Choosing a Homebuilder and Designing a House Plan

We found the land we had been searching for and it came time to design a house plan and choose a homebuilder. One of the biggest surprises in designing our dream home was the amount of time it took to finalize the house plan. The first step we took was to research the homebuilders in the Gainesville, Texas area. We surfed the Internet, contacted Realtors and questioned area construction lenders to find respected and dependable homebuilders. We began communicating with one of the builders we found in July. We started finding home plans on the web and then we told the builder what modifications we wanted to make. It was a process that involved numerous meetings. We discovered that we kept getting new ideas that we wanted to include in the house plan. The builder had a draftsman draw the original rough draft and then, after we had a meeting with the builder, the draftsman would make modifications to the plans and then we would review them. This usually resulted in making more changes, which caused additional editing of the plans by the draftsman. The draftsman charged by the hour, so each change and redrawing of the plan became an additional expense. We knew that his fee was $50 an hour.

After we finalized the house plan, (We were now in Sept.) the builder prepared a price bid for constructing our home. The builder had a reputation of building a very high quality home. His bid to build our house was $30 to $40 a square foot more than what we had budgeted to pay. While he attempted to make changes to reduce the price, we contacted a second builder. This builder also had a reputation of building a quality home. I even had a good friend of mine whose father and mother in law were in the process of using this builder to build a new home. It was the second time they had used the builder and they spoke highly of him. The good thing about this builder is that his lumber supplier was also a draftsman. If we decided to use the new builder, the draftsman would not charge for drawing the house plans if he received the lumber order for building the house. We began to meet with the second builder and came up with a plan we liked and he submitted a bid to us. His price per square foot was within our budget and we decided to use him to build our house. We let the first builder know that we decided to go with another builder and we paid his draftsman for the work he had done.

Here is the front elevation of the plan we chose.
Here is a picture of a house that is very similar to what our house will look like.We would have been confident to choose either of these builders, but we had to decide if we wanted a Rolls Royce or very nice Ford. We are conservative by nature and we decided a Ford would do just fine. I will tell you that we had originally planned on trying to limit our house to being 2,300 to 2,500 square feet of living area, but ended up with about 2,900 square feet. This increased our overall cost.

One of the things that Debbie has always wanted is a wrap-around front porch. We almost decided to not include the wrap-around portion of the porch to save money, but this will probably be our last home and we decided to get what we wanted. We did save money by going with stained concrete floors in the kitchen and great room instead of carpet, wood or tile. It will be interesting to see how they look.

One of the ongoing lessons we are learning is to make sure that we get at least two bids for work that we need to have done. We saved money on home construction, fence building and land clearing by getting multiple bids.

We have just completed the process of having the slab poured. Here are some pictures showing the different stages of preparing the lot and pouring the slab.

We will document each phase of construction in this blog. We will also describe the process of how we chose a lender for our interim construction loan.

Naming, Fencing and Land Clearing Decisions

Wow, a dream come true and an unpainted canvass to create a new work of art. So how did we come up with the “Oakie Nokey Farm” name? By a strange coincidence, Debbie and I had imaginary friends when we were very young. No, we did not know each other until we were in our 20’s, so there was not any common influence to conjure these friends. Deb’s imaginary friend’s name was Oakie and my imaginary friend’s name was Nokey. It occurred to us that “Oakie Nokey Farm” would be an appropriate name for our property.

We purchased 9 acres that was previously part of a 15 acre tract. The front of the property had a nice pipe fence on it, but it extended past our side boundary line and there was not a gate to get to our property. There was a gate located just past our side boundary line. The gate originally provided access to the original 15 acre tract and now only gave access to the remaining 6 acres that we did not purchase. We knew that we needed to have a gate installed in the pipe fence and we needed a new barbed wire fence running along the side boundary. We also had some wooded areas that we wanted to have thinned out. We proceeded to get names of fence contractors and clearing contractors. I felt a little bit like Mr. Douglas from the old Green Acres t.v. show. We asked the Realtor that was involved with our purchase if she knew any quality contractors and she provided us with some names. It became very apparent that the contractors did not rely on the internet to create business, so we had to rely on getting names from people who had knowledge of potential contractors. We also found someone to mow our pastures. He also provided names of fence and clearing contractors. It was surprising how much price difference there was in the quotes we were given. It was evident that we should always get multiple bids. After reviewing the bids, we chose our contractors and within a few weeks we had our new gate, barbed wire fence and the tree thinning was completed.

I purchased a gas chain saw for me and a small cordless electric chain saw for Debbie. We began doing additional thinning of wooded areas on the weekends.

We soon had two enormous piles of trees, brush and limbs. I had originally looked into having this material hauled off, but the locals and contractors all indicated that we just needed to do a “burn”. Wholly Molley, that placed a little fear in my heart to have large fires on our new land.

I called the county fire department and they said that I should do the burn on a day that had little or no wind and preferably after a light rain. They also requested that I contact the county Sheriff’s department when I started the burn. I found a website that tracked and forecasted wind speed and direction, which helped me decide when the time was right to start the burn. I asked two of my sons, Bryan and Chris, to help tend the fires. Chris brought his girlfriend, Naomi. After we contacted the Sheriff’s department, we started each burn pile at different times so we were not watching two blazes at once. We let the first fire die down before we started the second fire. We used diesel fuel to start the burn because it does not flare up like gasoline.

Before the day was over, the burn piles were burned to the ground and our first burn was a success.

Have You Dreamed of Finding Land and Building Your Dream Home?

This blog will document our expericence of looking for a beautiful tract of land and the steps we are taking to build a home on it. Here is a picture of the property that we had long been searching for.

We had been searching in North and East Texas to find what we were looking for in a piece of property. We wanted a combination of mature woods, a pond and some open pastures. We had actually given up hope that we would find what we were looking for. For some reason, my lovely wife, Debbie, decided to search http://www.realtor.com/ in the Gainesville, Texas area. This was a new area for us to explore. Deb sent the listing information to me via email on a Thursday and when I saw the listing info on it, I immediately contacted the Realtor who had the listing and requested more information. We drove out to see it on the following Sunday. Within 5 minutes of actually seeing this property, I knew that we had found our land. Here is a picture of Debbie just minutes after we had started walking the property for the first time.

That is Debbie with her hands lifted up to signal that we had "found it!" We submitted an offer to buy it that night. We closed within 10 days and the land was ours.

In the following posts we will describe the process of getting bids on land clearing and fence building. We will also discuss what it took to get water and electricity to our building site. We were fortunate that we had two options on public water and that we had a power line running across a part of our property. We will also share our experience with deciding on a home builder and how we decided on our building plans.

The next post will be "What Do We Do With it Now?" which will also include why we are calling it "Oakie Nokey Farm".