House Build Update April 2026
The update (that very few people asked for )… If you haven’t been around- we bought 40 acres of land in Wyoming back in December 2021. We sold our house in Colorado in January 2022 and moved into a camper February 1, 2022 in Wyoming with plans to break ground on our house that spring. Wellllll that didn’t end up happening and we ended up building a big red barn along with buying a house in town that we have completely gutted and renovated. OH and we had another baby! Fast forward to April 2026……. we are FINALLY getting close to breaking ground on our house build. The last few months we have been getting all of the paperwork/plans etc ready to submit for our building permit! WOOHOO!
It has been a SLOW process (no surprise there, remember how slow everything was going in 2022 that we bought a house in town? yeah.). But we are starting to see things coming together! So where are things currently:
We have our future house staked out on our land. We walked it and mapped out all of the rooms. It felt SO exciting to stand where each of the rooms will actually be (and “park” in the garage!)!!
We are waiting on our finalized plans back from the engineer. We are waiting on our septic system design (the testing for that should be this week weather permitting!). THEN we can submit for our building permit!! (There are SO many pieces we have to have done to submit for a building permit.)
We are moving our driveway (and extending it!!)!
We are actively working on fencing off our land and adding a gate (Okay, Zach is working on this. It was suppose to be a family work weekend out there but our kids were hit with a stomach bug so Zach was solo working this time).
There are a handful of things I’ve been asked lately so let me answer those here too:
How much is it going to cost? Honestly. I don’t know. We are not approaching this project “normally”. We don’t have a builder. We don’t have a loan. We are going to cash flow this build as much as possible. HOW? Well, we made some wise real estate choices in our 20’s which has allowed us to pursue this without a loan so far.
HOW are you doing it without a builder? Well, I married Zach so. But actually really, you don’t have to have a contractor or builder where we live. You can serve as the contractor. We will be contracting some of it out and other work we will be handling ourselves (and by ourselves, I actually mean mostly Zach while I hold tape measures, tools and whatever else he asks me to help with or keeping our toddler out of trouble).
When will it be done? See above. We have no clue. EVERYTHING has taken way longer than we expected so honestly, we have no clue how long all of this will take. If we can get our permit back from the county end of May/early June then we will break ground ASAP.