Building your own home is the life dream of every Dutch person. Realizing your own nest, however, costs a lot of money. It also requires a serious personal financial contribution, for many the stumbling block to realize this dream. How do we keep our construction budget within our financial means, without losing too much quality? On which items can we save as much as possible, so as not to be confronted with a financial hangover afterwards?
Rising costs
Cooking costs money, and that is certainly the case when building your own home. Anyone who wants to realize their dream home today must have a lot of capital at their disposal. In recent years, land prices and the cost of raw materials and labor in particular have risen sharply. On the other hand, there is in many cases the sharp reduction of all kinds of premiums. For many, the construction of their own home therefore became virtually unaffordable. But where are possible savings possible, so that we can still realize our own nest?
Be critical when choosing a building plot
One of the first steps in building your own home is the search for a suitable building plot. Be critical of the final choice. We prefer to be assisted here by someone who can make an informed judgment, and therefore can check whether we are actually dealing with good building land. That will certainly save us many (and expensive) disappointments later on.
Avoid expensive repairs
If we make a bad choice of building land, we will soon experience the negative consequences. After all, poor quality building land requires adapted and stronger foundations. If these foundations are not adapted to the quality of our building land, we will soon have to deal with all kinds of subsidence. Such subsidence in turn causes cracks and cracks in walls and ceilings, which will undoubtedly increase our construction budget by many thousands of euros. We therefore prefer to invest in good building land, instead of being confronted with many annoying inconveniences and a financial hangover later on.
Carefully analyze your building plans
Be careful when designing the building plans and preparing the actual structures. Obviously, overlook as little as possible. First and foremost, analyze your home. Provide sufficient space, but opt for compact construction. That undoubtedly lowers the price tag. For example, opt for an entrance hall with a limited surface. Many builders opt for a spacious entrance hall, while it is hardly used. Continue this line to the bedrooms and bathroom. Compact living not only saves us space and money, but it will also keep our energy bill within acceptable limits later on.
Make a heating plan
When planning our home, we prefer to choose future-oriented. Our future energy bill will undoubtedly play an important role in this. Rooms with a (too) large surface, boost our energy costs very quickly. Therefore, group as many rooms as possible with similar heating requirements, and make a clear heating plan in advance. Keep in mind that both our bathroom and our bedrooms need much less heating than our kitchen or living room. We can save extra on our energy bill by dividing our heating into different circuits. This gives the not to be underestimated advantage that we avoid unnecessary heating costs in the entrance hall, bathroom and bedrooms.
Get to work
We can save a lot in the construction of our house, by rolling up our sleeves as much as possible, and doing as much as possible ourselves. In this way we save many, very expensive working hours. Do not just think of all kinds of indoor painting and wallpaper work. We can also lend a hand to the contractor with any demolition and / or earthworks. We can also make considerable savings by, for example, slipping the trenches necessary for the construction of the electricity lines ourselves.
Save by insulating more
If there is one thing when building our home that they should certainly not save on, it is undoubtedly when insulating our home. After all, saving on our construction budget certainly does not mean that we can save on anything at random. Proper insulation will undoubtedly benefit our future living and living comfort. We can easily realize most insolation ourselves. Sound insulation of our home pays for itself in the short term thanks to a lower energy bill.