You’ve got everything set up to build your new home, and now all you need to do is wait and watch the beauty come together. It’s going to look like little busy bees, working nonstop on your home until the final touches have been applied. Right?
Sorry, but no. There are many custom home building problems that can impede the building of a new home, and you need to be prepared for delays that will impact your emotional state, as well as your wallet. What are the biggest things that delay the building of a new home?
Weather. This is the unavoidable, elephant-in-the-room, mother cause of all delays known to custom home building. Any inclement or unusual weather will put a clamp on the building of your home. This includes temperatures, since freezing temperatures will affect the pouring of concrete, as well as painting projects that you have. It’s difficult to install windows during very cold weather, and siding too. Vinyl material also becomes brittle when it gets very cold. On the flip side, when it’s too hot materials can also become altered, and workers can be negatively affected by the heat and need to take extra breaks to cool off. All of these factors will increase the amount of time that it takes to complete specific steps of building your home, so try to be understanding about this with your contractor. It’s simply not possible to account for the weather ahead of time when you start to build a new home.
Weather also impacts a second item, and that’s curing or drying time. For example, foundation walls need to be poured, filled, and then cured for at least a week. That means that to you, it will appear as though nothing will be happening on your home during this time. However, this is important work too – without this time to cure and set, the concrete could crack and eventually fail. As we say in this blog post, sometimes it’s what you don’t see that really matters when building a home.
Subcontractor no-shows. Unlike weather, this is a preventable cause of delay, and can be reduced or eliminated entirely by working with a quality contractor on your custom home building. The fact is, a quality contractor will hire quality subcontractors, who will be much more likely to show up for work than shoddy ones. In the end, you are still paying for the home whether the workers show up or not – and no-shows significantly impact your bottom line. Paying a little extra for a good contractor could actually save you money in this regard.
When building a new home, every day of work will cost you about $100, on average across the United States. Keep this in mind for budgeting and make absolutely sure that you allow space and time for overruns and custom home building problems. Since time literally is money when building a house, this includes overruns for both delays and extra measures that you choose to include while building is still occurring. Even small details, like adding extra electrical outlets, will add time and cost to your final product; give your new home the due that it deserves by building a range of “overspending” into your overall budget.
If any other questions arise, get in touch with us and ask. We’re always here to guide new homeowners in this exciting and complex process.
