I want more people building homes, planting trees, and starting homesteads to be able to afford professional guidance so they end up with more sustainable results. Efficient structures and landscapes benefit us all in more ways than are initially apparent, but building anything these days is expensive. One of the things that was frustrating about building our homestead was the unavailability of cost estimates. Further down below are some numbers for you to consider if that’s your thing.
When We Were In Your Shoes
Liz and I moved to Vermont in 2017 and rented an apartment in Montpelier while we looked for land to build on or a home to buy out in the country. After a couple of months with a realtor, we realized buying an existing home wasn’t a good fit for us. We wanted a well sited, high performance home close to Liz’s work. We hired a local design/build firm to help refine the house plans I had drawn and aid in evaluating potential properties. After a month or two, we’d spent thousands of dollars, didn’t have a parcel of land, didn’t have house plans, and hadn’t made any inroads on improving the design of our home. The designers I was working with were expensive and the communication wasn’t adequate to make progress. It was as if they had all of this knowledge but would only share a potential solution if I suggested it first. We wrote them a check, thanked them for their time, and I set off to find the land and design a home on my own.
After a couple more months it became clear that if we wanted to find a piece of land and design a home, the work needed to be more than a casual weekend hobby. I quit my job and made looking for land my full time gig. Since then I have been evaluating parcels for homesteads, designing homes, building homes, designing food forests, planting and tending to trees, and reading any books I can find on these topics.
Why Not Work Alone?
If you want to go-it alone more power to you. All I ask is that you call me and tell me what you’re plan is so I can tell you some of the mistakes we made that are pertinent to your situation (no charge). I respect people’s willpower to do things themselves. My goal is to give you as much (or as little) support as you need to help you accomplish whatever you want to achieve. Sometimes that may be a single site consultation and some quick schematic designs. Other times it might be a full set of construction documents or a master site plan with years of plantings. Maybe it’s a conversation to help you resolve what exactly it is you want to achieve. While the work is hard, sometimes the hardest part of this stuff is figuring out exactly what that work may be.
Why Not Work With Someone Else?
I am not a licensed Architect or Landscape Architect. I hold a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering. I believe that a persons education (formal or not) influences how they solve problems. I solve problems like an engineer: analytically, efficiently, and economically. That said, I don’t sacrifice form for function without a second thought. When I was a professional brewer I came to realize that art can be found in all things (beer in that case) and I have applied that principle to my work ever since.
I respect Architects, I work with them, and I understand why they charge the rates they do. Trying to realize someone else’s vision is not easy. Typically the architectural design of a home will end up accounting for around 10% of the total construction cost. In 2023 the median price of a new home was $616,000. At the same time, the median household income in Vermont was $74,000. So to get the average Architect to design you the average home in Vermont would cost you about 83% of and average Vermonter’s salary.
This arrangement works for some folks and they end up with beautiful homes. My goal is to provide the same quality of design services to people who can’t afford an architect. I do this by charging a reasonably low hourly rate ($50/hr), only providing the design services a client needs, and leveraging my experience from building homes to save money on construction costs. The last home I designed I worked with the clients off and on over the course of 7 months iterating through 4 different designs of their home until we had a full set of construction documents and a detailed estimate of construction costs. They took these documents to the bank, secured and loan, and now they are building their home. The whole process cost them $7675. This is still a lot of money but I would wager the design will pay for itself through labor and materials savings during construction.