What motivated you to build your custom home?
We just finished (well, mostly -- there's a bit of finish work still to do) our custom house project in June; we farm and my husband is also a builder -- he, our kids, and several apprentices did all of the work. It took us four years, in between farming, weather, projects for others, and several family emergencies.
We were motivated to build a custom house because we couldn't find any ready-made plans that would work for our circumstances and location/climate (western Canada, summers quite hot and getting hotter and more humid, and winters very long and very cold). The current house on the farm, a small 1950s bungalow, was built several kilometers away from the corrals, and the soil around that house is poor for growing anything (trees, flowers, vegetables); and with the lack of trees and a garden, the yard had no privacy from the acreages just south of our farm. We wanted the new house to be close to the corrals so that we could easily walk there in a few minutes to do daily chores or check on cows during calving season; we wanted more privacy and seclusion; and we wanted better soil for gardening. We'd planted several rows of shelterbelt trees around the area in the past 15 years in preparation for our building project.
We looked at a lot of plan books and online plans over the years but never found anything that would work for us without a lot of changes, and at that point we realized that with so many changes, it was silly not to do a custom build. We wanted to build the farmhouse that should have been here on the property originally, and we wanted it to seem like an older house, and we also wanted to "bring the outdoors in", with many large windows.
As Mrs. Pete wrote in her first post, "the things we want don't tend to be found all in the one house". Some features we wanted include a workshop attached to the garage, a granny suite over the workshop, a bathroom with shower in the garage, a washing machine near the workshop and garage for chore clothes, a mudroom area in the garage rather than in the house to keep most of the farm/gardening/building messes out of the house, a full bathroom with shower rather than powder room on the main floor by the garage entrance door, a large walk-in pantry by the garage entrance door, an open concept main floor without the kitchen, dining room, and living room being in one large square room.
What frustrations did you have to overcome?
Our build stretched over four years, and also because of our location, we weren't able to find an architect locally (and this was long before working remotely with a talented GW architect was a possibility) so found someone with design talent.
Also because of our location, and being a six-hour drive from the nearest big city, it wasn't always easy sourcing items. We made a lot of trips to the smaller city about 40 minutes away for casing and trim. I had to spend a lot of time online looking for everything from register covers (which I found online at Walmart dot ca of all places, since they had the best selection and best prices) to lighting fixtures.
What is most satisfying to you now that your home is complete (or will be soon)?
Pretty much everything : ) . It's the house that was meant to be here, and also has so many elements of the house I always dreamed of (even before moving to Canada and a farm lol) -- it drove me nuts for more than two decades that we lived in the country but had neither a front porch nor a back porch, and now we have (and use) both. We built the house around our needs and wants, rather than bending ourselves around an existing plan, which is what we'd done for 25 years in our old house.
I used a large binder, tote bag, and file box for organizing ideas and samples. I seem to recall a thread in this forum about various organizing methods, so it might be worth a search through the archives.
Apologies for nattering on at length. Good luck, anita!
Q