Building a house during parental leave - or when is the optimal moment?

Hello,

what do you generally think about building a house during parental leave, i.e. actively participating in the construction and saving as much as possible through personal effort? Just to explain the situation, we are both 26, have not "planned" a child yet, and do not want to move into a house overnight. It’s more about long-term planning. I (man) have studied and only started working about 2 years ago. Due to loans for furniture, kitchen, etc., I still have a few thousand euros of debt, but I can definitely repay about 1,000 euros per month, so I will start building capital in a few months. My girlfriend has not studied but has been working since she was 16. She has saved about 15,000 EUR capital. We both have cars worth about 8,000 EUR, on which no loans are outstanding.

My girlfriend wants to stay at home anyway during the first year. The idea would be that I also stay home completely in the first year and contribute as much as possible to the house construction during that time. Often the problem is that the work has to be done after regular work hours or on weekends. Here would be the chance to take complete time off. You only receive [Elterngeld] for 14 months, so some financial losses have to be accepted. The question is whether these losses are not less than the personal work effort that can be accomplished within 12 months.

Specifically, my idea is to hire an experienced worker for the respective tasks, who guides me and works together with me, but whom I can support full-time. I have not learned anything in this field, but I basically think it should not be a problem. I am physically fit and an athlete. I would also like to work on the labor-intensive trades such as the shell construction.

I look forward to your opinions or suggestions or general tips on how to combine family planning and house construction in our situation (low equity due to studying, my girlfriend definitely wants to have her first child before 30, and we will soon be 27). By the way, we live in a 2-room apartment. It is large (90 sqm), but still only two rooms, so a move will be necessary sometime anyway. And that also costs time, nerves, and money.

Hello,

I want to respond to you as the mother of a 16-month-old daughter, because I cannot estimate the effort involved in building a house more or less by yourself.

Don’t be mad at me, but I think you are approaching the matter quite naively and with rose-colored glasses. Surely you will delegate some trades completely to strangers, but even then – how long do you think it will take the two of you to build a house?

The fact is that your wife receives 65% of the net salary (of the last 12 months) [EG (Elterngeld)]. As you already wrote, you both get 14 months of parental leave. How do you plan to manage that financially? Let’s assume a salary of around €1500 (just for your wife), that would be €975! + child benefit! It’s also not the case that you both get credited the entire time. One partner takes 12 months, the other 2. In other words, you would have no income for 12 months.

In my view, that’s not feasible!

The idea that you will need a bigger apartment anyway is understandable, although that could also work for the first few years. Why don’t you build now and move into the ready-made nest?

Best regards

Hello,

what do you generally think about building a house during parental leave, i.e. actively participating in the construction and saving as much as possible through own work?
..... Specifically, my idea is to hire an experienced worker for the respective tasks, who guides me and works with me, but whom I can support full-time. I have not trained in this area, but I basically think it should not be a problem. I am physically fit and an athlete. So I would also like to work on the labor-intensive trades like shell construction.

Your post is hard for me to digest because you seem to assume that with zero knowledge you can build/participate in building a single-family house to be erected according to the latest standards...

Regardless of the fact that, for various reasons, I cannot recommend anyone to build a house almost entirely on their own during parental leave—not a few relationships have broken up because of it—you are quite naive... despite studying; sorry. Building a house means tackling 16 trades—you yourself say you don't have the slightest clue about any of them. The worst part: you are completely dependent on third parties, without the possibility of control/influence, since you probably would not even notice if something was badly done in one place. If you wanted to refute this argument by hiring close construction supervision by an expert—this expert would be so expensive that it would likely become uninteresting for you again. In short, you can provide auxiliary services, nothing more!

If someone with these ideas sat in front of me, I would usually send them home because I do not want to be responsible for a fiasco. Normally I would advise you to buy a refined shell and "only" do the interior work during parental leave. However, this "only" is already too much for you since you also have no knowledge of the trades in the interior; apart from the fact that—even during parental leave—you need a master craftsman for plumbing and a master craftsman for electrical work, otherwise there will be trouble with the responsible suppliers.

I strongly advise you—before you even think about building a house—to consult an independent financing broker. In a 2-3 hour conversation, they will explain your financial possibilities. If it turns out in the end that you should save up equity for some more years—which I assume—then it was a good conversation.

Not a few people build their first house after the age of 30, and quite a few still beyond 40 or 50.

Kind regards

A colleague of mine did something similar. 6 months of parental leave and helped with the house. However, his father-in-law is a construction contractor and did the major part of the house construction. I think, without this constellation - close relatives or very good friends with sufficient expertise - it does not make sense.

I can currently easily set aside 1,000 EUR in addition to the rent. My girlfriend surely also 500 EUR. Besides, we pay a cold rent of 500 EUR. That makes a total of 2,000 EUR. There are also salary increases, for example, I got 7% more during the last one. But I really don’t want to pay 2,000 EUR per month for the house. My parents have a rate well below 1,000 EUR and they have a nice semi-detached house in a very good urban location.

We might rather build a little outside (suburb, nearest municipality, etc.), but a single-family house instead of a semi-detached house. I am estimating a plot price somewhere between 60,000 EUR and 120,000 EUR. It’s about the Dresden area or nearby suburbs like Weißig, Bannewitz, Ottendorf-Okrilla, etc.

We even have a civil engineer in our circle of friends, but more than occasionally taking a look is certainly not possible. He has to work outside from Monday to Friday and is only there on weekends.

Trades like sanitary, electrical, roof structure, etc. I wouldn’t do anyway. I had rather thought that there is great potential with the shell construction (brick by brick) and then with trades like interior doors, parquet flooring, wall paint/wallpaper, landscaping and possibly insulation (I have read that there are methods which are very easy even for laymen). I would of course leave the planning to an architect. He should then know what is possible and what is not.

An alternative would be that I really only do the "idiot-proof" and non-time-critical things, I will take parental leave anyway. At least 2 months and I also think a few more months wouldn’t have such a negative effect on income (e.g., because of tax progression). So something like that, for example, the ground floor is already finished and we can move in, but I do interior doors, parquet, wall paint/wallpaper, and the upper floor alone + landscaping.

In this case, it means saving up some more equity. I think 15,000 EUR per year should be possible for both of us together. Then we would have about 50,000 EUR in 2 years and the salary has probably improved a little too. I just hope that interest rates are still that favorable in 2 years.

@ slbs86

We are also building in the west of Dresden. I could give you information about a new development area where plots are currently being sold for around 80€/m². If you are interested, please send me a private message.