Honestly, this and financing are what give me the biggest heartburn at night. Damn is budgeting hard. Peter here!
Designing new products or being an early adopter of new products is expensive. Particularly if the products are bucking long-standing trends, they can both be a financial headache and a regulatory one. As an easy example, our thicker straw bale walls necessitated us asking for setback variances (to avoid shrinking our living space) and a lot of extra hurdles to ensure the building officials were comfortable with the safety of straw bale construction. Being on an urban lot also means that our project has more regulation (higher permit fees), stricter work standards, and tighter lots. The last part has a tendency to naturally drive up prices because it is inconvenient to even get to where we want to build. Minnesota additionally has strict rules on electricians that also drives up prices. Lump all of these pieces into wanting natural materials, often only found with speciality vendors or from abroad, and the price tag can explode in a hurry. There is no way to hide the fact that this is an expensive project. We are building our dream house that we plan on being in for however many years we are lucky enough to be around for. Balancing that long-term nature with the nearer-term concern of needing to pay for this project has been a challenge. We also quite frankly didn’t realize how much permits, architects, site prep work (tree clearing, Xcel line burial, etc.) and design consulting was going to cost. When it is all said and done, the full cost of this house will be almost as much as we spent to purchase the triplex on the front of the lot. That has been a brutal realization for me. We started with a budget of $300,000 for this project. Once we had picked out the materials that we wanted to use (eco-conscious, avoiding fossil fuel products as much as possible, lots of European elements, etc.), it quickly became clear that we wouldn’t even be close to this. We paused the project for a year to figure out what a more realistic budget would be, what compromises we were willing to make (if any), and if we could make all the money line up (financing post upcoming). In the end, we decided to build the house with very few compromises on materials. There are some that we can’t get around for building code reasons (drywall underneath the roof for fire code or the 6 mm polyethylene layer that we had to put underneath our foundation for radon protection), but we decided to follow a German phrase: wenn schon, denn schon. This translates roughly to “if you’re going to do it, do it fully.” As embarrassing as it will be if we have to delay this project by another year to pay for this, we are building a long-term home and want to do it right. This clearly shows a level of privilege on our part and we acknowledge that and know that it won’t be the case for most folks, but we wanted to at least be open about our thought process in our blog. If you can’t be honest in a lower readership blog, where can you be honest? Will this decision stop me from having period panic attacks about where the money will come from? Absolutely not! Once financing closes, though, I will certainly breathe easier. More to come on that front!
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AuthorKatie Jones and Peter Schmitt chronicle their building adventure. Archives
January 2024
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