House Building: Our Big Project

Assalamu alaykum (Peace be upon you)...

I will start off by thanking Allah for all the blessings and gifts He has given us, for surely we would not have accomplished any of what we have without His help, mercy and permission.

We are in the middle of a big project and that is building our first house. Living in the US it is tempting to have all that we wish for. One can easily earn money but spending it is even easier. Alhamdulillah, for the past six years of our marriage we have saved enough to start building our own house interest free of course.
Here is how it started to unfold: a year ago I checked out some books on house building from the library. We were clueless regarding this subject. We did not know the cost of building the house, or whether we would do the whole job or just partly, what went first the footers or the foundation, simple terms such as plywood, drywall, framing...were stange to us. We had a lot of learning to do! I got The Owner Builder Book, House Building for the dummy and others ranging from general topics to some complex ones such as house framing. I researched and learned more by watching videos and reading articles on the web. Oh, this soon became a very interesting subject I could not get enough of. Meanwhile we started looking for a lot to buy. We wanted to be close to the mosque as possible, but getting a lot near it was hard because there weren't so many. We would find some wooded ones with a lot of acres and hills, and many trees.  That all meant a lot of money upfront to clean it up and fix it for building a house.  We stumbled upon some nice lots but they had many restrictions, which we really did not like. After all, we want a house of our own so that we could have freedom to enjoy it, we did not need anybody to tell us how to use our property.  So, alhamdulillah, after a while we decided to look up some lots where many of our relatives have already bought their houses.  It was a bit further from the town, but I figured, we have to compromise and give some to get some.  The area is very quiet, plenty of backyard space for playing, gardening..., most of our close relatives were in this same suburb, so we decided to give it a shot. And this is what we got...:

We purchased the lot for $ 22500.00 and chose the corner lot because those lot have more square footage then the others.  InshaAllah in my next posts I will try to share our house progress as it happens.