Why we decided to build instead of buy.

It is amazing how you can have one set of plans and something can happen that changes your plans and sets another into motion. A little over a year ago my husband and I started looking for a home to buy. We don't want to spend more than we pay in rent and what we were finding in our price range was really sad. I know many places around the country housing is a lot more than what it is here in Indiana but I didn't want to spend $70K-$80K and still have to put $30K-$40K into it to make it livable. Sadly that is all we were finding. As around here unless you are an investor you never get the chance to even bid on the good properties that have come up. They get listed pending as the realtors call their investors before their other clients.

We looked at every available property and even upped our price range and wasn't finding what we wanted. Then I came across a listing for a vacant piece of land, price too good to be true, so I was like why is this price so cheap. A little research I discovered years and 4 owners ago the land was owned by a corporation and corporations are charged a higher tax rate, no one bothered to fix it after it was sold to individuals. Land is normally expensive where I live as I don't live that far away from Indianapolis 1/4 acre lot typically sells for $22,000. We picked up 1.53 acres for less than asking price of $10,900, and we went and got the taxes fixed.

above two photos are from google earth

But before we put an offer on the land we had to see could we afford to build. Traditional site build homes were out of budget, we don't want to be house poor, just because you can get the loan doesn't mean you should. So I started looking at modular homes as they are stick built homes done in the factory at 20-30% cheaper than site build ones. And that was the plan.

Then our landlords told us they are selling our house. Apparently they have a restrictive FHA that doesn't allow them to rent the house out for any reason, the bank found out so they have to move back into it or sell it or the bank is going to sue for breech of contract and take the house back. (I have no clue if that is the true story or not) but now we don't have the time we thought we had.

So we looked at renting some place else. And I have to say I got sticker shock, rent has gone up $200 more a month than what rent prices were just 4 years ago when we rented this house. Okay not such a big deal for 12 months in the scheme of things, but we have another problem we have 3 dogs and 2 cats and we could only find one person that would rent to us and they wanted a $1150 non refundable pet deposit plus an $895 deposit plus $895 a month in rent.

At this point I looked at my husband and said why don't we just do a manufactured home, we can get one for what a car costs and it will be a lot cheaper. We can be in the home by the time we have to be out of here, and we won't be wasting money. The company that was going to being doing our modular also sells manufactured homes and they will buy the home back off of us in a few years if we decide to go ahead with out modular build.

Also since we no longer have small kids at home and our baby is about to fly the nest. We may decide that a manufactured home is just fine. We are putting it on foundation, we have upgraded the studs to 2x6 and upgraded the windows to traditional windows, shoot the only reason it is still a manufactured home is because of the title and it won't have dry wall. To me that isn't that big of a deal and since we did the other upgrades we could always upgrade the inside later instead of going into debt for a modular. I don't really care about the home I live in, I wanted this property for the land and the woods.

This above photo is the house we are having put on our land. We are having it put on a crawlspace foundation (just in case we decide to do a modular build later) We also plan to have a steel garage built, as they are less than 1/2 the cost as a traditional one. We plan to do a green house. raise a few chickens. some rabbits and a small seasonal garden. I also plan to covert an Amish storage barn into a photo studio and though I will do location shoots, I have the perfect location for outdoor woods photo shoots right on my land.