Where you build shapes everything that follows, from the purchase price to the homeowners insurance premium to the eventual assessed value of the finished home. Narrow the search to a few candidate parcels and check each one against a fixed list before you sign. The discipline carries past the closing: site prep and early construction […]
Everyone pictures the perfect timber home on the perfect piece of property with the perfect view. Beauty is only skin deep when you buy land: you need to know what is beneath the surface and what it will take to reach it. Scouting early in the process uncovers hidden costs and design challenges, and the
Buying land is one of the biggest decisions in the building process, and it happens before most of the fun. A short, deliberate list of questions helps you walk through the choice without skipping a category, and the answers shape everything from the house design to the closing costs. The checklist below covers the questions
The view is the reason most people fall for a mountain lot, but the view is the wrong reason to buy one. A building site has to earn its keep through access, utilities, climate, and the work it takes to build on it, and those factors vary wildly from one mountain town to the next.
An hour from downtown Los Angeles, a 75-acre ranch with three dwellings, horse training facilities, and two creeks recently listed for $5.75 million. The property contains a 10,010-square-foot main house, an original farmhouse just under 1,000 square feet, a 1,900-square-foot trailer, a renovated barn that handles up to 10 horses, and two equipment structures totaling
Most custom home projects start with floor plans, and that is usually a mistake. The parcel comes first, because the land decides which plans are even possible. Slope, shoreline, soil, and utilities shape the design and the budget long before the first wall goes up, and the choice between a developed lot and raw land
A timber home in the Colorado high country reaches 24 feet at its great-room ceiling and opens the living space to a valley view through walls of glass. The structure relies on heavy timbers with custom joinery, and every member carries load. That combination, big glass and exposed structure, works because of engineering choices made
The phrase ’loan application’ stops many buyers cold. Most people do not fill out applications for hundreds of thousands of dollars every day, and unfamiliarity breeds hesitation. The fix is to treat the process like any other construction task: break it into steps, gather the inputs, and check the work before it goes out. A
A timber frame home in the hills of West Virginia can satisfy two sets of wishes at once: the structural honesty of heavy posts and beams, and the relaxed indoor-outdoor living that mountain country encourages. The building process itself is part of the appeal; owners describe the frame raising as the best part of the
Vacation rentals built with timber frames give travelers a way to test wood construction before they commit to a home of their own. The same structural timber engineering that carries heavy roofs and long clear spans in permanent houses shows up in rental properties, from lakefront cabins in California to mountain lodges in Idaho and
