to be on a hybrid system we'll always be connected to the grid just as a backup but then the solar is primarily going to run everything we do have a good amount of power outages out here very remote because we're on the end of the line and when that happens up until now we never knew and a neighbor would call and say hey do you have power and we look of course we have power so we never knew when the power went out up here on the mountain but it does go off frequently we get a lot of storms we're actually right now starting hurricane season and very likely we're going to have power outages we do get a lot of ice storms you might have seen some of those in our videos um so definitely having that off-grid capability is going to be important up here getting that generator up here making sure that everything is going to operate as normal as possible if we do have grid down so we're kind of uh all in or nothing so we always go to one extreme and then the other extreme and then we figure out the best combination of everything and that's what we settle on so living off grid in a trailer for five years versus moving here and being on grid we're gonna do a hybrid which is pretty much how we usually end up so a lot of things coming up if you guys are interested stick with us and uh hope this has been helpful and nice seeing you yeah we'll see in the next video thanks for watching also check out this sunset [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Guildbrook Farm

Views: 51,543

Keywords: be your own contractor building a home, build your own house, construction, diy, do it yourself, general contracting, gilbrook farm, gillbrook farms, guildbrook, guildbrook farm, guildbrook farms, home building, home construction, home decor, home improvement, homestead, homesteaders, homesteading, homesteading family, house build, icf, icf construction, insulated concrete forms, mountains, off-grid living, self reliance, the dirt

Id: ZVM5EI3dhGk

Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022