12 Things I Wish I Knew Before Building a House

for the last 3 months we've been building this A-frame Cabin in the Woods we just got finished with framing HVAC electrical and plumbing and today I'm going to share with you 12 things I wish I knew before building a cabin myself you can learn from my mistakes so you don't do the same let's get started number one with an A-frame it's all roof there's no walls so what that means is at full height 6'2 you're going to be losing about 3 and 1/2 ft from each side you can place a couch but it will still be bumped out if you're building an A-frame for that aesthetic cool look no problem those are things you can put up with but if you're really trying to leverage all the livable space consider having a wall coming up first with the cost to build usually averaging $350 a square foot you might consider a more efficient building design that doesn't include an A-frame but more of a traditional wall on the side number two on the list is this little half wall that's being put in place again you're losing all that square footage and the reason they have to put this wall in certain rooms like the bedroom or the upstairs that I'll show you is because you have to be able to have places to run run your HVAC and your plumbing in order to actually fit it you could possibly run it through your crawl space but the problem that that some things like HVAC specifically all the duct work becomes very inefficient when it's being run underneath the ground especially if the furnace is right here some of the things can run through the walls but some things have to run through the pony wall like this HVAC duck work that's pushing out all the vents outside and vents like your bathroom vent or even your dryer vent and even your HVAC vent pipes on the upstairs Loft some of the DCT work is a lot larger as you can see this is blowing the hot or cold air inside of it so when before the hbag goes in you might consider oh maybe I'll use this as storage or maybe built-in shelves or built-in closet space but you really can't this is all meant for all that stuff to be running through and yeah it continues on the other side it's all loaded with basically all the HVAC electrical and plumbing number three on the list is one that I'm most annoyed about the Architects originally designed this to be laid out exactly this way bathtub vanity toilet but the problem starts happening in two places because of this slope first of all your shower head starts pointing way out you could get a head that is able to be adjusted lower but it's going to be maximized out one solution could be to flip it this way you'll save that part but the problem becomes even larger since the vanity is right here this angle is a very uncomfortable angle to hang a mirror for your vanity if you can imagine it it's going to be slanted all the way down looking at you that's going to be awkward ugly and and very inefficient use of space one option would be to relocate the vanity here but that would interfere with the entrance into the bathroom I'm personally very annoyed about this design and if you have any ideas for an angled bathroom vanity mirror that is not hideous I'd love to hear them in the comment section let me know cuz I could take any advice I can number four on the list is something that's problematic in the wintertime because the A-frame roofs are so long and they don't have a bump out for a sofit all the snow gets bumped pumped out to about what looks like 8 to 9 in away from the building now that means you're going to be shoveling and updating to make sure it doesn't build up and hit your little fascia board and get it sucked up and start swelling up number two it's going to you got you're going to have to make sure that snow doesn't melt later on and goes into your crawl space now conveniently for our situation we did an attic blower fan in there where all of these are going to get closed off the vents and the HV guy installed a pipe through there with a blower fan that's going to get all the moisture out so you don't need these little vents but they will need to be covered up and the most annoying part of the roofing situation here is when snow gets diverted down here it's going to start building up against our heat exchanger which it's fine because you're not going to be using your AC unit in the winter time but it's also going to build it up and push it out to the side the only real solution for that to be is to put it in the front or the back of the house but that depends on whether or not you have the space or you want it to be an iore when you walk in another solution for this is to put some snow stoppers on the metal roof the problem with that is enough snow gets built up on them the roofer said that those break off very easily straight from the rafters themselves the only real possible solution here is to build another roof pitch right over it it's not going to cancel out this snow build up on the side but at least keep as much snow off of it that you could possibly can again regular maintenance during snow to remove it from this area area to prevent any kind of problems number five on the list is the entry to your building The Architects originally designed this to be a secondary entrance even though this was supposed to be the very front of the building that they were considering to be the primary entrance the problem with that is when you have a deck or and if you have a deck the snow runs down and covers this entire section what that will do is not only jeopardize your fascia here if the snow is not regularly removed but the snow eventually when it melts it'll start seeping into the house the only real possible solutions here is to either not have a deck or to keep an eye out every time there's a lot of snowfall to make sure that you scoop as much of it out these are little things that I didn't consider until we got some snow and the property was built number seven on the list something you really have to be aware of is the complexity of the work and the location of the building is going to dictate how high your bids are going to be because this property is about an hour and a half to two hours outside of town all the bids are going to include between two and $3,000 of travel alone now some contractors will tell you oh we use a portion of that money for lodging but the reality is none of them did they just wanted to mark up the price because it's more inconvenient to travel this far which I totally get I'd rather do local work in town and of course the complexity of the build will rise the bid prices you have these inconvenient spaces even though it's a small structure it's a little bit less than 2,000 square ft my HVAC guy says I'm going to be in and out on one day with my guys I want to make this efficient it's outside of town it ended up taking him almost a week and a half to do this because how annoying certain locations for certain things are pushing and pulling all their duck work and all the electrical stuff and all the plumbing stuff something you really got to consider the more simple your build is the more probably cost savings it'll be when it comes to hiring contractors number eight on the list is considering a fireplace with this 2112 aggressive pitch roof and it being a cabin you might consider wanting to have a fireplace to make a more of a cozy atmosphere in the winter time but where would you put that fireplace is it going to be gas or is it going to be electric whichever option you choose you're going to have to build the section flat so you're going to frame it out you're going to lose more livable space in order to fit that in the best solution that we came up to be able to have a fireplace is we're going to go with a gas fireplace that's round and the pipe is going to go up through these Rafters and out outside now I don't like that the vent pipe is going to be sticking out this close to the pitch roof I was considering having a swivel up and come at the highest pitch of the roof the problem with that is with that vent pipe running all through this rafter code regulations for energy requires that you cannot have more than 40% of that rafter exposed and not insulated because that will reduce the R value for the Energy Efficiency of the home again with a simpler wall face here you probably have no issues putting any kind of fire place but with this design these are things you have to come up with number nine on list when considering building a cabin that you might not expect is the limited Closet Storage with an A-frame originally The Architects designed this to be the laundry room this is a dedicated furnac room as you could see you can't use it for utilities or anything else exclusively furnace and this was just going to be a hallway closet but one thing the Architects didn't incorporate it in is a place for a water heater so the solution was to put a tankless water heater in here to save space and to be able to have at least a utility closet where you could put brooms and vacuums and dust pans and any other kind of thing like that so you'd have your tankless water heater in the corner you have a junction box in here for connection and charging your vacuum and maybe a little bit extra room for your brooms and your vacuum cleaners now the only actual closet space that's here that you can use is in the primary bedroom there is a dedicated closet for your clothes and that's the unfortunate part is there's not a whole lot of places to put Linens bed sheets pillows you know additional stuff uh to sleep so the only real solution for things like that is either a put a shelf in that utility closet and consider it being possibly getting dusty over time maybe use some of the closet space dedicated for those Linens or maybe put a dresser specifically upstairs cuz there's no closet space at all number 10 on the list you might want to really consider before building is whether or not you're going to have a garage a garage is nice because you can pull up and park your car when it snows and not have to shovel it out you could get away with what we're going to be doing is putting a carport on the top of the drive driveway that way you could use that space more efficiently but if I was to really redesign this building structure knowing what i' know now is I'd probably put this building further back on the hill and have the Architects design a stilt system deck system down below so you could actually drive up to it and park underneath it those designs are highly efficient because not only can you utilize that for storage for parking but you can also put your heat exchanger uh or AC unit underneath it and not worry about snow getting on top of those things and if you're wondering what we're going to do with this space when it's going to be Springtime and the snow melts we're going to pour concrete all the way up and build out this porch system as far as we can so we can entertain and enjoy this beautiful view but man a carport would be really nice and handy number 11 on the list when considering building a cabin specifically an A-frame is your ridge beam up top we have a 60t long 3T deep 9 in wide weighing at 4500 lb glue l beam and if you haven't seen that video when we brought it in go check it out it will give you an anxiety attack but the biggest question I get is aren't there a Fram designs that you don't have to have such a big ridge beam that's not only expensive it's a $155,000 beam with very inconvenient access roads but the answer to that is the architect's designed to have a particular snow load on the building the building is so wide and it's so tall that some of the traditional webbing system that they'll have to connect the rafters it's not sufficient for for the engineers to be able to sign off on that the only real way to get away with that webbing system that's far cheaper is if you were to build a building structure an A-frame specifically about half the size of this room it's essentially a system in place for tiny homes that are A-frames and this is like I said close to 2,000 ft and number 12 on the list when considering building your dream cabin is if you're chasing a place that is in the woods with a killer View and the view is specifically something that we were chasing you're going to have to consider putting it on that Hillside it's so hard to find property that's sitting right on top of the mountain and you could put your cabin right on top that's a very expensive piece of property now with our situation we're not directly on the hillside we're probably around 200 yards off the top of this Hillside now what that means is that if you're going to save money on the property you're going to have to consider spending that money on the retaining wall retaining walls are crucial because if the soil gets compromised over time it'll break off and push everything into your building with a retaining wall like this they can range between 30 and $50,000 depending on your setup the crew that you hire and the materials that you use but at the end of the day with a retaining wall and a killer view you can't beat that it's just the coolest thing in the world and the way this retaining wall turned out it's it's almost like an artistic thing not to mention if your property is within some kind of neighborhood of other cabins it gives you somewhat of actually privacy from everybody else well there you have it folks those are 12 things I wish I knew before starting building our Dream cabin here these are lessons that I learned after the fact but we are happy with how things turned out well I hope you guys found these tips helpful that my mistakes that I made not catching these things ahead of time you could save yourself a lot of time and stress when building your own dream cabin make sure you tune in for the next episode as we start handling the inside of this cabin and in the meantime here's a video that I think you might enjoy [Music]