I am feeling the same exact way. We are in an apartment and are working with the builder on our plans. Well, after each meeting with the builder to discuss our "needs", I leave there feeling like I really do not need any of it and I am content to stay where I am at (not in debt)LOL! I almost feel like I am ready to throw in the towel and stay where we are at or simple buy a home (there are thousands for sale around where we live). I think your plan of finding a home and perhaps doing some remodeling and then spend some time traveling sounds completely awesome!!! Good luck on your decision and be happy no matter what. Take care, Colleennc

We had second thoughts, several times in fact. :) When our plans were completed and went out to bid it was our final chance to really examine our motivations and commitment to the project. We kept coming back to the same conclusion, we really wanted to build a house on the property we owned and it made sense for our family and our future plans and no other solution 'fit' as well or in the end would have satisfied our dream and desire to build a home together. I think having second thoughts is a natural part of any big decision, it gives you a chance to reflect and think about what you are doing and reaffirm if it is the right thing for you or if you need to change direction. Perhaps building the 3000sf home with all the bells and whistles and stuff is not the right thing and the process of almost getting it has allowed you to refocus and get clear on what you really want and the best way to achieve it. What does your partner say? Are you both having similar qualms? Whatever you decide, I hope things end up working out just the way they should for you. :)

EVERYONE who builds has days when they think 'Wish I'd bought something instead'. In fact, most have days when they think it would have been better to simply pitch a tent...

The real question is, do they still feel the same on move-in day? I'm sure some do, hope I don't.

There is such a thing as building too much house, and it's actually kind of tough to calculate how much extra money we'd have each month if we shave off a few feet here, go with tile instead of slab granite there.

But you might be wise to at least look at a few 'possibles' in your target neighborhood, and play with the numbers before you commit to building a house that might suck up more of your income than you are willing to part with. I'm a big believer in having all the info I can before I make a final decision...

Has anyone had 'second thoughts' about building?

Not 'til I started reading about others' building experiences on this web site! LOL

Every day. I have a paid for house and little debt. The DH and were planning on retiring young and traveling before we began our second careers doing something that we love. But....

We live in a suburb now and our house is way too small for the two of us. Both of us are craving open space and a simpler way of life than what you find in suburbia. I was raised on a farm, and although my hubby is a city boy, we lived in a small farm town when when we were first married that converted him to the country life. We both want that type of living again and made a vow that someday, when we could afford to do it right, we'd move back to the country.

So we bought acreage in a very rural area, in the middle of Ohio's Amish country. It's always way more difficult to build in rural areas and deal with wells, septic systems, and it's way more expensive and you have less choice of builders and services. There is no cable TV, only satelite, no plowed streets, no convenience of having grocery stores or gas stations a short walk away. No one delivers pizza there and our nearest neighbor is nearly a mile away. I'm exchanging my 5 minute commute for a 45 minute commute.

So every time we run into some problem or our builder calls us with something unexpected, I wonder why we're doing this? It would have been much easier just buy a bigger house a little farther out in the suburbs or stay put in a paid off house. But that feeling goes away when I go visit the building site, after a peaceful drive on a beautiful summer evening, past lush fields with grazing cows and their calves. I stop to let my neighbor with his faithful border collies take his dairy herd across the road to the milking shed. It's the most peaceful 2 minutes of my day. When I get to the site and drive up the quarter mile of driveway, I sit on the spot that will be my front porch and watch the herd of deer grazing in the meadow that will be my horse's pasture. I watch a blue herron catching small fish in my pond, and see the turkeys already roosting for the night in my woods. That's when all those doubts about taking on this project go away and all the nagging annoyances seem to disappear.

Great post Mainecoonkitty. I feel the same!

phoggie -- It sounds to me as though you have bigger issues than just whether to build a house or not. You say you want to avoid the Kansas winters. You say you are looking at moving to and building in another city. (Still in Kansas? How far away from your present home?)

Based on our experience I firmly endorse your second thoughts. I'm your age; DH is nearly 70. When we built (2000) we guessed we'd have 15 - 20 years to enjoy the house. We moved only 15 miles to a farther out suburb and built a 2900 sq ft single-story house. I know I'm not *physically* up to doing that today -- only eight years later! I wouldn't tempt fate if my DH were nearly 80. This house is a tad larger than two people need -- huge for just one (either one!).

Why do you want to move? Why do you want to build? We wanted a nicer town, farther from traffic congestion (road and air). We couldn't find a nice single story existing house in the new town, so did a teardown to build new.

We have been escaping Chicagoland winters in Maui -- that may change to Florida if airfares keep rising! We're only gone a month, but that too may change to longer stays. At some point 2900 sq ft, however lovely, however 'home', may feel too big for too short a time. (We have neighbors who are in Wisconsin many weekends and in Florida all winter, all the while maintaining a big house here. Don't want to do that!)

We are knee deep into our build and as mentioned, there have been times when we thought we should have gone existing/remodel route, but it hasn't come up often for the reasons above, our awesome property. We will spend the rest of our lives exploring the national forest that borders our property,(heavy into gold panning my wife and i), and taking short trips around the n.ca area as far as the coast, wine country,gold country, etc.

I think your deal is asking yourself how extensive you want to travel and what you want to see. Buying an existing energy efficient place to act as a base to "come home to" with heavy traveling plans would eliminate the need for a build that will take up a great protion of your time. Should you decide to build and im assuming you are both retired, being onsite as often as possible on your build will be a huge advantage. Some folks down the road from our build were able to do just that and despite a few hiccups, had an extremely smooth build simply because they were there.

Our reasons why we want to move.....

We can move to a different county only about 120 miles away and the tax rate is about 1/3 on homes and vehicles and that is a huge savings. The "new city" has a population of about 3,000 but it has a nice country club and golf course, two huge lakes, top-of-the notch rec center (which is free to the people of the city to use), up to date hospital, beautiful library that any college would envy, wonderful new schools...everything that we need, and if not, a larger city is just an hour away....and the money for all of this is mostly supported by the nuclear power plant that is in that county.
We now live near a military town and the quality of life here is going down hill rapidly with the moving in with troops (now I don't dislike military, so don't take me wrong), but with them comes crime/drugs/etc.

We will be moving to where our families are all within an hour drive.

Our home is too big (about 4,000 sf) and with arthritis in all my joints, it is just too much for me to take care of anymore and we never use our 2,000 sf finished basement.

Our "city fathers" have taken this city into so much debt that it is on the verge of bankruptcy...so taxes will continue to skyrocket. They built on the notion that so many military are coming...3,000 new empty homes now...but they might not come until 2020 and if they do, they can not afford the houses that have been built.

My husband is an architect so a "house plan" is not the problem, but he is 77...and I am 66....so it won't be too many years before one of us is living alone.

I guess I have so many "mixed emotions" about all of this...although we did buy a beautiful lot on a pretty little lake in our city of choice, it may take a loooong time to sell this with the market being as it is.

Your support and ideas are more than welcome...THANKS

Phoggie, from your description, I know what city you live in, I live about an hour away from you. I don't know if all military towns are this way, but that town does seem to be going downhill. I really hope you will be able to sell your current house, although with the military, there always seems to be buyers (even if we don't get the proposed amount of troops in here).

The town you are considering seems nice, and I can guess the approximate location, sounds like a great place to spend retirement. I think everyone here has had some great ideas, you might want to check out and see what the town has to offer for current houses for sale, you never know, you might find the perfect one. OTOH, if you decide to build, yes, I've had second thoughts several times, and this has been my dream as long as I can remember! As a friend told us the other day, only you can make up your mind if this is right for you, but when you make up your minds, you both have to be happy with your decision. I wish you luck!

Phoggie, I took interest in you being in a military area. We currently live in a town solely supported by a navy base. Currently there are bases closing and the navy base is/was expected to pick up personnel. The original #'s were 7500 now projected to be 500-1000 if at all. The city immediately started making plans for our area to be the next "palm springs" investing monies into cosmetic things such as medain landscaping and the like ignoring our infastructure which is hurting to the point that it wouldn't handle a population increase, as it's in trouble now. This involves our water table, sewage and things like road conditions. There are two major home developers that somehow got caught up in it and have moved dirt around for 400+ homes to be built on each development, (3 major areas), that will more than likely remain dirt because of the brac #'s of personnel being drastically reduced. Our towns populous has declined in the past due to reductions in force, the projected brac (base realignment and closure)#'s wont even bring it back to the level it was in the eighties. Our town powers to be have drained monies for infastructure and has always turned down private industries from setting up shop in our valley in favor of the navy base.Our town has dwindled at times looking ghost town like with rentals boarded up and housing prices so low that people buying here at the time got deals of the century.We are currently about the same as the average area in the country with housing prices at a level where everyone is waiting to see what happens with the base. They might be waiting for awhile all for not. Time for change!

I'm hearing that you want to leave your too-big home in a city you no longer love. You will still be near family, which I think is very important. It sounds like there is good medical care available, although I wonder if a city that small can expect excellence. (Friends built in Prescott, AZ. There was 'a hospital'. It was a long way to top-notch care in Phoenix when a long-term medical condition arose.) The tax situation may change somewhat as the area grows,, but that's minor.

So far, I like your plan...to move. I'm not crazy about the idea of building, or of building anything so large. I would not build a custom home from a distance either.

I like sierraeast's suggestion of moving to the new city, but into an existing home. Are there any you'd consider? Should you still want to build, you'd be 'on site' to supervise. You'd also be able to 'try on' the new community to see if it suits you without investing so much at the outset. You could move sooner. You could invest less there and plan to rent somewhere warm in the winter.

jenk2008~~ We do live in Junction City....and if you are within 100 miles, you know the problems that this city has...and as far as I can tell, no way to dig outselves back up out of this debt~~ Would you mind sharing with me where in Kansas you live?....I saw on the post "tell us about yourself" that you also lived here, but I think we are the "lone-rangers"

We actually did both things you mentioned: built a house and remodeled an existing home. The decision to build turned out to be a good one, not only because the house turned out very well but also because we now live on a lake, so our home is an incredible sanctuary for us. I will say, however, that our new 2500 sq ft house with some "bells and whistles" (i.e. beautiful wood flooring, multiple showroom bathrooms, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and 72 different species of plants in the landscape) is a lot more work than our previous house. My DW scoffs at idea of how various things were supposed to be "low maintenance." It takes the two of us four hours just to superficially clean this beast.

Even though the process of building the home went well and brought the two of us closer as a result of the new-found respect we had for each other, it was mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting (even though we had a contractor build it for us). And both of us were in our 40s. It would have been less stressful if I hadn't been the GC, but the additional cost would have been an even bigger stressor. Fortunately, our old house was only twenty minutes away - we didn't have to uproot ourselves from the community, learn a whole new city, re-establish ourselves, etc. I can't imagine what that would have been like.

Remodeling, on the other hand, was a very unpleasant experience and caused a lot of arguments between us. You would think with our previous building experience that it would have gone smoothly, but remodeling is a whole different animal. You are constrained by the often dysfunctional floor plan of the original builder and are continually at the effect of shoddy materials, poor planning, or just outright stupidity. You have to put up with things you don't like because the cost of changing them, like a horribly colored fireplace, is prohibitive. And it is harder to control costs because you don't know what lies behind the next piece of crumbling floor board... or unyielding clipboard of the local county bureaucrat. We were mandated to put in sidewalks/gutters, widen the road, and put in $13K of landscaping just to bring the property in line with local statues. This was after a county planning meeting where we were told (prior to buying the property) that code compliance costs would be "minimal".

In the end, I think the most important thing is to discover what is the essential, core experience you want to have in your retirement years. Is it new experiences, intimate time with each other and/or family, spiritual growth, or a unique combination of things? Once you find this "touchstone," it should be easier to decide if building a house really fits in with what is most important to you.

Mainecoonkitty - I cried when I read your post!! It was beautifully written. Are you a writer by any chance?? --Colleennc

Aww... thank you so much for your kind words, Colleennc. And yes, I am a writer. I had hoped to retire very early from the "real world" of regular paychecks and devote all my time to writing, but now I have to pay for my Eden in the country. The decision to commit to such a large project just at the time that I could have walked away relatively debt-free took many hours of soul searching about what's really important in this short lifetime that we're given. I've come to the conclusion that what I get in terms of serenity and inspiration from even my short visits to the building site are a fair trade for continuing to work in the corporate world for a few more years in order to be able to afford my sanctuary.

And... I'll continue to play the Power Ball Lottery!

Thank you!

Phoggie-I wasn't sure if you wanted to disclose your location, so I didn't say, I live in the Randolph/Olsburg area. Yes, JC seems to have some bad issues, it's sad, it is a nice area. At least with the fort and university, I would hope your current house will sell for what you want, and you can get out of there!