The New Home Building Guide

The House Building Guide has been almost a decade in the making. Back in the early 1990’s my wife and I were living in an old Victorian home built in 1888. It was loaded with charm, but short on modern amenities. One day she was taking her winter coats out of a closet where they had been stored over the summer. She discovered, much to her surprise, that the linings of these coats were covered with mold. Within two days she had moved out; she is extremely allergic to molds and was having some health problems at the time. She moved in with her parents and I was left to sell the house, which I was fortunately able to do in a few weeks.

We began looking for a house to buy. After some amount of looking and discussion we agreed that we would instead, build a house. Unwittingly, the saga that would lead to the publication of this guide had begun. We went through all of the normal steps of buying land, designing the house, selecting a builder, securing financing, overseeing the building process, and finally 17 months later, after taking our builder to small claims court, we moved in.

Homes Built By Purchasers of the House Building Guide

More pictures….

Thankfully we did a lot of things correctly. But, unfortunately there were many things we should have done differently. As soon as we had finished the process I wrote about 9 pages of notes for myself to use when we built our second house. About this time a baby came into our lives and my notes went into a file and stayed there for more than six years.

The Internet had blossomed during those six years and I recognized the potential value of the education I had received in the “school of hard knocks”. At the same time I was somewhat uncomfortable with presenting myself as an expert in the area of house building. I decided to see what information was available. I went first to the Internet and bought almost every new house building guide I could find and read them. I was quite surprised at what I found. The information fell into two basic groups. One group provided only a general overview of the home building process, with a few checklists and timetables, but overall was really pretty useless. The second group attempted to teach consumers how to be the GC and save money by taking on the role of a builder. Next I went to Amazon.com and bought several books on building a new home. Once again I found that many of these were written by builders. And once again I found that, while there was some good information in these, none of them contained what I considered to be the most critical information, i.e. how to save thousands of dollars when building a new home without being the GC. In my mind this was the most critical detail and no one was writing from that perspective.

Having finally convinced myself that the information I had compiled was important, generally unavailable elsewhere, and could save the homeowner a bundle, I made the decision to write the House Building Guide.

Saving Real Money

The House and Home Building Guide will show you how to save thousands of dollars on your building project. If you are building an average sized house in the U.S. (~$150,000) you should be able to save $5000-$10,000 or about 5-10% of the construction costs of your home. The best part is that you can realize these types of savings without being the General Contractor (GC) on your house building project. This is an extremely important point because being the GC on a house is almost a full time job - and few people today have that amount of free time. Furthermore, even if you were one of the lucky few who had the time, without the practical experience, you would have a very difficult time managing the process. For most people the bottom line is that a builder, whom you hire, will be responsible for all of the nitty gritty details of getting the house built - not you. He is your house building expert and you should use him for his expertise.

This House Building Guide walks you through, step-by-step, and shows you exactly what you need to do to save money. But it goes well beyond that, by incorporating the logistics of how you save this money into an example set of specifications and an example contract. What you get then, is not just a single document - but 11 documents -- a complete house building kit:

	View the Table of Contents
The House Building Guide Sample Building Contract Example Specification Healthy House Building Tips House Building Time Line House Building Task List A Complete Set of House Plans Credit Prequalification Tool House Building Newsletter Mortgage Pre-Approval Home Energy Report and Checklist

By putting into practice the tips in the House Building Guide you should easily save 50 fold the purchase price. In fact if you followed through on just one of the money savings tips contained in the Guide, you would pay for its cost many times over. This analysis doesn’t even take into consideration the value of the many convenience tips. What else could you ask for? Here is a quick look at just a few of the other things contained in the Guide.

Insider Secrets – What Builders Don’t Want You To Know

Here are eight things your builder would prefer you didn’t know. Once you read the Guide you will understand why:

	Why builders love change orders and why it is so critical that you have as few of these as possible.		Why all warranties are not alike and what kind of warranty you must avoid.
	Why homeowners have the leverage in the building process.		How to achieve “apples to apples” comparability when requesting bids from builders.
	Two things you can do yourself and save money.		Five things you can delay or postpone if you are running short on money.
	Why your specifications must be as detailed as possible.		Twelve (12) major items on which you can easily avoid a builder’s markup.

What Home Owners Must Know About Builders

The vast majority of people can’t do it all themselves. A good builder is indispensable. This Guide can help you find one and show you:

	Why you need a good builder.
	Why 98% of people shouldn’t be their own GC.
	How to choose a builder.
	What questions to ask when interviewing a builder.
	How to audit a prospective builder’s construction site.

Learn From My Mistakes, Don’t Repeat Them

The House Building Guide is packed with dozens of money saving and convenience tips and practical advice. Get educated before jumping into the building process or your ignorance could cost you big bucks. Here is some additional information you will find in the Guide:

	The best and easiest way to develop your floor plan.		Twenty-nine convenience tips that could save you thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours over a lifetime.
	Why the right credit card is important and how it could save you hundreds of dollars.		How a call to your local electrical utility might pay for the cost of this Guide 5-10 times over.
	Which clauses are important in a house building contract.		An easy way to enforce your contract if the builder doesn’t live up to his end of the bargain.
	How to assemble your punch list.		Thirty (30) important questions to examine when buying land.
	How to easily check if land is near an environmentally contaminated site.		Why a credit check on both yourself and your prospective builder is important.

Special Bonus #1 - 2001 Pricing in 2006

$20 Savings

It has been five years since we first started selling Guide. Since that time we have continually updated and added to the information. In fact, we have added five new documents and tools to the Guide within the last few months, yet the price remains the same as it was five years ago, $29.95 for the downloadable version. Our nearest competitors are charging from $47-69, and quite frankly, sometime later this year we are going to raise the price to at least $47 to match our competitors.

The implementation of just one of the money savings tips discussed in the Guide could save hundreds of dollars-- and the total value of all the money saving and convenience tips is easily in the thousands.

In addition, all of the other documents that we have bundled with the Guide (described below) have significantly increased the overall value of the Guide. If you were to purchase these documents from other sites on the Internet you would pay more than the $29 cost of the Guide just for a single document. Moreover, some of these documents and tools are not available anywhere else. To give you some idea of what these documents and tools might cost you elsewhere we have provided and estimated savings for each.

I have included with the Guide an example set of specifications and a sample house building contract. Specifications are the details behind the blue prints that define specifically what is to be built. For example, let’s take the doors shown in your house plan. Specifications will tell you what color, size, and materials they are to made from, what kind of hardware they will have, whether they are to be painted, whether they will have door stops - and if they are - what kind of stops these will be. Are you beginning to get the picture? Without good, tight specifications, your builder will have a lot of latitude in deciding how your house will be built, and it’s a good bet that you will not be thrilled with his choices. The example specs included in the Guide will go a long way to making certain you’ve covered all the bases.

Your House Building Contract is similarly important. It should cover all of the many contingencies that might arise in your building project. For example, if the builder is late in finishing your house, and you have to move out of your present one and into a rental apartment, who pays for this, you or your builder? Examples abound, but without a good contract, you builder can get away with much and have little accountability for his actions. Take if from me, this is not something you want to learn the hard way.

Here are just a small sample of important points that need to be in the contract you sign:

Special Bonuses #4 - A Healthy House Primer

The information contained in Healthy House Building Tips will surprise and alarm you. Everyone who is building a new house should be aware of the things contained in this document. For those with allergies, chronic illness, multiple chemical sensitivities, asthma, or respiratory illness this information is absolutely essential. The bottom line is that two trends in house building have converged to make the typical new house constructed today less healthy than it was 50 years ago. These trends are the increasing tendency to use man made materials and the construction of “tighter” homes with less outside air exchange. Did you know that the indoor air quality in most new homes is 5-10 times worse than outdoor air, even in the most polluted industrial areas? That is why the information found in the Healthy House Building Tips document is so important. Here is an example section.

"Perhaps the worst offenders when it comes to building healthier houses are carpets and specifically man-made carpets. They can contain a variety of substances that outgas for many years. These gases are precisely what you are smelling when you enter a carpet store or a newly carpeted room. The many nice features you can purchase for carpeting such as color fastness, stain proofing, fire resistance, etc. are achieved by the use of chemicals. Carpets outgas these chemicals at the highest rates for the first few years but continue slowly for many years thereafter."

The good news is that if you are aware of the air quality problems associated with the normal new house construction project, much can be done to mitigate these problems, and at a reasonable cost.

Special Bonuses #5 - A House Building Time Line

It’s raining cat’s and dog’s and the roof on your new house is only partly finished. Your builder’s sub has been working on this task for a week already, and you don’t know why it’s taking so long. Should it take a week to finish, or longer? Is someone dragging their feet? Should you complain to your builder, since the water’s pouring in on your partially completed house? Our time line will help you answer these questions. We provide you with timelines for four different houses – a ranch and a colonial – and a 1500 and 300 sq ft. home. While certainly not definitive, this timeline gives you a basic understanding of how long certain tasks should take, and armed with this ammunition you can make decisions and take actions – like talking to the builder about WHY it’s taking so long to finish the roof, when it should have been done in three days.