Building your home (continued)

Make sure you go to the building codes department before you start purchasing a modular or manufactured trailer. Make a list of questions to ask and make sure it is okay to put a modular or manufactured home on the property first. Ask them about all the costs you will need to pay to them for a building permits and miscellaneous costs.

Go on-line and find a punch list if your contracting the building of your own home. This can be very time consuming and a headache so do some research and if you have no education about building a home it may be easier to hire a contractor. This saved us money but we did incur some difficult times even though my husband had built homes for a living. This also came in handy as we were able to add on our own addition.

Adding on an addition has its own set of problems. You must get an engineers stamp when you change the original modular home plans and this can be very expensive. Another important factor to look at is contracts that your subcontractors give you. Read them very carefully and don't take for granted that a good company will always treat you right or a lender will remember everything.

We had a lean out on our home as the company that did our foundation as they forgot to pay the concrete company. We had to pay for the concrete twice before we could close on our home. This did not come up until just before closing on our loan. When trying to find the builder to collect our money back he had went bankrupt and was no where to be found.

This could have been prevented if the lender would have made him sign a mechanics lean releasing us of any responsibility after the job was done. This error cost us more than money. A mechanics lean means the contractor must pay for all the materials or you get what we had here a failure to communicate which equals a extra expense not needed.

As I say you have to dot all your I's and cross all your T's if you know what I mean. They may have been a good company and did a great job but it was not worth the extra cost we were not expecting especially when we wanted to move in. This created a lot of leg work and unwanted stress by this time of building our home. To be continued ...