31 Days of Building a Home - Scheduling

 

We have quickly learned that building a house does not always go along with your timeline. Once we obtained permits to build, we had the soggiest summer in the history of Georgia. It rained nearly every day in July. 

This slowed down our early building tremendously. It also added to our cost because we had to bring in special cement trucks to pour the foundation and walls since the ground was so wet.

It is important to take everything day by day because so much of the building process is out of your control. Contractors tend to move at their own pace and this can be extremely frustrating when everything else is waiting for one person to do their job. Scheduling everything in order and knowing what is needed in order to move along in the process is crucial. As I mentioned before, we are no home building experts, but we have learned a thing or two about the order of building. Below are steps to building a home. Some of them can be reversed or done at the same time, but this gives you a general idea. 

1. Marking where the house will go on your lot - To do this we took our plans out on our property and laid out how big the house would be with stakes, then we moved the stakes around until we liked the placement of the house. I am sure there is a more high tech way to do this, but it was simple and it worked. 

2. Clearing and grading - This is when our lot was smoothed out a bit and the basement was dug. 

3. Footings - Footings took a few days to complete. First the company came out and laid out where the footings would go, then came back a few other times (in between rain storms) to pour the cement.

Footing Inspection

4. Plumbing in the slab - This is the first portion of plumbing that the rest of the house will hook up to later on. If you are on a slab it has to be done first since the cement will be poured around it. If not you will have to cut through the slab to install. 

Plumbing Inspection

5. Ordering temporary power, water, trash service for debris and portable toilet-

6. Slab, basement and garage foundation - This portion should normally only take a few days, but ours was extended due to rain.

Inspection

7. Framing - This took about 2 weeks. We had great framers that were super fast.

Framing Inspection

8. Roof - This step can probably fluctuate with the next few steps, but we wanted ours on ASAP after all of the rain we had.

9. Doors and Windows - The doors and windows have to be hung before the trim and siding can be done. We had our windows installed and then changed our mind on the doors, this added an additional week of waiting before we could get siding on the house.

10. Trim and Siding - This only took a few days, but it makes the house feel like it is finally coming together! We also had brick columns installed under the porch and around the sides during this time.

11. Rough ins for plumbing, HVAC, and electrical - We had the plumbing completed while the siding was going up. The electrical needed to wait until we had all of the doors and windows  were installed. We decided to wait because the neighbor had seen people going in the house at night with flashlights (most likely looking for copper to steal). The HVAC guy was one of those contractors that was on his own time schedule, so we had to wait.

12. Fireplace - (Where we are currently) This could have been done already, but we had been comparing prices.  

Rough Inspection

13. Insulation -

14. Drywall -

15. Hardwood Floors - 

16. Trim 

17. Painting (Interior and Exterior)

18. Cabinets

19. Tiling and Counter tops

20. Final Plumbing, HVAC and Electrical

21. Carpet Installation

22. Landscaping & Driveway

23. Final inspection and mortgage closing

A few of these final steps may end up moving around towards the end. If they do, I will come back and change the order.