We sold first. That gave us our down and cleared our debt sheet, also gave me priority on the build without having to worry about loose ends. We did rent an apartment in the interim.
Good luck, keep the dream going.

We just listed our home here, too. I don't want to do the long distance build. We also need to see how much money we will have to play with from this one. We know we will need to take out another mortgage as the next one will cost us more. But we would like to limit it some. If we have to we will eliminate some of our non-essential wants to add at a later date.

In the meantime, I will rent a home there near my new one and my DH may have to rent a one bedroom place up here and travel back and forth for a year or so. He can do most of his job anywhere, but does need to check in up here.

I am already looking to line up work in the new area for the fall, but have not really let anyone know here that I am planning on leaving until we have a buyer.

Good luck with selling your home.

We have a paid for house now, so we're not selling it until the new one is completed. We own our land free and clear, and that will be the downpayment on the construction loan. I didn't want to move twice!

With the way the market is now, I'd put it on the market now. You can always put the bulk of stuff in storage and rough it in a rental if it sells early.

We are putting our house up for sale this month. We just finalized our new house plans. It will be ready around November. We have enough for a good down payment without selling our old house if that is the worst case scenario. Our mortgage company for the new house lets you put more money down on the principal after you close (ex. within the first year) and then recalculates a lower mortgage payment. With 3 kids(2 in school) it was hard to sell first, move into an apartment, and then move into the new house. If our house sells before the new one is ready we will move to our farm about 2 hours away (house is 150 years and needs a lot of work) so you might see me asking a lot of questions on other forums.

We sold over a year ago. It was a pain, but I am definitely glad we did it. We "staged" the house, moving stuff to storage and then after it sold, found a nice house to rent and moved the rest of our stuff there. We were actually in the rental 4 months before we felt comfortable enough to break ground, but we are moving now and I hope to be in the new house mid summer.

We sold first. We would not have been comfortable with having both houses at the same time. We were luicky that the couple that bought our house wanted to rent it until they were able to move here in 18 months so we stayed in the house while we built.

We purchased our new property first. Then we built a barn at the new site with an attached workshop designed to work as a temporary apartment. Then we put our current place on the market. As soon as it sold (it took 2 years) we moved into the workshop/apartment and started construction of our new house.

It's been a year and a half living in the barn as the new place is being built. We are looking at a July move in date, but it is not critical as we are comfortable and will move it when it is finished to our satisfaction. An added advantage is that we were 100' from the new construction and are able to interact with the crew at least twice a day.

Sold our house last May.
Moved into a rental closer to the build site.
Chose a rental much bigger than we needed 'cause rent was cheaper than storage expenses, so we live in a 5 BR house, where the Family Room, DR, 3.5 BRs, and 1 of 2 garage bays are filled with boxes.
We'd planned on breaking ground last June, we still haven't. At least we only need to give 30 days notice to end our lease now.

blindstar, that's what we planned to do too but we weren't able to meet the permit requirements. I guess they've decided it's not OK here but I don't know why.

Let me qualify this by saying that we live in upstate New York in a rural community. We moved in without a CO. I was kind of paranoid about doing it, but DW and our builder kept saying "what are they going to do about it?" After several months the building inspector called and asked to meet with me. I figured we were screwed, but once again DW was right. I chatted up the inspector. He is a retired machinist and I have a barn full of machine tools:) The result was he bought into the fact this was a temporary arrangement and cut me an incredible amount of slack and gave us a CO. To meet code, among other things, I would have needed to add about 900 sq ft of sheetrock to the wall between the "living space" and the barn space.

Well the house is now on the market. Of course its the worst time to do so with the market the way it is. I am afraid we are going to lose out on the lot we like if this does not sell quickly. We are trying to nail something down with the builder to hold the lot and it looked like we were going to be able to, but he has suddenly not been responding a great deal the last week or so, so I am afraid he has another interested buyer in the lot. We shall see. Its going to be tough to rent for upwards of a year, I really hope we can make it through that. It can take a toll on a family. We had to do that for a short period when we build our existing house, but only for 2 months or so and we only had one child at the time and she was only a year old. Now it would be much more difficult, of course the payback is getting into the new house.

We're very rural too in Nova Scotia. We got away without the CO but we could not get a building permit to build the new house if we had an inhabitable space on the property. That pretty much ended our plans.

We thankfully sold fairly quickly last June (in about 60 days), and have been renting a house 5 miles from the construction site since then. We didn't want to own two houses at once. We were very lucky to sell the house so quickly before the bottom fell out around here.

We plan to be in the new home sometime in May. Living in the rental actually made us think more about what we wanted and didn't want in the new home, because we had been so spoiled in the old one!

When we were getting ready to sell our home, we put a lot of the more weatherproof stuff into a barn that we had built on the new property. It opened up the old house to make it look less cluttered, and got some of the moving done early! Hopefully, the two barn cats have kept the mice and other critters under control, although we did store everything in rubbermaid type containers.

We found a rental with a basement, and it is chock full of boxes and unused furniture. Didn't unpack anything but the essentials, and it hasn't been too bad.

We have an RV, and lots of people have asked why we didn't just move into a campground to save money, but with 2 dogs and two teenagers, it was NOT doable for me ;)

Good luck with your sale!

PennyLaney

Even in the face of falling home prices, we decided to continue living in our current home and NOT put it on the market until our new home was ready. Financially, selling earlier MIGHT have made better sense but 1) I absolutely do not want to move more than one time and 2) I cannot stand the thought of real estate agents walking strangers through my home! Besides which, I'll readily admit that I am simply not a good enough house-keeper to keep my home in "showing shape" seven days a week for weeks/months on end. LOL! Being able to clean it up, paint it up, and showcase it after we move out (as opposed to showing it full of all our junk) will probably balance out whatever equity we lose due to the falling market. At least that's what I told DH and since most of the JUNK is his and he didn't want to put it in storage for 9 to 12 months AND he is no better at housework than I am, he let me convince him.

Luckily, we were within a couple of thousand dollars of having the mortgage on our first home paid off before we signed a contract for the new build. (Would have already had it paid off but three years ago, when we found the land we wanted, we discovered it was a whole lot cheaper to refinance our house and purchase the land outright than to get a land-only loan.) Since we won't be faced with the possibility of two mortgages, that gave us a lot more freedom.

Fortunately too we're in a part of the country that hasn't been hit too hard by the subprime mess plus we're in a university town where rentals are at a premium so, if we can't get a decent price for our current house when we're ready to sell, I'm 100% sure we can keep it rented easily enough.

In fact, I've been advised that holding onto the old house and renting it out would probably be the smarter thing to do financially. I just really don't want the hassles of being a "landlord" though so I'd really rather sell it, roll whatever equity we have into the new house, and be done with it.

We are living in our house until new house is done also. This house is smaller and in the best neighborhood in town among a lot of larger homes. Our state has been fortunate to not be in such a declining market. Plus, we don't owe a mortgage on this house, so not worried about 2 mortgages either.

We would have liked to have sold this one and then went to rent so we wouldn't have had to "visit" the bank for some of the homebuilding money, but we have a lot of animals so that was impossible. The good part is this house is paid for. So we won't be selling until after we've moved out and remodeled for sale. We are pretty confident it will sell fast because it's a in a middle class neighborhood at a price the average couple can afford in today's market. It's a great starter home.