We are land owners!

Yay! Our land closed today, so we are officially land owners. Here is how things sit:

Land has an approved septic design. Water hookup has been paid and we have conduit for water, power, cable and telephone to the building site. This morning I just sent check to the designer for our floorplans.

I will state again how nice it was that so much of our utility stuff for the land was done. If you are in the market for raw land (not building in a development) try if you can to find land that has that work done.  If you are score a driveway like we did, awesome. Those are expensive, require permits and will affect the total run off of your build if you are doing the driveway at the same time of your build (you can only create so much impervious surface before an engineer must be called in and if your driveway is in before your build, the driveway square footage does not count as an impervious surface because it is already in place. If you have a long driveway you need to put in, that alone can eat up your allowable impervious surface and engineers are expensive!).

I am going to open with our budget here because I really want this blog to help someone else who wants to build fully understand the costs (not including land).

So far we have spent:

$1360 on septic submittal
$1138 deposit for architectural drawings

Coming up:
$1138 remaining payment on drawings
$750 to for an engineer to look at/approve the drawings
$900 for property taxes on the land due in October
$4,000 for building permit (we will hopefully have this refunded by our construction loan)

Then we will get our loan- hoping to stay in the $300,000-$310,000 for construction costs- and that will pay for everything else besides landscaping.  We are building a 1,800 square foot one level home with a 350 square foot bonus room above the girls bedrooms. We are not building a garage (we will build a garage with a mother-in-law apartment down the line).

Had we not had all of the utility and driveway stuff done, that would have cost us an additional $15,000+ out of pocket BEFORE we even began to build. Not to mention 6+ months of time for permits/work. Our land closed in just over 45 days.