re: Spinoff: What are reasons not to build a house?

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the best contractors are loyal to their customers

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i concur.

You will generally get more house per dollar (i.e. either better class, more heated square feet or both) if you find a house that you're willing to buy, than custom building it yourself.

Plus - once you decide to build a house you are 9 months to 2 years from move in - catch a motivated seller, you can move in as quickly as the day after closing, and typically 4 to 6 weeks is not an uncommon time period - so, a typical experience would be shopping for a house in February/March. Finding the right house, making an offer, negotiating, accepting in April - maybe close at the end of April - you're moved in by the end of June, probably earlier - so 16 weeks from start to finish wouldn't be an outlier.

Deciding to find land, design and build a house can easily last 2 or 3 years (can be much longer), depending on other factors and almost can't be done in less than 1 full year.

This is what I want to know.

After doing years of construction inspection in multiple areas of construction, including residential, I have very little faith in most builders. Incredibly shady stuff goes down in residential construction. It can be shockingly bad. And with my current company, it drives me crazy the things I've seen that I can't do anything about.

If your are spending 200-300k on a house, it's worth another grand to have proper oversight on structural, and particularly, water intrusion issues.

Some builders hire us directly to perform inspections. Mostly because their construction managers only know how to manage the paperwork, but have little to no construction knowledge. That's pretty common amongst the larger builders.

I've just seen a lot of bad construction practices. It gets particularly bad when there's a construction bubble, like we have now in Colorado.

I'm in the process of building a custom home. Almost six months into it and still haven't broken ground. Soon though...,.i hope!

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I'm in the process of building a custom home. Almost six months into it and still haven't broken ground. Soon though...,.i hope!

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A thing I'd recommend doing, is watching them pour the slab. Residential concrete can be absurd with what they'll do. Especially in Louisiana, I'd want to be sure I wasn't getting old concrete.

I'll never forget a job in Florida. It was a neighborhood we were doing regular inspections in. I was walking with the city inspector, checking out several houses for framing. While we are were next to a slab being poured, the driver backs into the garage, over a reinforced thickened edge, bending the rebar into the ground. There's was also a few trucks stacked up.

Of course, we walked over to see what the hell they were doing. I look at the trucks ticket, and it was 2.5 hours old from batch (in the south, it's always a 90 minute spec or less). Because it was so old, they had also added 80 gallons of water (most crews only added 5-10 gallons, and I've never seen more than 30 gallons held back, to allow for a field slump adjustment). They had significantly exceeded the water cement ratio, which can prevents the concrete from reaching its specified psi, and causes shrinkage cracking. It was a disaster.

Obviously, there's plenty of quality homes that are built. I've just seen enough shady work that I'm naturally skeptical.

You have to pick out every fricking knob, faucet, paint color, style of trim; tile and pattern, cabinet wood, style and color; crown molding style, toilet, light fixture, sink, door, shingles, etc.

All that shite takes a ton of time. Some women and gays love it, but most men will eventually come near suicide in the process.

The wife and I built a house and we are still having issues with the builder. DO NOT USE REVE. Complete trash. I would ask several other home people who have used a certain builder and what issues If any did they in countered.

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What are the downsides?

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1. Time
2. Headaches

The advantage: you designed it to fit your needs perfectly. There's nothing better than a custom home.
Oh, and it's brand fricking new.