My wife and I are building a small two and a half bedroom house (approx. 110m2) with terrace in Costa Rica. Construction began at the beginning of February 2011 and is scheduled to take a little more than four months to complete.
We are a small family with a small budget and the aspiration to not grow too much. But you never know. One of the biggest unanswerable questions for us (and probably for many people I guess) was how big it needed to be now and in 10 years time. It seems to me that when people buy a pre-existing house it is often with the idea that they will sell it when it no longer meets their needs.
We do not plan to sell our house and move somewhere new. So it needs to suit our needs now and in the future, whatever they may be.
People we know with a very small budget are doing a lot of the building themselves with help from friends. They are learning a lot and not doing much else I imagine. This is one extreme. Then there are the people that project manage their construction - they buy the materials, arrange transport, hire people to work and arrange all the permits and insurance for workers. But they don't get their hands too dirty.
At the other extreme of people building their own house are those that don't get too involved in the day-to-day decision making and leave that to a "constructor". This is the group we fall into. We are more like construction project sponsors. But we are more involved than that sounds - we are also very much the creative drive for the work. And I did get my hands dirty a bit too.
