Building a home on pylons

It’s funny you posted this, I’m currently doing the same thing. I’m going 9’ up. My builder said if you get dirt hauled in, it’s ridiculously expensive. After 2019 there’s some kind of law about hauling in fill. If your property is big enough you can dig a pond and use that dirt. Building a small pad then slab and piers is the cheapest option in a flood zone.

I built a house on concrete pilings 9 years ago. Nobody is using wood pilings here anymore. The house is 15 feet above grade. The cost for the pilings was around $70k for a 1,900 ft2 house. That includes a few test borings to see what was below (mostly sand with a little crumbly limestone). An engineer designed the pilings to match the layout of the house and they range from 30 feet down to 55 feet down. The layout of the house is 40x40 because the longest span is 20 feet. I picked 15 feet up because that gets me to the lowest possible flood insurance cost. I can't imagine that building up dirt would be cost effective. The house came out great (it's in a VE flood zone so the land was cheap and it was easy to buy some acreage). I built a wrap around porch (85% of the perimeter, anyway) and I love walking around and enjoying the view. One bonus is that insects mostly don't come up that high, and after a year I ripped out the screening on a screen porch I had included. My builder told me to expect a piling house to cost about 20% to 25% more and he was on the money. All in, the house was around $165 per square foot but I built just before prices escalated and I'm not sure I could do it for $250 per square foot today.

You should probably first learn the difference between pylons and pilings!

Ouch. Yeah I messed that up.