Who Will Be Our House Builder: Should We Hire a Contractor or Build Ourselves?

Reader Contribution by Jennifer Kongs
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The Small Home, Big Decisions series follows Jennifer and her husband, Tyler, as they build a self-reliant homestead on a piece of country property in northeastern Kansas. The series will delve into questions that arise during their building process and the decisions they make along the way. The posts are a work in progress, written as their home-building adventure unfolds.

Partly because I work at MOTHER EARTH NEWS where DIY is taken to ultimate and incredible heights, partly because so many of our friends have built or are currently building their homes by hand, and partly because it would be just so cool to build our own home with our own labor and materials from our own property, I kind of felt like a cheater when Tyler and I started talking about hiring a contractor. Neither one of us feels comfortable enough with our building skills to begin the process on our own, and neither of us has the credentials to submit an estimate that the bank would approve for our loan. I know, I know, that whole bank loan bit is really unromantic, but for reasons I’ve already covered, we’re choosing to get a standard mortgage instead of finding financial alternatives. And a huge reason for both choosing a bank and a contractor: time. Call it impatience if you will, but we’ve been ready to move to the country and start our homestead since we started dating 5 years ago — not 5 years from now, which is just an estimate of how long doing less-traditional building could take.

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