The Prairie Project House: Why We're Building It Ourselves

The first question that was asked is, why?

Well, here is a little of the why, but the biggest reason why is answered by NO.

We're building a 1,600 square foot house from the ground up. No general contractor, no production builder, no bank standing over our shoulder telling us what a house is supposed to look like. Just us, a set of plans, and a lot of weekends.

People ask why. Fair question. Here's the honest answer.

The math stopped making sense

Take a look at where things sit right now. 30-year mortgage rates are hovering around 6.5%, and they've been stuck up there for over a year with no real relief in sight. That's not the "temporary spike" everyone kept promising back in 2022, that's just where money costs now. Home prices never corrected to match. So you've got the worst of both: high prices and high rates, stacked on top of each other, and a monthly payment that makes zero sense for what you're actually getting. We looked at conventional home builders, that was am astronomically priced no. We looked at replacing the trailer that has existed on our property since 1980 with something like it, that was also a surprising no. We even looked into the tiny home option of 399 square feet that is titled as an RV, thereby not subject to property taxes, and the $65,000 quote turned into a $117,000 ten year 10% commitment. Owning your own business also further complicates the math. Banks want consistency, and business ownership is anything but consistent.

And what you're actually getting is the problem I really want to talk about. We used to build homes for people, made for families, personalized. Homes build now are all a commodity.

Underwriting doesn't care what a house is worth. It cares what a house is.

Go build something efficient, with a smart footprint, simple roofline, no wasted square footage, and see what an appraiser does with it. Underwriting standards are built around comparables, not value. The bank isn't asking "is this well built." It's asking "does this match what sold on the street last year." If your house doesn't look like everyone else's house, it doesn't appraise like everyone else's house, and now you're fighting your own lender to get credit for decisions that actually make the home better.

That's the trap. The system rewards square footage and conformity. It does not reward craftsmanship, efficiency, or good design. So the production builders build what appraises, not what's smart, and everybody downstream pays for it in price, in quality, in options.

We got tired of being priced out of a system that wasn't pricing in the things we actually cared about.

So we cut out the parts that weren't serving us

If the bank's model doesn't reward good building, and the market's prices don't reflect good value, the move is obvious: stop playing that game. We designed a house that's efficient instead of bloated, simple instead of complicated, and are building it with our own hands instead of paying someone else's overhead, someone else's profit margin, and someone else's timeline. From site prep to finish out and punch-list, everyone has a profit margin and they want it all to be maxed.

We started with a simple question: what are the actual costs that go into a modern home? That decision is what makes the rest of this project possible, including a real number I'll get into next time: what it actually costs to build a 1,600 square foot house from scratch when you cut out everything that doesn't need to be there.

The second question we asked: is there a better way to build a home to suit our needs and the area? We researched this question extensively. We have watched as new builds require new, expensive HVAC, constant repairs due to builders neglecting things like freezes and other weather extremes, and watch as homes around us have sunk into the sand… only being a few years old. We have visited historic homes, old homes, structures; to libraries and found books and manuals on construction practices from prairie homes, frontier builds, agriculture builds, and practices suited to the Central Texas Climate.

Then we started questioning how exactly were we going to pull this off… and then we got to work.

This is the first post in a series walking through the Prairie Project House start to finish, the budget, the build, and the design choices that make a small, efficient house feel like a whole lot more than 1,600 square feet. Next up: the number everyone doesn't believe until they see it.