Why build?

From the beginning the idea of building a house has been on the table. This is probably the only way we’ll get something very close to what we really want in a house. Of course…the cost of building is substantial, not to mention the hassle. Everyone I’ve ever known who has built their own house has told me what an unbelievable pain in the ass it is. It doesn’t exactly sell one on the idea, however, the more we look at the inventory that’s available the more we keep getting pushed down that path.

We have seen a few decent places, but there’s always that one thing that sort of screws them up for us. One of the first days we seriously looked we saw a nice house in a really nice area in Columbia City. Most of the attributes were close enough to be workable, and the price was right. It was marked way down because the people had already moved and the new job one of them got was going to cover the short sale of the house. But the one big snafu for us was the master bedroom closet was much too small. Just not usable at all in my opinion, and the way the house was laid out there just wasn’t any way to fix this. We thought about making an offer, but we had just begun looking and felt we could find something more to our liking. It sold a few days later.

There’s another good one available now in a nice neighborhood.

Most of the rooms are configured in a way we like, or at least in a way that with some construction would be workable, and it backs up to a nice pond with a walk out basement. Very nice. The problem is it’s located close enough to where we live now that it would only shave 10 minutes off of Liane’s drive time. Hardly seems worth it, even though it’s a short sale and a really great price. We haven’t written it off.

It always seems like it’s just that one thing that kills some of them for us, which keeps pushing us back toward building.

I’ve been reluctant to push down the building path because it seems like it would be so much more expensive given the current housing market “in these economic times.” (Boy, there is a phrase I am really sick of hearing.) While house prices may be depressed, the cost of building one is what it is. Nobody is going to take a loss on building a house, so relatively speaking you’d think it would cost a lot more to do that right now. But it doesn’t seem like house prices are all that depressed in the FW area. My experience has been that Fort Wayne doesn’t seem to boom or bust like a lot of the rest of the country. Everything stays about the same. The house I live in has hardly appreciated in value over the last 14 years. There are a few houses that are in duress for one reason or another, so there are a few good deals out there, but for the most part I have not been impressed with the pricing…again pushing us toward building our own.