A Walk to the Home site

This morning was a rather hectic affair that involved running around our town, trying to find the right place, people and information to get the sale of a little hunk of land for us to build on finalized and the deed in our name. It is still not all done, but the paperwork is ready and later this afternoon we should be signing it. Some days I think the red tape related to this project is worse than the actual building process is going to be. Everywhere we went people knew a little something about buying a house, but no one seemed to know what we needed to do to buy land. It was repeatedly recommended that we talk to our builder/contractor. I had a little trouble explaining that we were going to do the labor ourselves.

In any case, as of right now we are still on track with our grand plan to build our own home, make it as self sustaining as possible, and do it out of pocket.

It is a beautiful day today, so after we got done with our wild deed hunt I strapped the little one into the mei tai I made last night (and will be putting a free pattern up for once I work out a few kinks in the design) and we walked to the new home site.



I'm very excited, after 6 years of urban living and being able to hear my neighbors snoring at night, at the prospect of nothing but untouched forest off my back deck.


Unfortunately, before we begin building, there are still permits to get and the similarly daunting task of cleaning up the building site, which is currently a mess.



A friend is going to come help us go through the stuff and debris that has accumulated over the years tomorrow in exchange for food and beer. On initial inspection this afternoon I found three sinks, a bunch of roof trusses that appear to still be in usable condition (I'm super excited about these since the roof is looking to be one of our largest expenses if we have to buy trusses), a shower, hot tub, and two two bath tubs that may be repairable, more concrete block than I was expecting to need, some old windows (may not be able to use these as I'm not sure what building code requirements for windows will be) and a pile of metal beams.


Since I was planning on using reclaimed materials wherever possible, these are great finds for us! Also, given that we intend to build out of pocket rather than take out a loan, this should pretty drastically increase how far we can go with what we currently have saved.