If you are reading this to figure out whether you should build or buy your first new home, this is not going to be very helpful to you. My husband, Tommy, and I decided to build for many reasons and honestly didn’t even think about buying. I grew up in southwest Houston where building is commonplace, affordable, and relatively easy. My parents built their house from scratch and it has always been a dream of mine. So in the build vs buy stage of our journey, we had extremely selective hearing and we pretty much skipped that stage altogether and went with build.

I am not going to make an even argument here. I’m not going to list the pros and cons because what would be the point of that after I already made my choice. I’m just going to list all the good things about building your own house:

1.) It’s brand new. That’s right. No one has ever lived in it before. No smokers who insist that they have kept everything odorless. No cats who “never claw at the carpet”. No murderers whose wives “made them do it”.

2.) It’s your perfect home. You don’t have to settle for a granite countertop that is too dark. You get to pick the exact one you want. You get to pick the lighting, the floors, the fixtures, the paint, the brick, everything.

3.) It’s fun! The whole process is something that many people never get to do. You’ll get to pick out your plot of land and watch your house grow from just a slab of concrete into what you will call your home. Picking tiles is fun guys! Right? Yea!

I’m sure there are some equally good reasons to buy instead. So if that’s what you did then good for you!