Why and How We Should Build Expansible Homes
World From Scratch’s mission is to create a world where everyone can follow their dreams. We can do that by building homes that take care of their owner, but at the same time are incredibly affordable. Imagine paying less for your housing that you do know while your home takes care of its own energy and utility bills and even feeds you. Seems like an impossible feat, but let me show you how it can be done through some interesting architecture and financial innovation!
Even outside of Denver, a 1500 sqft. house is going for about $400k. When you look at a mortgage for that, you are putting $20-$80k down and then you are still paying an $1800 mortgage for the next 30 years of your life! What if you could start cheaper and work your way up? Living in exactly what you need. Maybe you can.
There is a concept called Expansible Building. It was something that modular homes had grabbed onto at one point. Essentially what if you started with your basic living needs and then scaled from there? If you were to live in New York City or many other places, you start with a studio apartment, from there you move into a one bedroom and maybe at some point you decide to grab a small house. When you have kids, you grow into something bigger. Just like you grow into needing more space in your life, what if your house could follow along?
What if your house started at the size of a studio apartment? You’ve got a bathroom, and kitchen/living room/bedroom and that’s all you need. You are just starting out, you don’t have a lot of stuff and you are buying your first furniture! Last year, World From Scratch built a home similar to that with an attached greenhouse for under $25k.
It could easily be under $20k. And we aren’t alone in thinking that. There is a contractor showing that they were able to build a shipping container house for $17.5k.
With that being said, you probably aren’t doing the build yourself, so let’s say it costs $50k to build. Land outside Denver is another $50k for a couple acres, so we are looking at $100k. Loans actually work out very similarly when doing construction vs. buying a home. So, we’ve got $5–20k down instead of $20k-80k and closer to $500/mon in mortgage payments.
The trick here is to build with expansion in mind. To do that, we can put all the built in parts of the house on the right or left side. So, the shower, sinks, toilet, etc. will all be on one side of the house while the other side is left blank. Underneath, we have the water pipes and electrical boxes positioned to expand out and easily accessible for when you expand. Finally, we have a flat roof style house in case we need to go up.
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So, now you’ve moved in, you are feeling good and it’s time for a one bedroom. Well, you simple can expand outwards from the blank wall. Literally build the next section of the house onto what you are currently living in, add the bedroom, add an island to your kitchen and have a real living room. Then we take out the wall and boom, you are living in a larger place. Even better with the ability to have it done prefab and shipped to you so you don’t live next to a construction project. Now, luckily, we have a much easier time with electrical, water, etc. So, this expansion is only going to cost $30k. I’ve talked to the banks, their is a loan for this too, and at the end it just rolls into your mortgage. So, we put $6k down and add ~$100 to your mortgage.
Picture.
And thus, we can make it easy to build your life with your home and keep your payments way down! Depending on how big your life scales, you can expand your house to keep up with you. If you want to live in a world where your house takes care of you, visit World From Scratch and follow along so we can figure out we can do it together.
