[cheesedoodle]

Building a house is an incredible feat, the caveats of it are hard to understand for the casual bystander. There's a lot of comments here criticizing this project based on personal preferences, it's great that you managed to create something you are satisfied with!

My experience from building our first, and so far only, house are quite different. Having a limited budget (unlike what the blog post let you believe) was extremely stressful due to a large number of economical factors hard to foresee as a novice developer.

Land development comes with so many gotchas and bills needs to be paid, else, the build stops. Groundwork are most important and the economical impact will be great. We also had the romanticised view of "minimal site disruption", and modeled the house for it. In the end, the result was inevitable "site disruption" anyway. Make choices based on what you want, not based on whats there, the site will be so different anyway, it might be better to "create a new one" from start.

I can relate to the post. It took us 5 years from buying land, design grandios, re design more down to earth, permits, sourcing materials and finding-, firing-, re-hiring- local contractors, digging and building, until we finally where finished with the body and interior of a house. The sheer effort in doing this is astounding. We live in a beautiful one of kind house as a result. The one of kind also brings problems; Flat roof, Shu shogiban facade, oiled hardwood floors, limestone, large fixed windows, mosaic tiles. We have it all; great to look at and too feel, not so great when salt from outside makes stains on limestone, dogs make large pee stains on oiled floors, windows unreachable to be cleaned, tiles collecting dirt and open floor plans supporting sound travel more than we could previously understand.

In retrospect, it's very easy to make the wrong decisions, how ever prepared you previously thought you were, as new decisions needs to be made a la minute onsite, all the time.

The author seems well read about the technical part of their house, I cant help but feel they where overrun by contractors deciding what and what not should be installed. It is a shame they could not find a solution the geothermal heating. Nothing is said about ventilation or insulation. Not much feels "modern" to this build except the shape of it.