#buildingcrane

December 19, 2017

This is the most common question you will encounter from parents, coworkers, friends, and anyone who has lived through a renovation. And for good reason. This will not be easy. Going through the land buying, loan closing, permit attaining, contractor bidding, inevitable blown budget is a headache that is totally avoidable if you go down the tried and true, great American practice of buying an existing house. And you probably considered that option first. We did. But then we came right up against the harsh reality of trying to buy in Los Angeles -- it’s bloody expensive. Not just Bel Air or Malibu. It’s expensive everywhere. Even little 500 square foot shacks in Mt. Washington go for three-quarters of a million dollars.  And good luck outbidding all cash offers, tens of thousands of dollars over asking price.

So then you do the sensical thing and you start looking outside the city, somewhere like Claremont or Long Beach.  You try to picture your life there, negotiating whether you could stare down a 90 minute commute every day.  Hell no.  You tell yourself that you would rather rent for the rest of your life. But there must be a better way! And then you go on Zillow and click on that little land box that you had deselected, and an entire new world of cheap “vacant land” presents itself.  $75,000 for a piece of Los Angeles hillside.  Hey, I can afford that.  Then you remember that tiny house show you binged on HGTV that one Christmas.  How that cute, resourceful couple built something for super cheap, and you think to yourself, I could make that work.

Tiny homes lead us to container homes.  Container homes lead us to prefab.  Prefab homes finally lead us to our architect, Simon Storey.  Once we saw his Big & Small house in Mt. Washington, a 1200 square foot house he built for $210,000, we knew he was our guy.  The math was simple: House + Land = around $300,000.  Hell yes!  We were going to beat the system.  

One visit to Simon later, and we were met with the reality of building a house in Mt. Washington in 2017 -- it costs roughly $350 a square foot.  About double what Big & Small cost.  Even if we could make that work, there wasn’t a conversation until we obtained land.  

So started my hunt for land.  More on that later.

Fast forward to today and we own land.  If everything falls into place, construction on our Simon Storey designed house will begin in six months to a year.  But it hasn’t been easy.  In the end, we aren’t saving by building.  In fact, we are paying slightly more than we feel comfortable with.  Here's some helpful advice the architect Padric Cassidy once told me “custom anything is more costly than off the shelf, in a way an existing building is like a thrift store and new custom is like bespoke tailoring.” 

Just to be 100% crystal clear, building a house in Los Angeles is expensive and will likely not save you money compared to buying.

Financial reasons aside, I think the real question is not why do I want to do this, but DO I have what it takes to see this through?  I’m not talking about grit or determination — although those things will certainly help, I’m talking about the emotional fortitude to handle the myriad of feelings and frustrations that it will take to summit, and persevere through the hailstorm of Kafkaesque bureaucratic indignations, massive financial risk, overwhelming uncertainty and anxiety you are sure to suffer along the way.

And if you’re married or in a relationship -- it’s time to take stock of how it’s going, because this will test that relationship to the max.  When we first started tackle building, Katy and I got on a conference call with my architect friend Jim Bonner-Martin for any advice on how to find an architect.  “How’s your marriage?”  he asked us, not skipping a beat.  At the time we didn’t see what that had to do with building a house, and assured him we were doing great, and ushered him onto serious business.

How silly we were.

Like a house, you need a steady emotional foundation in place to survive.   And if there’s cracks, then those cracks will be stressed, and your relationship, just like any house, is in deep trouble. 

Half way through just the the land hunting, Katy and I were forced into emergency couples counseling.  House building was put on hold until we were back on good footing.  (I’m happy to report things are going swimmingly.)