Ever wondered what it would be like to build your dream custom home...without a builder? That's what I ended up doing in a county with so many regulations (because it’s right next to Washington D.C) that it took TWO YEARS to get permits before we could even begin construction. It also took ONE YEAR to build because we had to end up firing our builder and building the home ourselves. Not only that, we lived on our property in a Tiny Home while it was being built and started raising pigs at the same time! Check out this four part series on building our SIPS Timber Frame Farmhouse straight outta Compton (Road) right here in Northern Virginia.
When we first moved to Virginia, my wife really wanted to start a farm. She always had a dream of living on a farm. I was not too keen on the idea because we just came from Texas where the land was cheap, if anything, that would’ve been the perfect time to buy land! However, as I thought about one of the main the ideas of farm-living: self-sustainability, the idea grew on me. So we started looking at properties with acreage and were also open to the idea of finding land. One day, we found some land in Centreville which was about a mile from where our kids attend school! We were so excited, but it was a bit out of our price range and it was 7 acres, a bit more than we needed. We mentioned that to the owner and he said that he had a smaller 4 acre lot that wasn’t on the market and it was within our price range so we drew up a contract for it shortly after! Next, we had to find a builder. We interviewed several and ended up with a builder who wasn’t familiar with the county permitting process but he made us a lot of promises and he had experience building homes around a Timber Frame. As we started working with him, he was just not on top of the permitting process and so it dragged on for two years before we could even break ground! We stuck with him and hoped that maybe administration wasn’t his forte’ and that his skills would shine in the construction phase. However those mistakes started piling up as well and finally there was just one mistake that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. He messed up on the foundation by not digging the footers deep enough, below the frost depth! Watch this video as I describe some of the mistakes he made on the site.
In three months, we were able to identify and fix most of the problems resulting from our builder, poured our concrete foundation, installed our basement walls and erected our Timber frame. On the farming side, we started to finish up the process of raising our first set of pigs.
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