Our Ground Bound House
Tis the season for building! Just kidding, tis the season for resting and recouping, obviously. We like to use these long dark winter months to plan our projects for the year though. And in this case we’re planning out a little more than that, too. It’s likely not going to happen this summer as we have a 2,000 s.f. rental unit to completely renovate that is taking priority come June. But if we can get as far as getting a foundation in this fall I would be pretty stoked! So, we’re getting ready with some actual plans.
The short stats are that the house will be roughly 1,000 square feet. It’s 3 beds, 2.5 baths (the .5 is a ‘normal’ toilet for guests so they don’t have to get an explanation on how our low flow units work…). It will have approximately 600 s.f. of unfinished basement which will hold our water cisterns (~6,000 gallons if I get my way) and solar batteries at a consistent temperature. We are designing it so that it can be built in 3 different phases as we get the money.
Financials
Much like one of the main reasons I chose to build a tiny house, this house will be paid for with cash on hand. I absolutely refuse to borrow money again because I have been burned by the banking industry pretty hard in the 2008 recession. The route I took (living tiny) has ultimately worked out pretty well to get me through. More than that, it introduced me to a whole community of people who feel the same in a lot of ways as me. Most importantly it found me a partner who, while he doesn’t feel the exact same about financing, he understands why I do and respects that.
Why are we leaving the tiny?
Really I just want my kids to have their own rooms, in the short term. In the long term I want them and their future families to be able to visit us comfortably. Or at the very least, I want to be able to help house them as their lives expand, there is no telling what is coming but the housing sector is not all that sustainable. The tiny house isn’t going anywhere though, it’s just becoming guest quarters eventually.
Six years ago I purchased 6 acres of land with cash because that is what I could afford at that point. Because I had this tiny house which was on wheels I rolled that home up to these acres. Prior to purchasing the property I had been in contact with the county to assure that, if purchased, there would be a path I could find to be able to live in this tiny house on that property. This involved me going before their planning and zoning commission, making my case and working with the building department to make sure I was legit with them as well. We were required to put in a septic system but were permitted to collect our own water (from the sky) and generate our own power (mostly sun but wind, too). I say we are permitted to do that because those are not options everywhere (mostly there are conditions within a city limit, but also if you’re pretty close to the annex line I’d be extra aware). If you’re looking to go this path, it’s something you’ll want to discuss prior to purchase.
We got legal approval 4 years ago now (and boy does it still feel good after living in the tiny house grey area for 9 years!) In that time we have been saving money. Also in that time James sold his house in Boise and was able to buy a triplex up here. He also had to completely overhaul his business and it has proven to be much more profitable than when he was primarily using third parties previously. It keeps him a lot more busy than when he outsourced to third parties but we aren’t moving around constantly so it works. He’s really been at the point that he needs to hire an employee or two to help but, in an effort to keep away from banks, we as a family have decided a little grind might just build up that bundle of money we need to build this house. In the last year alone James has been able to save a little over $100,000 which is incredible. The world conspires to make things happen sometimes!
The economy
We of course know nothing about where the price of goods is going to be going in the coming years. Personally, I can’t imagine them coming down. We want to get ahead of this building plan so we have a pretty solid idea of a material list. That, combined with the great big barn we built for material storage, should help us save a decent amount. Average houses in our neck of the woods sell between 500-600 per s.f. still. Even at 1,000 s.f. there is no way we could afford a $500,000 house with cash and I am not giving us an alternative so we have to get tricky.
This of course is not just the house, it’s a factor of the land, the labor and the materials that went into the house. We already own the land outright so that will bring down cost (a lot). Actual material costs per house is estimated to be between $150-200 per finished square foot based on material choices and about $50-75 per square foot for unfinished spaces (this has us at between $180,000-275,000). We aren’t doing anything terribly fancy because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I don’t really like terribly fancy houses! 😀 We’ll do what we love and I suspect we’ll be on the pretty low end of that. I will splurge for things like real hard wood floor but not for granite, or fantastically/terribly processed materials. It will stay natural as possible and balance in cheap.
The surprise zone
Labor is the big catch and that is expensive and varies a lot by location. We are on the very high end of labor costs where we live right now unfortunately. Fortunately though, James and I do plan on doing a lot of labor ourselves so that will bring those costs WAY down. However, we’re well into our forties, both of us have already literally broken our backs once. James is working what amounts to more than a full time job and I have plenty to do in the heart of the default parent zone. We will appreciate some parts being done by others and will happily pay for that if we can manage to find anyone with time in their schedule (that will be another hard task!).
Additionally, this is not a typical build and will have additional costs like solar batteries and a couple thousand dollars of potable water cisterns, those will be above and beyond ‘typical’ price structures. In the end, we are aiming to get the whole things done for around $200,000. Several people seem to think we’re crazy for thinking we can do that. Still others find it wildly low given our design. We’ll do what we need to do to make it how we want it and I guess we’ll see how that shakes out.
Phases
There are actually more phases to this house than just the three I alluded to at the top. First phase was acquiring the land, that was a big one. We have just been sitting here, saving money for the next stage. While sitting, wishing and waiting we did buy a tractor so we could get a good start on phase two, the ground work. We’ve been building the road to it and breaking through the bits of granite to make sure we could put the house where we wanted it to sit. By the way, we couldn’t so we have selected another site which we happen to like better. Phase three was moving up the tiny house and building the barn so we could have a community gathering space for homeschooling and a storage space to collect materials.
If you were curious at all about how our budget is shaking out I will keep documenting it over here at my budget page.
The actual house phases
There will be three phases as we see it to the house. First will be the biggest at building the actual living space, roughly 1,000 finished square feet and ~600 unfinished basement.
Phase two will be the deck space off of the living area. And phase three will be a great big greenhouse off of the south side of the house so that we can grow avocados and lemons as well as having a year round garden.
If we can do all of this at once, that’s great, I just have the feeling it is going to take more time to budget it out. I am a fan of designing and engineering all of the phases as a whole but also thinking in ways that it can be constructed in smaller bites.
So thats where we’re at!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you think it will cost? Are we being crazy thinking we can get through phase 1&2 for about $200,000? I’ll remind you all I did build a 232 s.f. tiny house for about $12,000 bucks which is at least 50k under what builders said they could have done it for at that time. We very well might be crazy though. There is a lot more red tape to this one… I think my next step is going to be to take a calculator to actual material costs and volumes and see where we sit.
Here are some pictures of the process
And a quick note because there are much better metrics than dollars: doing this with my kids and with my partner has been absolutely priceless. Hazel has made the layout so much better and Miles is really loving learning how to 3D model in sketchup. James and I are just having fun getting back to some design work together. We don’t agree on everything but it turns out we have gotten a lot better at working together over the years!
