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.