Context

Big gap between the first and subsequent posts, and realising there is no context for what we're building I'll go into some detail.

The site is approx 1 Acre, heavily sloped. We have a perfect entrance already for us. The house is going to be almost exactly in the middle of the rectangular site (long edge running downhill). House will end up being about 509m2 or approx. 5500 sqft so a big house to get my teeth into! It's on family land and we're planning to live out the rest of our hopefully long lives there, if we do end up leaving for a time it won't be sold.

So the challenge is to build this in an economic time where lending is at rock bottom, the threat of job redundancies faces everyone and basically money is tight. The plans were made in slightly better times shall we say, but if we are careful and tighten down on everything we should be able to complete. The result is that we have to go the direct labour route, hiring all the contractors ourselves rather than a turnkey builder delivery. Naturally, there are gaps between what contractors do which need to be filled by yours truly, hopefully with a little help from friends, family and neighbors!

Planning went well - kudos to our architect whom I'd highly recommend for anyone. We got through with reasonable conditions and no objections. We both really love the house on paper, and are excited about starting to see it develop.

So a number of construction challenges to be overcome, a non-traditional construction methodology (ICF), and my own desire to ensure that we do it the right way - i.e. not follow the herd but understand what we're putting into the house and why. I'd like to say best practice but in reality that means different things depending on what outcome best means to you.

Time lines are estimated about a year but we have no strict deadline for a finish time. Sooner is better but only from our own desires to move into it and settle into the community. The downside of it is that its easy to let things slide a bit and maybe I'll revisit a plan to get a closer end-date, the real issue with doing that is that I'm not sure how long each part takes so it would be a heavy estimate. The first milestone is really to get weather-tight by Autumn so that internal trades can continue in bad and colder weather. The only outstanding item with that is the windows - primarily the colour but we don't yet need to order that.