Building Your Own Home Step-by-Step
Self-building is becoming more popular, with more self-build plots and companies providing help and with more people seeing the unlimited design potential in self-building than ever before. Building your own home might seem more than you can handle, but with the help available and good planning, you can design and build your dream home.
To build your own home, you need to plan everything step-by-step. To help you, here is a guide including the main things to consider and some tips for bringing your design to life.
Five top tips from a self-build company
Self-build property developers have a lot of experience building custom properties, so what better place to start? Here are the five top tips self-build property developer Graven Hill has to share:
- Choosing the location of your new home is incredibly important. You want your home to be close enough to the local amenities but secluded enough to provide you with some privacy. You won’t want to build your home close to anything that causes noise pollution or strong odors. And, of course, your home needs to be close enough to your work so that you can travel to and from the office every day.
- The unexpected will happen, so prepare for it. Anything can go wrong. Planning permission could take longer than expected, and the weather could be so severe that building work has to halt. Any problems could cause a delay in your timeline and unforeseen financial implications, but planning for it can help you to manage your losses.
- Place your trust in your builders. It might be tempting to become a project manager and a builder to try to lower the costs of the home build, but you must realize your limitations and put your trust in your builder.
- Make your home futureproof, think about the future, and design a home that will stand the test of time and continues to look modern and exciting. Also, try to make your home adaptable and flexible.
- Research and be well-prepared. Understand the entire process of self-building a property and the outcome you’d like to achieve so that you know exactly what is involved. This will help you manage your expectations and plan to accomplish everything you want.
Budgeting
Budgeting for your self-building venture is crucial. Your design will largely be dictated by your finances and the budget you have to spend. The first thing you must do is determine how much money you must spend on building your home. Once you’ve done that, decide what percentage of the budget you are going to spend on:
- Financing costs and fees
- Insurance fees
- Landscaping
- The survey, conveyors, and any other reports you might need
- Adding road access from the main road to your new property
- Connection to services like gas and electricity
Storage facilities
People moving into new homes often have one major complaint, limited storage. Building your own home is the perfect opportunity to create a home with ample storage space that is easily accessible and large enough to store everything you have. However, it is essential to remember that your storage needs could change. For example, if you expand your family, you might need more space than you did before.
Prepare the site
One of the things people need to remember when it comes to building their own homes is preparing the site. Before any building work can begin, the site needs to be adequately prepared, it needs to be:
- Clear of bushes and debris
- The property boundaries need to be identified
- Alterations might need to be made to the sites topography to allow water flow across the site
- Order a skip and/or refuse removal
- Order things you need for the builders, like portable toilets
- Make sure you have utilities (even if they’re just temporary)
Once this is done, you need to lay concrete floorings and foundations, which can take up a large part of your entire budget and must be done to continue the rest of the building. Next, you can rough the electrics and plumbing before pouring in the concrete slabs. After this, you can start to work on the frame, side, and roof, and suddenly your home will begin to look like a house.
These are just some of the many things you need to do and think about when it comes to building a home, but knowing all of this will make the house build much more manageable.
