I am so excited I can hardly contain myself! After much discussion and deliberation, we have officially decided to build our forever home. I’m not sure how many of you have taken the leap and actually built a house together with your mate but from what I am reading it is not something to take lightly. I’m in multiple house groups and from what I’ve seen building a house with your other half will make or break a marriage. SCARY!!!
We here at Love travel and adventures are going to take you along on every step of our journey. You’ll have a front row seat to view the ins and outs of what it takes to build a house together. We’ll go from buying the land to finishing the house or our marriage, whichever one comes first, lol.
I’m sure it’s going to be a long stressful project, and will take us a few years but hey, thats part of the adventure right?
WHERE TO BEGIN
So Tim and I have been looking for land on and off for a good ten or so years. We’ve gone back and forth with either a piece of property on a lake somewhere or property in the country with no neighbors. Lake property is pretty much all jammed packed houses or camps one on top of the other. Country property would be all spread out with a bit of distance between the houses.
Right now the house we own is in a neighborhood where the houses are pretty close to each other. So close in fact that our neighbors driveway is under our bedroom window. This was fine when we had a little old lady living next door for the first 15 years that we lived here. Not so great now with a motorcycle being started at 5am.
Living on a lake has always been my dream. The water calls to me, it’s my happy place. Neighbors being close enough to hear a fart, not so much. Lake property is also super expensive. Sadly we aren’t millionaires quite yet. My husband likes to remind me that I have champagne and caviar taste but we only have a cheap wine and cheese budget.
Keeping our current living situation and our budget in mind, country living looks like the way for us to go.
ON TO THE LAND SEARCH
Now that we know the direction we are leaning it’s time to decide on the route to take to find our land. Being the DIY type we decide to start the land search ourselves instead of hiring a real estate guide.
I’m the type of person that would rather put in the effort and do the work myself rather than hire someone. Why pay someone to do the legwork when I can look online. The tools to find your slice of heaven are literally at your finger tips these days.
With that being said, you can’t do everything yourself. You can find your land but you still have to contact the sellers real estate agent to take a look. And once you’ve found your land you have to get yourself a real estate lawyer. The lawyers job is to look out for your interests. They hire the title search company and write up a contract to make sure you aren’t buying a useless piece of land. They also help with the closing to make everything legal.
Tim and I looked at so many pieces of property. We were starting to get a bit discouraged. All the land within the budget we were looking to stay in where terrible. Nothing you could build on without a ton of work, like a stick of dynamite ton of work. After months of searching we finally found our spot. It’s a bit of a mountain and will be a lot of work to make it what we want it to be, hopefully not dynamite work. Either way, we think it will be our piece of heaven when done.
YOU FOUND YOUR LAND….. NOW WHAT?
So we’ve found our perfect spot, now what? Now it’s time to start the bidding process. The seller had the land listed at a certain price which was somewhat reasonable but was more than I wanted to spend. This is when you put in an offer. When making this offer keep in mind where you realistically want to end up. We offered ten thousand less than she was asking knowing she would probably counter at what we were willing to spend. It worked out as expected and we ended up where we wanted to be. Now it won’t always work out this way but it doesn’t hurt to try.
After we agreed on a price, the sellers agent sent us a contract. Once that’s signed the land can’t be sold out from under us. This is the point where the lawyer comes in. Now title searches need to be performed to make sure no one else can stake claim to the property. Don’t want to build a house on land to have someone ten years down the line try to say they own the property. This is also why you buy title insurance. It saves you the headache of that happening. The title search insurance company would be responsible for your costs that would arise from someone else actually owning the land you just built your house on since they didn’t do their job correctly. But be sure to talk with your lawyer about this to be sure as I am not qualified to be your legal counsel.
After our lawyer took over once we signed the contract it took about 3 months to close. Buying land is usually a cash deal. Banks don’t finance land purchases. Now if you are buying from a builder than that is a different story. We bought raw land (meaning it’s never been touched and is full of trees. Not cleared, no driveways, no electric, water, sewer, nothing. It’s woods, which means loggers, and excavators are the first on the list. And this is where the real adventure begins….. stay tuned for the next steps in our forever home build.
Until then, travel and fall in love, adventure awaits ❤️