Thanks for coming to this page of www.rickcafe.com I will take you thru the 22 week process of building a house in the Philippines, the planning weeks prior to that, and some of the pitfalls I encountered and some that I didn't. I looked around at houses on the market for sale and they were either in need of serious repairs or they were priced at some inflated price of what the owner and real estate agent  thought it was worth (remember the real estate agent is going to get 5-10% of the purchase price, so by building you have saved 10% off the house cost already).  There is no guaranteed success in building a house as many of you know, and being in the Philippines only complicates the process more with language problems, different names for tools, cultural differences (like hanging slaughtered chickens on the columns before building further, sorry I missed the photo on that one, (but I think it was really dreamed up by the construction crew to get a free lunch),  processes, and of course some of the workings with the local government. While I was in the building phase I looked on the internet and found a lot of good sites to coach me on how to build a house in the U.S; Australia and Europe, but not with the technology that is available here. The closest web site I could find was about building a school in Africa that answered most of my question on how the footing and cement work was done.

Many years ago I read a Dummies book on how to repair your Volkswagen and was thoroughly amused, so I will try to keep it in that format along with photos to keep you entertained through your read, it will be long just like the planning and building process were. First off I am no builder or engineer, but do understand having everything straight and even, how to mix cement and I have some basic carpentry skills from making furniture in years gone by. This was my first go at having a house built or even owning a house after renting all my life. The driving force in building was the rapid rise of rent in the Angeles City area due to the latest rapid expansion of the area with the new Subic highway, the  growth of the old Clark Airfield into an international Airport, and the decline of the U.S. dollar. Rent for a 4 bedroom house escalated from about $200 a month to well over $500 a month in the last 2 or 3 years. So lets go ahead and get started.......

You first have to own a piece of land to build your house on, and that of course is an entire web page or book in itself. It was about a 2 year process trying to find a good piece of land, in a secure gated subdivision, which does narrow down your search area.  You can read my first experience trying to buy land by clicking, I will update how I finally got the land after this portion of house building is finished. This is a photo of the 300 square meter piece of land I purchased:

Day 1 clearing the lot above.

OK so now you have your land and you want to build a house, lets do some basic planning and research in the area to find the right assets to get it done.

First you need a budget to build the house, which is a double edged sword, because to figure out your budget you need to figure out the cost of the house you are going to build, a real catch 22 that turns most people to find a contractor to build the house and not go through the aggravation. To get a ball park cost of your house you can find a contractor to give you a quote by giving him a design/sketch of the house you want to build, (I had 2 quotes, 1 was 3.5 million pesos and one was 3.8 million pesos). Now you have a basic number to work around and see what best suites you. You will also find if you chose to do subcontracting yourself it is like trying to get your hands around a jellyfish in the middle of a tsunami. First let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of going contractor or subcontractor and then list out all or most of the variables in the subcontractor phase which I chose.