All in all, none of this really gives you much hope anymore, to be honest. Money-wise, we both earn decently, but apparently, building your own little house isn’t really feasible.
Nobody said otherwise. Of course you can build a little house, just probably not the way you imagine it now. And that is due to the lack of equity. Let’s assume you have total capital of 350,000, regardless of how it is split up. You pay just under 90,000 for the plot, 230,000 for the house (turnkey 140 sqm approx), 30,000 for incidental building costs. Boom, the money is gone. What you don’t have now: a driveway, a garage, a terrace, a new kitchen, furniture, lamps, lawn, a garden fence, outdoor lamps, paved driveway, entrance steps, splash protection around the house. Incidental building costs and the plot are FIXED. So you can either build smaller, or forego KfW funding, which in my opinion means giving up on living comfort, and you can contribute your own work. Just don’t underestimate your own work. We only wallpapered and laid floors. That would have cost us about 15,000 to 19,000 € more at our prefab house provider. We have now spent 11,000 € for that and invested almost 50 man-days. The saving potential is therefore not as high as you might think. Sure, we could have laid laminate for 15 €, and tiles at 10 €/sqm. But you don’t want that. Our tiles cost 30 €/sqm, the tiler an additional 35 €/sqm. The cork parquet was 20 €/sqm and the living room parquet 40 €/sqm. If you go to a specialist store, you’ll see that this is the lower end of the price range. Wallpapering materials cost us over 1,000 € because it’s 65 rolls of wallpaper and about 10 buckets of paint. The house is about 600 sqm in area. Plus brushes, ladders, tools, and so on… you’ll be amazed at what else comes along. We saved about 7,000 €. We could still have screwed the plasterboards ourselves and done the taping ourselves. Saving potential approx. 8,000 €. Time effort almost 3 weeks full-time with two people. We have acquaintances who sacrificed an entire year’s vacation for this work. You can’t really do much more yourself in a prefab house, unless you can do plumbing and electrical work yourself. You can save on stairs and doors as well, but in my opinion, you have too much risk and trouble to make it worth saving 2,000 € in the end on such an amount. Personally, I would never wallpaper myself again… the first week was amusing and felt good to do something yourself, but by the second week you are done with it… can’t stand another drop of glue or smell of paint.