Building a home and saving money

We married at age 16 and 17 and have been happily married for 35 years. Working hard all of our lives we could not wait until we could build a new home of our own, After 30 years we finally had the opportunity to build a home on 2 acres of  land that we inherited from my husbands parents. In 2007, life had finally given us the break we needed to complete our American Dream, a new home.

The bills were paid off and our credit was great. We both had jobs and my husbands company went from hardly getting by to making a good living. We would do the work of a contractor to save money allowing us to get the extra things we wanted for our new home. Here is the beginning of our story and all the good and bad times that occurred when building our own home. We saved money and I hope to detour you from making the same mistakes we did.


We decided to buy a modular home then add on a room to make it unique. The difference between a manufactured home and a modular home is like the difference between a trailer and a stick built home. The walls of our home were not put together with staples but had sheet rock walls with nails. After several months of looking we finally found the layout we liked and we were ready to move forward. A big difference between a modular home and a manufactured one is we can get refinanced and manufactured homes cannot.


Our land was 20 minutes from the suburbs of Kansas City. We lived in a rural area and it being only 20 minutes to the city we could enjoy the best of both worlds. Being a artist and having the ability to draw out the scaled plans would allow us to save money on an architect. We were off and going and the first goal was to get a permit from the county. This was the beginning of learning the hard lessons of rules and regulations that made having a home seem miles away in the beginning.


Kelly Says, "Stay tuned for the rest of the story of building a home in 2008. I will tell you all the trials and tribulations we experienced as we made the effort to make our American Dream of owning our own home a reality.