Building a Home - From the Ground Up

2013 was a CRAZY year for us.

We FINALLY sold our house in Kamloops and 'temporarily' moved in with my folks while we tried to find a place to live. Apparently, we are picker than most, and after looking at 50+ homes in the Fraser Valley, we came to the conclusion that the only way to get what we were looking for was to build it ourselves.

Luckily for us, during our house search we had come across the neighbourhood of our dreams. It had large, forested lots, was just the right distance from town, and in the catchment area for an amazing K-9 school. After second guessing ourselves a couple times, we finally chose one of the 1/2 acre lots in Rose Garden Estates with an amazing view of Mt. Cheam, located in the Rosedale/Popkum area between Chilliwack & Hope (and only 5-10 minutes from our home-towns of Agassiz & Harrison Hot Springs).

SOLD!

This was back in October 2013 & where our house building adventure began!

With a little bit of help from our real estate agent, asking around for advice, and my best friend Google, I figured out that the first steps to building a house are basically as follows:

1) Find a General Contractor  

2) Design the House

3) Hire Engineers

4) Apply for the Building Permit

5) Prep the Lot

The most stressful part of this whole process is that all of those things need to be figured out & completed all at once. You have to have #1-3 completed in order to do #4, and #5 can take a while and should really be started as soon as you have possession of the lot - unless you have to wait for the permit to clear trees, which we luckily did not. However, we did have to wait for the permit before we could move dirt around.

I would HIGHLY recommend finding your general contractor first, so he can help out with the entire design & application process - unfortunately, we didn't. Our amazing contractor, Rick, was basically the last person I personally hired in the process, so I ended up having to find everyone else from the excavators, tree fallers, plan designers, and engineers based solely on recommendations from friends, instead of hiring the contractor first and using who he would normally use and/or recommend. That would have been way easier.

Trees Cleared

Vegetation Cleared

This is where we had to wait for our building permit before we could start digging. I had an excellent drafter, Drew from Ausbridge Design, draw up our plans for us. Here's what we came up with:

Our Future Home!

While we were working on the plans, we hired a Geotechnical Engineer to determine site stability & other soil-related stuff. Once the plans were finalized, I also had to get a Structural Engineer to check them over and do up their drawings. Once the last few items on the application checklist were ready to go, including hiring our contractor, we submitted the permit application and patiently waited until it was finally approved a few weeks later!!

Moving Dirt Around

Adding Gravel

Did you happen to notice the giant hole in the second-to-last photo & the amount of gravel it took to fill that hole in the last image? This is how fast you can blow your budget. Seriously. It took over 150 loads of gravel to fill that hole (14 feet deep in the back), and considering it had to be engineered gravel for the footings to go on it, those loads were $150 a pop. That's on top of the $120/hr for each excavator. We spent more on dirt & gravel than on any other single item on the whole budget, other than the lot itself (including what it will cost for us to finish the entire basement). I'm a little bitter, and more than a little peeved that the original estimate was as far off as it was.

Whew. I forgot how exhausting and stressful that time was.

Check back soon for the next post - I'll be showing off the foundation (boring) & the exterior colour palette (yaay!).

Lauren