And so it Begins!

Show me the man who has watched "This Old House" for a season who has not been intrigued by the idea of building his own house? I have seen lots of people on that show (who had less skills than I have) take on the task and come up with a house that fits their every desire. Of course having the TOH team there to help would be a big plus. But I thought we could do it ourselves; after all, I'm a handy guy. Flora and I had been looking for the perfect building lot for years when we finally found one that fit all of our requirements:

• Big mature hardwood trees
• An open south-facing exposure to allow use of solar features
• A south-facing hillside that would allow a walk-out basement
• A large open space for gardening
• A location close enough to town for convenience but far enough away to avoid the noise of a city
• A lot that would not allow anyone to build next door
• Surrounded by nice houses
• A lot of at least 2 acres
• No restrictive covenants that limit what I can do on my own land
• No nearby high tension power lines or cell towers
• The lot had to be affordable

It was a long list and we looked at plenty of them. There was a building boom on and developers were snapping up the good lots quickly and driving the price higher and higher. I had never looked at building sites in the United States (we already had our lot in Nova Scotia) so it was a learning process. Anything within close proximity to Chapel Hill was outrageously expensive and the ones that were not had inherent problems. We found one on Daisy Lane in 2005 that looked pretty good and put an offer on it, The lot was 2.5 acres and they would not budge from the listed $50,000 asking price. We decided that if everything was perfect with the lot it would be worth the money so we agreed to the price, but only if the land would perc.

For you city-dwellers who do not know about perc tests, please allow me to explain. Out in the country, away from city water and sewer systems, each house usually has its own well and septic system. The prevailing municipality (in this case, Orange County) is responsible for ensuring that these systems are in compliance with all of the rules and for testing the soil to make sure that liquids will percolate through them adequately. That is called a perc test. Generally, lots that don't perc cannot generally be used for building and are therefore worth a lot less money than lots that perc. The size of a septic field is loosely based on the number of people who will live in the house and they base that on how many bedrooms a house will have. In the case of the house I wanted to build on Daisy Lane, I stipulated in the purchase agreement that it must perc for a 4 bedroom house. Unfortunately, the perc test results said that there was only one small area on the lot that would suitable for a septic field and it was only large enough to support a 3 bedroom house, the owner refused to reduce the price, so I backed out of the sale.

We looked at more lots and it was a year later that my friend Chuy (owner of Chapel Hill's famous Fiesta Grill Restaurant) told me that the restaurant's landlord had called him and was subdividing the ten acre lot the restaurant was on and selling off part of it to raise some cash. Chuy and I took a walk into the woods there one spring morning and I loved it! We had a tough time getting through the thickets, but it had everything on my list. Chuy was looking for a house at the time but was not interested in the lot. Flora and I took out a loan and made the deal. A year later we had 1/2 acre cleared for a house and a road put in and after that, a well was drilled. I also had the big logs from trees that were cut down milled into lumber. All of those things were documented here: http://www.cardcity.com/nchome/index.htm.

In that same time-frame I had fallen in love with timberframed houses. I love the big beams and the large open spaces they create. We looked at a lot of them and went to some timberframe home shows and after comparing them with the conventionally-build homes we had seen, we decided that only a timberframe would do for us. The problem was that they were inordinately expensive, even if you keep down the number of luxury features. I decided that maybe a reclaimed frame (rather than I newly manufactured one) would be the way to go so I started looking around and ended up finding one on Ebay. I drove up to Pittsburgh to look at at it, liked it, bought it, and had it trucked down. We had an architect design us a house around it and prepared to build our dream house. I even submitted a plan and a copy of our blueprints to "This Old House" to see if they were interested in participating; they do one build up north each year and another in a more southerly (warmer) location. I never heard back from them.

South-facing view

2-car garage and walk-out multipurpose room

1st floor decks, great room, and  master BR suite

Unfortunately, my employer at the time (IBM) decided at about that same time that they could get a couple of Chinese writers to do the work I was doing and save some money in the transaction to I was laid off just before we broke ground. (Remember back when commies were bad, bad, bad, back before mega-corporations decided how to ship all of the jobs over to Communist China to save them money?) As we had driven around this country a decade earlier we had seen the closed factories and the ghost towns from coast to coast that had resulted from corporate outsourcing and now it was going to take away OUR dream (rather than the dreams of somebody else). With no income stream that was the end of the timberframe dream.

Last fall though, I did some figuring and decided that maybe we could find a house somewhere to buy. Now that prices had fallen a little made me think that the timing might be right. We found a realtor, defined the parameters of what we wanted, and started looking at used homes. Unfortunately, you don't get much these days for $250K, especially if you want it to include 2+ acres. We looked at used houses through much of the winter but in the end it became clear that the only way to get what we wanted was to build it ourselves. So with the help of an engineer who eventually used CAD to put my ideas on paper, we designed a house that had much of the look and feel of the timberframe house we had designed earlier, but using conventional framing methods. What we ended up with gave us a 3 BR/3 bath passive solar house with a walk-out basement, and a great room with 25 foot ceilings and my numbers show that we can build it for about $100K less than the timberframe. My plan was to keep the footprint fairly small, gain the basement space (fairly cheap space to build), make the house as energy efficient as possible, and save money by being my own general contractor.

Guest BR, office, and loft

Our building permit was issued on 04/05/2011 and our owner/builder experience has begun! I have gotten bids for several of the tasks and have met a lot of nice people. Stay tuned for chapter 1 - excavation.