Come along as we build our custom home- lessons learned in real time.
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Anonymous
According to OP they began the project 3 years ago but got delayed for a number of reasons and the house is now currently under construction. I appreciate them sharing their insights on what they’ve learned. |
Anonymous
Thank you! I'm doing this because its information we wish we'd had. We're learning as we go, and won't likely ever be doing this again-so lessons learned are wasted unless shared. One thing we didn't have to deal with was well and septic, since we've got city water and sewer. Still, utility connection fees were 8k. I mentioned the topography testing as part of site prep. That includes the soil testing as well as drilling bore holes to determine where the water table is. I bet that's really important if you have to site a septic system. |
Anonymous
Thank you--this is meant to be helpful. But no worries, I will see this through--even if the 'real' time updates I hoped aren't really practical. Because, life. I mean, if negativity could stop me, we would never have done a custom build. I'm genetically engineered to ignore haters 
Speaking of negativity, I'll talk about permitting now. This part might be a little bit of therapy |
Anonymous
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So, permitting. Spoiler alert--it took us nearly 18 months to get these done. COVID and its knock on effects deserve some blame, but in talking to others, for a single home with a developer that doesn't do giant projects, anything under a year is very unlikely.
First issue: I thought that having the architect & engineer was all we needed. But they don't have experience in managing the beast that is your average county/city department of permitting. Someone has to coordinate the submitting of plans, the updates, keeping track of the perpetually changing permitting requirements, and generally has to ride herd on county employees and sometimes the architect and engineer for changes or clarifications. And that person has to know the ins and outs of the department and who to pick up the phone to call. I wasted 6 weeks because like a sane person, I spent time on the county website and took it at its word. And I even called the department and asked the hopelessly naive question " How long does it take to get a building permit?" And the pleasant, helpful person told me: 10-12 weeks. Fantastic! Great call. What I didn't realize is that she had accurately answered the question, and ONLY the question I'd asked. It does indeed take 12 weeks to get a building permit. Except, the building permit is the last of a long line of permits that are needed for new construction. These permits are for the most part issued sequentially, and each of them takes weeks and has multiple components. YMMV with geographic location, but for close in DMV, these are generally needed (more rural may not need some of these) They are: Stormwater Management Plan Site Plan Fine grading permit Right of way + driveway permit Sediment control plan(during construction) Tree Conservation Plan Building permit (which itself includes Mechanical, Engineering and Plumbing plans) So we gave in and hired a nifty professional called a Permit Expediter. Much like the builder manages the contractors during construction, the expediter quarterbacks County, Engineer, Architect and the Builder in getting all these plans approved. *The Builder isn't really vital to this process, except, that they do have to be licensed the County will check on this before construction gets under way. Pausing for a moment. There is so much more to come. |
Anonymous
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And one other fun surprise. Sprinkled throughout the DMV are charming and quirkily independent enclaves, with names like "College Park". These lovely oases are physically located within a County--so naturally, one would think that if the County approves and issues a slew of permits, after great time and expense....then building can commence. But that is only possible in some alternate universe. Here in this universe, there are quite a few citylets that have their own separate, independent permitting departments and processes, that stand almost wholly separate from the County. So, you get to do a version of this permitting dance all over again.
Hypothetically, you may start screaming into your pillow at this point. Or asking rational questions like why the two entities cannot just get together over lunch and work out a way to have one building permit count for both jurisdictions. Or understand, suddenly, why so many local scandals involve some version of bribery between developers and government officials. None of this will do any good. Having to do two sets of permitting added about 4 months to the total. It was like a very bad episode of Parks & Recreation. |
Anonymous
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Wife and I are currently about 8 months into a teardown and build in Fairfax City. The specifics of how the OP has managed the process is extremely interesting. Best of luck.
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Anonymous
OP, your builder should have handled that. Ours did. He was responsible for submission of all the plans to the county. From closing to getting our building permit, it was about 3 months for us so sounds about right. Regarding your other post about enclaves, yeah we went through that as well. Places like Kensington, Chevy Chase, etc are called "towns" which essentially means they have a local government that you have to pass through before you even get to the county. In our case, we had to go through that, the HOA, and the county as well so 3 passes. Luckily the HOA goes with whatever the Town wants. Those towns basically dictate what kind of house you're going to build so that it can blend in with the town vibe. |
Anonymous
Wow! "Narcissist"? That's a bit aggressive, PP. This is such an overused, lazy, and often mislabeled term tossed about on DCUM mostly because people don't take the time to understand the actual definition of a real "narcissist". Look it up. This ain't it! |
Anonymous
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NP. OP, I think your detailing is fascinating and I appreciate your insights. Please keep them coming!
I have no intention of ever building a home but I still find the process interesting and fun to learn about. |
Anonymous
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Do you have a quote for this? "Stormwater Management Plan"
I believe this is one of the most costly things in new construction/additions. |
Anonymous
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OP, your builder should have handled that. Ours did. He was responsible for submission of all the plans to the county. From closing to getting our building permit, it was about 3 months for us so sounds about right. Regarding your other post about enclaves, yeah we went through that as well. Places like Kensington, Chevy Chase, etc are called "towns" which essentially means they have a local government that you have to pass through before you even get to the county. In our case, we had to go through that, the HOA, and the county as well so 3 passes. Luckily the HOA goes with whatever the Town wants. Those towns basically dictate what kind of house you're going to build so that it can blend in with the town vibe. Some builders will handle permitting and some do not. It just depends on the builder and, crucially, depends if they have built in that particular jurisdiction before. So much of getting permits done quickly depends on understanding the unique requirements of the particular location + having relationships at the permitting division. |
Anonymous
Creating the SWM plan was part of the larger 15K that we paid to the engineer for all of the various engineering work completed. The cost of actually executing the plan was one of the larger line items in our site prep budget. But, it gets hard to separate out what was done just for SWM vs what was done for general grading/site prep overall. You can read the State of MD requirements for stormwater at: https://mde.maryland.gov/programs/Water/StormwaterManagementProgram/Documents/Residential%20SP3.pdf The total bill for putting the SWM in place is highly dependent on the features of the land itself, the size of the build and the surrounding land. For example, one requirement is that runoff doesn't go onto a neighbors property. Our runoff for the front half of the property is channeled to the street, which itself is a direct conduit to a runoff/retention pond that already exists & was created for that purpose, in the neighborhood. The other side of our property required a retention wall to mitigate runoff--at least, that's what our engineer first told us. Building a retention wall is big bucks. But our builder stepped in and recommended a berm + slight slope change when grading (which we were doing anyway)--so much less expensive than a wall and accepted by the county as acceptable. Our total bill for SWM + homesite grading was 22K |
Anonymous
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So, to sum up our our permitting & plans related costs for site preparation, we spent:
Architect, 18K Engineer, 15K Permitting fees: 54K (in many DMV counties, if its just land and not a teardown there is an additional impact fee. Our architect told us that for people with teardowns, that's why they'll leave a token piece of the house in place and incorporate it into the new build. Those impact fees were about 1/3 of the total 54K) Permit Expeditor was 35K--dysfunction at the County level added about 10k to this. At one point, the County couldn't find key legal historical documents related to our property. We had a stand off for about 6 weeks with them, and had to send the permit expeditor down a rabbit hole to find said documents through extensive research. ugh. That puts us at 122K for this part of site prep. |
Anonymous
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OP back again-time got away from me! Here are final components and costs for site prep:
Tree clearing Grading Excavation & backfill Erosion Control Demolition (there was a shed on site that had to be knocked down) Dump Fees/Hauling Cost was $40K for all of the above. The dump fees were the single largest cost of the above at 17K. Our builder saved us a lot of money on this--we had estimated 34K for dump fees. The county charges a lot of money to fill up their landfill with the dirt excavated. But he knew of a construction project nearby that needed dirt, and once the dirt was tested and deemed suitable, he had it hauled there. |
Anonymous
OP, you said at the beginning that you hired separate companies instead of design build because you thought it would be less expensive. But then you had to hire more people like a permit expeditor. I'm curious if it came out cheaper in the end. We investigated both ways and went with a design-build firm because it was less $ and also because I wanted ONE company responsible for everything. I didn't want the headache of one place pointing to another or things falling through the cracks that were no one's job. |