Home Building Advice for First Timers

Building a house or even finishing the last phases of construction on a spec home that you purchased can be stressful if you’ve never done it before. In fact, it’s at least a little stressful every time after that too. But there are a handful of things I remind myself of as I enter the process and I wanted to share them with others that are building a house for the first time.

Planning

Before you ever sit with the builder, try to set some goals, guidelines and boundaries that you and your partner/spouse both agree with. I’m mainly talking about things like size, cost, major features, etc. Otherwise, it’s too easy to go nuts when you sit with the builder and they start presenting you with hundreds of options. One approach is to make Must Have, Should Have and Nice to Have lists before getting distracted with all the details.

Critical Relationship

Try to establish a good relationship with your general contractor (GC) or building supervisor. This is the person that oversees the various subcontractors and work crews that will build the house. If you are building a custom home and selected your own GC, you have the ultimate decision on anything important. 

If you are using a home building company and are building a pre-designed home per their plans, you won’t be able to select your building supervisor. They can become your best friend or worst enemy.  If you hit it off right with them, you’ll probably be able to make some minor changes with no extra cost. They can also do things like leave you extra tile, carpet, wallpaper, brick, trim, etc. that ends up left over. Builders do some of this automatically, but I typically like to have as much extra as the builder will give me, within limits.

Patience

As the construction progresses, prepare for several things to not look quite right. After building a few houses, I have learned the things to bring to the builder’s attention immediately, versus things that aren’t that important and will be corrected later without any need to mention. Your builder won’t want you calling every day with updates on little things you noticed.

I recommend keeping a list of everything you notice and asking to have a short conversation with the builder each week. You can cover the items on the list all at once. They will let you know which ones are important, versus others that will be addressed later. For the ones they say can be addressed later, make a notation on your sheet and check up to make sure it was eventually done.

Discipline

Once the building starts, try not to make too many changes that aren’t genuinely important. Almost every change will carry a fee – especially if real work or rework is involved.

Moment of Truth 

If you are buying a home from a homebuilder, don’t panic if 3 weeks before the planned close date there seems to be a lot of small things that still need to be done or corrected. Once you get this close to closing, the builder takes special notice – not wanting to have your close date delayed. They often will expand the size of the crews working on your house. And lots of small repair items (called a “punch list”) will be taken care of literally days and hours before closing. 

You Have Leverage  

One note of caution. You might be asked to close on the home purchase with remaining items on the punch list. It almost always happens and there is a list of unresolved open issues that are probably OK to proceed to close and have finished/fixed later. But if the list is long or any of the issues are of greater than minor consequence, I recommend insisting they get fixed – even if it means delaying your closing by a day or a couple of days. Once you close on your home purchase, the motivation of your builder moves to the next home to be closed. Instead of fixing your remaining issues within a couple of days, it might be a couple of weeks or even a couple of months.

Also see my related blog post titled 15 Easy-to-Forget Things When Building a Home