werepeLeri:

Building a house in Abuja - a four room duplex - with BQ

Cost of land - 8m.

Spent so far. 23m.

Purpose- Elegance and taste all combined in a modest 4 room duplex in a serviced estate. Hmmm -

Jarus- means, the cost of land in Abuja will build two of yours in Kwara. Please take me to Kwara.

NL1960:

@Jarus. Sorry for my asking. Why would you want to share your country home with shops?. Will you be able to control the type of people that will rent the shops or those that will patronize what they are selling?. What if somebody rents one of the shops and turn it into a drinking joint?. Hope you know that all sorts of characters come into a drinking joint. To me that is not safe or quiet enough for a house that is a country home.

Jarus:

Lessons:

1, Just start, don't procrastinate. I almost regret procrastinating for too long before starting. I remember asking on this section of NL in 2009 about what it costs to build a house. I however gained something useful from one of the responses as it was through this section that I got a link to a website that did a fine analysis of how 2.5m can do a house, which fired me up, even though I got to realize it can't.

2, You are most likely to spend above your budget, if not due to anything, because of changing prices of building materials. In addition to that, a factor that swelled up my own cost is changing taste. I kept tinkering with the original plan and idea almost at every stage. My plan was, with 3.5m max, I will finish the whole house to painting and finishing, but today I have spent 3.6m and it's just around 60% completed. From the look of things, by the time I finish(painting plus finishing), I may have spent 6m. To bring it to my final desired shape (interlocking compound, mosque, car port, shop, fencing etc), I don't see myself spending less than 8m. From initial plan of 2.5m to 8m! That's how it is! But never be discouraged, just start, even if with 500k!

3, You can hardly escape being short-changed, no matter the level of supervision, and it is worse if you're sending money from Lagos like me. I learnt some bags of cement disappeared unaccounted for from my site. I also suspect most of the prices being told me are inflated. I may have lost close to 500k on these things, but they played their game so well, and I'm also not somebody that finds faults, especially when I don't have concrete evidence. So I just do some shouting on phone and leave them.

My broda, nice quote there. However, building a house is like bringing a baby up, you can never estimate the exact amount you are going to spend on it, but you can always guess almost right. My brother, you're doing something great and may God see you through. I will pat you on the back if you can successfully build a 3 bedroom flat with 2 self-contained bqs with 8mil. My brother, you have a great taste, abeg be looking at 13 million .