Custom Homes are for the Rich

Raise your hand if you've drawn architectural renderings of your dream house on graph paper before. Or maybe mapped out your entire room including your beanbag chair with scale included. My people.

If you're building your own cabin (cottage, house, mansion, space-station...) it's because you have a vision in your head and weren't able to exactly match it out in reality. For me, this was because the right combination of cost, water access, and dwelling didn't exist at the time I was looking for it.

Ideally, I'd work with an architect to shape my graph-paper daydreams into the fully executable drawings and have deep and meaningful discussions about the size of my walk-in closets and listen to them rant for hours about collectivism vs individualism.

Here's some unvarnished truth: fully custom homes are for the rich.

*This isn't a knock on your amazing hand-built camp or that van you turned into a very cool tiny house. I'm talking about a structure that meets environmental, zoning, and development restrictions and will last long enough for your grandkids to inherit. 

I'll take a moment while we all come to terms with that. Or you can fight me in the comments.

Unless you're spending a lot of money, you're probably not getting the completely custom home you drew on your graph paper. At best, and if you have middle or upper-middle-class dough, you're picking from a few pre-created designs from a builder and they're letting you look through a book to choose custom finishes and make changes to those designs. At worst, you're getting an extraordinarily shitty version of your graph-paper house made possible through poor materials and unlicensed labor.

Even with those processes - you're going to pay for design. For hiring an architect, plan 5-12% of the total house cost, but don't plan $0 for the design you pick out of a book either. Here's an overview of the options:

1. Fully custom - plan more than 10% of your project cost for the architect. This site says the national average cost is $40k, but it really depends on project size. Doesn't sound real? Go look at some of the discussions on Houzz, or this guide to architect fees.
2. Pick an existing design and have an architect add features of your custom design and adapt the design to your building site - still going to be expensive, and the expense will be driven mainly be the amount of customization you include.
3. Use an existing design offered by a builder which, even if you accept as-is, will still need to be adapted to your site... Unless you're buying into a pre-planned subdivision and then you don't need any of the information on my blog, but I appreciate you anyway :)

I started out by drawing many designs on graph paper, some inspired by real buildings, and others by fantasies of what an ideal way to move about my house would look like. Needs like easily accessible outdoor spaces, two bathrooms, bedrooms far apart for privacy, and a balcony from which to address the town all featured in my artwork.

Then for more inspiration I looked at hundreds of existing designs on houseplans.com. This helped me get an idea of what possibilities already exist, what's possible with different square footage, and what certain layouts look like from the outside. You can filter really easily by size, floors, beds, baths, and a million other options. Really great website.

Finally, as I started to research builders and understand costs and really started to understand the impact of customization. My process has wound its way through all three options, finally landing on #3 as the most cost effective and time-efficient way. It turns out that the "minimum" path often coincides with the type of standardization needed to produce affordable housing that the market demands.

Which is, funny enough, where I started. This isn't a blog about my journey creating a fully custom cabin or a subdivision model home. It's a blog about creating the minimum building that will serve my purposes, and then expanding or iterating on it over the years.

If you want something beautiful and custom, go talk to these guys (seriously - they're the nicest designer/home-builders I've spoken to and have an earnest desire to build high quality, environmentally responsible, beautiful homes).

And invite me over for your housewarming party because if you can swing a house from them I know you'll be serving the good whiskey.

I'll bring you a spider-plant. Mine just propagated. 

But if you want something minimal, functional, repeatable, and well-made, keep reading.