Developing our house-floor-plan
I had been doing some research of my own and had started developing a house-floor-plan of my own liking. I then created a timeline for building our free house. I wanted to be done by the end of August, 2007. Many professional general contractors build a home in 3 months, so couldn't we do it in 8 months? Little did I know. Probably the hardest part was creating a house-floor-plan
When we had finally agreed upon our house-floor-plan we discovered that this particular house wouldn't fit on our property,
It was now about March 2007, and we were back to the drawing board. RL is the draftsman in our family, so I let him sketch the plans. We experimented with duplexes, ramblers, etc. The ebook on building a free house that I had purchAsed said to make the first home small,... a starter home. Well, the 2200 sq ft. home we were envisioning was going to cost us upwards of $200K and it became intuitively obvious that it was too big. Finally, we had scaled down to a 1500 sq ft home (or so I thought).
His creative nature had taken hold and he was designing “his castle”. So when we ordered the plans, I was astonished to learn that the house was 1800+ sq ft. I feared that this home was going to cost way more than we could afford. Well, since we had already bought the plans we were already in $1600+ to the cause, so we were committed. It was “sink or swim” time Incidentally, I've heard that building a house together can be very hard on a marriage, so you have to work at being super nice to each other.
Making Changes to the PlansWith a little additional research, I had obtained estimate bids from various contractors (see Getting Bids HERE) by this time, and our initial plan was laid low when the plumber and electrician refused to use the big box materials we had planned to use and we found ourselves making changes to our house plans . What we originally planned on doing was to buy a “house plan plus all the materials it took to build this particular house” from a local big box building store. 
Of course, as I called different contractors, they wouldn't use the cheap stuff this store offered. So we took the $1600 houseplans and used them to price out the labor and materials purchased elsewhere. Yes, we built this same house-floor-plan, making changes to them, and paying dearly for those change-orders This was all part of our education. I determined to keep a record of whenever we found ourselves making changes to the plans and the costs incurred. This was truly an education. Then I determined to write an ebook to help people like yourself who want to build,
I told a lot of people this was what I was going to do. I suggested that they buy this other guy's ebook, but they would always say “Why?” “I want to buy yours.” I guess I had told them enough about our experiences and “sold them” on the fact that our experiences would be valuable to know. Because the book I purchased wasn't filled with these true to life experiences I had determined that I was “going to write an ebook to sell” on the internet,. As you probably noticed, this isn't an ebook, but it does have our experiences on this website... Imagine this...I decided to GIVE this information to you - for free!
Our son worried and voiced his concern about us getting ripped off royally because we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. He said “Mom, I'm just afraid you are going to be way over your head and I don't want you to lose everything.” Don't let people discourage you. We got tons of negative advice, but we were convinced we could do it, and when we had our house-floor-plan ready we went to the bank and were successful in getting a construction loan.
Getting a Construction Loan
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that we both liked. I had my ideas, but RL also had some ideas of his own. “Never the twain shall meet” became the famous last words.
I really hadn't scrutinized the house-floor-plan RL had finally settled on for the exact dimensions, because he wasn't really listening to me anyway. It was more frustrating for me to realize that my ideas were being ignored so I just stood back and waited for him to finish.. 
but have had no experience. Perhaps this could be of help to your learning curve and it wouldn't be as expensive as ours was. 
Free House ; Free Information. We paid the price, and you do your due diligence and read and study our mistakes, so you don't make the same ones we did. 