{"id":16865,"date":"2026-09-13T13:26:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T17:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/?p=16865"},"modified":"2026-09-13T13:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T17:26:10","slug":"my-house-the-entire-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/2026\/09\/13\/my-house-the-entire-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"My House: The Entire Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I published My House: Phase 2<\/a> a year ago this week, right before we broke ground. The line I ended up quoting back to myself the most over the following ten months was “I’m both excited and scared” which turned out to be about the right ratio.<\/p>\n

The house is done now. Not the “mostly done” I’ve been saying since May but actually done, with the front siding going on in the third week of August, grass in the back yard and a fence around the whole perimeter. The last crew pulled out of my driveway two days before I turned 40. Forty weeks of construction, 30 videos, and about three years from the first phone call to a lender to the last invoice getting paid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been writing these updates as I went and they got less frequent as things got harder, which I think is pretty typical. So this is the whole thing in one place, for anyone who wants it in a single sitting rather than across 16 posts and 30 videos. Every one of those is linked at the bottom if you’d rather watch it happen than read about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\"Overlook<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Some of you have been here since the 2017 remodel<\/a>, which I now have to call Part 1 and which has its own YouTube playlist<\/a> if you want to see what I looked like before I turned 30. If you’re wondering why a guy would gut the same 700 square foot camp twice in ten years, that’s basically what this post is about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why any of this happened<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In late 2022 Heather and I left New Hampshire for Charlotte so I could take a role at Credit Karma, at a pay cut, and I told her we’d be back in two years. That wasn’t a soft promise, it was the actual terms of the move. The whole time we were down there we rented the camp out (a couple at $2,500 a month against our $1,200 mortgage, then AirBNB after they moved out) and put the difference into savings and into the renovation fund. The remodel was the entire point of going to Charlotte. We weren’t leaving the lake, we were figuring out how to afford to stay on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matilda was born down there in October 2023. We came back in December 2024 and moved into 700 square feet in the middle of a New Hampshire winter with a one year old, and everything that had been a spreadsheet exercise for two years became an actual daily problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matilda slept in our closet. I said that in the intro video and I’ve said it a bunch of times since, because if you only remember one fact from three years of this it should be that one. The second bedroom was an uninsulated addition hanging off the side that we could never get heat into (it’s the last original part of the house other than the roof, and both of them are gone now) so I was using it as an office, and it was 150 square feet which meant it wouldn’t fit a queen bed, which meant it was never going to be a bedroom for anybody. One bathroom, and it opened onto the living room, so when anyone visited it was a whole thing. The living room ceiling sloped from eight feet down to about five foot six at the lake end. If you were standing up in your own living room you were looking at sheetrock, and you had to physically sit down on the couch to see the water that was the entire reason we paid $92,000 for a foreclosed three season camp in 2016 and then put another $70,000 into it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\"Sun<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Three years of approvals<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We started looking for a builder and a lender in 2023 and by that December we had both. We’d also already brought in NH DES (we’re inside 250 feet of the Lake), NH DOT (we’re on a state road) and the town, because between the three of them they govern essentially everything that can happen on this lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lot is 0.11 acres and it was already inside our neighbor’s setback before we touched anything. The town wants 15 feet on the sides and 20 in front and we were going to end up four feet off the property line. So in 2024 we filed for a hardship variance, or really two variances, one to go out and one to go up. That meant an engineer, an attorney, a full site plan and a bunch of neighbors willing to come to a meeting and say out loud that they were fine with it. I’m still grateful for that. Approvals came through in August 2024 with a two year clock on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then we waited about a year. Twelve months on the waitlist for both a quote and a lender, because my GC builds around four houses a year. He built for three of my neighbors, he has a place across the water and he knows the ledge on this lake better than anyone I could have hired. This was also the last job he was going to take before retiring. His fee is 10% on top of costs, so roughly $45,000 of the total is his margin and I see every receipt for everything else. I appreciated that a lot more as the year went on than I expected to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By September 2025 we were 11 months from our permits expiring and there was a new, considerably more conservative zoning board in town. When we asked a town employee about an extension he told us plainly not to bother filing for one, because it would be denied. That is the entire reason we broke ground on November 1, 2025, heading into a New Hampshire winter, which is not a thing anyone would do by choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The house we didn’t build<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The version I actually wanted had a walkout subterranean garage with a four post lift you could see through a picture window from the lake. It also had a wraparound screened porch off the living room, a workshop on the upper floor and about 1,000 square feet of garage with two story height inside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It came back at $300,000 more than we could afford. Roughly $90,000 of that was site work alone (including repaving a neighbor’s driveway, because a large truck can’t physically get into my lot and the dirt would have had to move out in something like a hundred pickup loads) with the extra level accounting for another $150,000 to $200,000 built out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were approved to build it. We just couldn’t borrow $750,000 without huge sacrifices and a 3rd job. There was also a wraparound front deck in the drawings that died for a dumber reason, which is that it landed one foot inside the state highway setback, so we would have been building a deck one foot deep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we cut it down to the version we could actually pay for, which is the one that got built, and I’ve made my peace with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ground broke November 1 and we moved out on the 14th into Heather’s childhood bedroom at her parents’ house, 40 minutes north. Three of us and a dog in about 100 square feet, with ten boxes and a mattress, and everything else in a 30 foot storage unit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They hit ledge almost immediately, which cost us a $4,000 contingency draw for a crew to hammer at it for a full day, and it turned the foundation into a split level with 10 foot walls on the sides and back and 8 at the front (the front is where the ledge is, which is also why the garage headroom got tight enough that we had to dig down another 18 to 24 inches to make a standard garage door work). In early December the inspector approved footings on a morning that was three below zero, the concrete truck showed up the next day at 15 degrees, and the lake started icing over weeks earlier than it should have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\"Overlook<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Then winter did what it does. Ice storms over Christmas, a cold snap through the middle of January, and then three consecutive weeks in February that never got above zero and sometimes ran to negative 10, during which absolutely nothing happened on site. That’s why there’s no video for weeks 12 through 14. There was nothing to film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two genuinely good things came out of that stretch anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first was the roof. My GC came back and said trusses were going to be nearly impossible (they’d be built in Pennsylvania, shipped up, and there was nowhere on my lot to crane or store them) and proposed stick building instead at no additional cost. I asked if it would cost more and he said it wouldn’t, so we agreed. That one change bought us 8 foot ceilings across the entire house rather than just the addition, and let all 32 solar panels consolidate onto the front roof where the sun actually is instead of being split front and back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second was how he did it. They built the new roof over the old roof, put up a temporary wall with rock wool inside, and then demoed the old roof and the front of the house from underneath with weather protection the whole time. For a few weeks in February and March the old house was standing intact inside the skeleton of the new one, with the bathroom and the bedrooms still in use. I described it at the time, in the week 15 post<\/a>, as my new house eating my old one, and that’s still how I think about it. The video from that week<\/a> is the one to watch if you only watch one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\"Overlook<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\"Overlook<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\"The<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\"Overlook<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The roof got shingled in a single day in the middle of March. The exterior palette that Heather put together got locked in right after: black shingles, black trim, white soffits and eaves, white window trim, green siding. Standing down the road looking back at it that week, the thing I kept thinking was that it fit the neighborhood. That’s exactly the argument we’d made to the ZBA a year and a half earlier, and it was a relief to find out it was actually true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\"Overlook<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Delays:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our HVAC sub needed three additional working days. Those three days cost us our slot in the subcontractor queue, and losing the slot meant every trade lined up behind us went to the back of their own lines. So instead of a clean handoff from plumbing to electrical to HVAC to insulation to drywall, we got roughly a week of dead air between each one. Three days of slip turned into something like five weeks of calendar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I said on camera in week 24 that there was no float in the critical path. I meant that literally. I build schedules for a living and I still didn’t put any slack in my own house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is the part that actually bothers me, and I posted it in the MOA thread back in June rather than in a video, because it was easier to type than to say out loud. I had already Gantt charted the whole thing against the velocity we were actually running at, and my model said we would finish on August 10. My GC kept saying April, then May, then June. I went with his dates in every conversation I had with my wife, my in-laws and all of you, and I should have stuck with mine. The final draw was signed on August 26 and the last video went up on August 24. My spreadsheet was about two weeks off over ten months. His estimate was off by four months. The lesson is not that I am smart, it is that I had the data the entire time and deferred to optimism anyway, which is exactly what I tell students not to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pattern kept repeating right to the end. In July we pushed the electricians so the paving crew could do the driveway, the paving crew didn’t show, and we lost the electricians for another eight days and couldn’t finish the basement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier than that our landscaper refused to come back at all until every other crew was off the property. That’s defensible from his side and completely maddening from mine, because it meant no regrade and no French drain, which meant water came into the basement for two months while we waited. I’d given that company around $100,000 by June, about 30% of the entire budget, and I was standing in mud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scott in the MOA thread had a read on that which I did not want to hear and which I now think was correct. His theory was that the landscaper had new work booked, that sending his crew back to my house meant turning down that work and losing it to a competitor, and that since he had already been paid for a chunk of unfinished work I was “house money” to him with no real incentive to hurry. Nothing about that is illegal or even unusual. It is just how the incentives line up when you pay ahead of completion, and I paid ahead of completion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Week 30, the home stretch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I filmed the week 30 video<\/a> on June 9 standing down by the water. I opened it by saying that all the boats were out, people were in the water, and we were still homeless. Seven and a half months in. The post that went with it<\/a> was 76 words long, which tells you about as much as the video does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of my riding gear was in storage and I hadn’t been on a bike once that season. I’d missed the MOA Puppy Dog Ride. The National Rally was in Vermont that same weekend and I went and worked it, and it still stung not to have a garage or access to my own motorcycles. Heather’s birthday was three weeks out and we weren’t going to be home for it, which was the one thing I’d told myself we’d definitely make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I said in that video that I thought I was going to cry, and that Heather had asked me to stop talking about it. I left both of those in, because pretending otherwise would have been dishonest to everyone who’d been watching for seven months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\"Overlook<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There were good things that week too, because there always are. The bathroom tile was finished and Heather had stained and urethaned the stairs herself. Matilda’s room was done with four Cat6 drops in it (and yes it’s staying pink, and if she moves out in 20 years I’m taking it as my office). Heather also found somebody on Craigslist selling exactly the used quartz countertop we needed for $500, so we drove four hours south and brought it back and it fits alongside the existing granite perfectly. Our painter was hand brushing the entire house, six weeks and counting at that point, slow as anything and genuinely excellent work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we were $380,000 in and still living in one room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going home<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On June 18 at two in the afternoon the building inspector came out and granted a certificate of occupancy for the upstairs living area. That is the week 32 video<\/a>, which I shot at 11pm the night before because I had work in the morning. The movers came Saturday the 20th, ran two loads, about $1,400 all in, and we slept in our own bed that night for the first time since November, eight and a half months later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote something a few days after that, dictated at midnight because my wrists were bad. I’m not going to try to write it better now:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The night we moved in, I tucked Matilda into her room. And she looked at me and asked, is this my room? Yes. It is yours. Ever since, she keeps asking if she can go play in her room, and every time I tell her yes, it is your room, you can go in there whenever you want. If everything goes to plan, this is the room she grows up in. It might actually become her childhood room, the one she remembers. I never had that, so I cannot fully explain why it hits me as hard as it does.<\/p>\nHome<\/a>, June 26, 2026<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I moved every single year growing up, so no room was ever “the room” for me, and that’s the part of this whole project I still can’t really talk about without it getting away from me a bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\"Overlook<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We did not move into a finished house, to be clear. The upstairs bathtub drained straight into the garage, several outlets were dead and the mini splits weren’t charged for another five days. The driveway was too rough and steep to get a low car up without scraping. The solar panels had been sitting under a tarp for nine months and were still on the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last 20%, which takes as long as the first 80%<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

July was paving, which I shot as a timelapse<\/a> because there is not much to say about asphalt, and then the electricians finally coming back a week later and lighting the basement, the garage and the beer room. I also put up a short post<\/a> in the middle of all that which was basically just a drone photo and an apology for not writing more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solar went back up over the course of a week, needing more brackets and two return visits. I was more anxious about that than about anything structural in the entire build, because this wasn’t a solar company doing it, it was my contractor’s electricians working off a lot of labeling and notes. They work. We hit 6,000 watts the first good day. I have room for three more panels that I’m probably not going to add, since my array is grandfathered into the old banking arrangement with the power company rather than time of use, and I don’t want to touch that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

August was landscaping<\/a>, finally, after three months of waiting on it. Two French drains out to the brook to take the water that comes off the mountain every spring, a regrade of the back hill to get some yard back, split rail fencing around the perimeter with chicken wire run through it to keep the dog and the baby on the right side of it, then hay and grass seed. I watered it every day for a week and it germinated. Then we got a two day downpour that took most of the soil into the brook and onto the new patio and knocked the fence sideways. They came back the following week and did the entire thing over again from the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tuff Shed went in on its gravel pad, 12 by 16 with a loft, and it’s about 25% full which was exactly the goal (everything we store year round fits, with room left for outdoor furniture and the grill). I put the second coat of paint on it myself and saved $450. Its placement is not where I wanted it, and the reason is a decent illustration of how this town works: our variances covered the house, not the shed, and here every shed counts as permanent and is subject to full setbacks and permitting, including the plastic ones that weigh fifty pounds. With 20 feet required on all sides it had to land close to dead center in the back. The front siding went on in the third week of August, which was supposed to be stone until we cut it for cost, a sentence I have now typed so many times over three years that I barely notice it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\"Overlook<\/a>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What it actually cost<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The contract closed out on August 26, 2026 at $477,778 with a zero balance and every line item at 100% complete. That’s $464,690 in original contract plus $13,088 in net change orders, and there were 28 change orders over ten months, which broke down as $27,197 in additions against $14,109 in credits coming back to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The additions were mostly what you’d expect: excavating ledge, a retaining wall change, a new culvert, additional tree cutting, the gas piping for the propane relocation, mold remediation, framing material increases, patio fencing, additional gutters. What I didn’t expect going in was how many of the allowances came in under and got credited back to me, including electrical ($1,137), door hardware ($664), the heat pump ($2,200), driveway paving ($2,200), flooring ($333) and bath fixtures ($1,449), which is not how any of the horror stories I read before starting this go. I quoted $458,725 in the Phase 2 post a year earlier, so finishing about 4% over an 11 month old estimate, through a New Hampshire winter, on a lot where we hit ledge in week three, is a much better outcome than I was braced for and most of the credit for that goes to a GC who sent me every receipt and never once tried to bury anything in a line item.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What that money bought, roughly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n