My husband and I paid the price for saving money to build a house.

Because he didn't want to spend a lot of money building a house, Mr. Hung used the foundation he had built 5 years before. He also chose to buy cheap materials...

However, his savings plan did not bring the desired results. Below is the sharing of Phan Hung, 43 years old, District 7, Ho Chi Minh City about the story of building a house for his family.

Early last year, I had a 41m2 two-story house and a 72m2 plot of land along a canal, along with a bank debt of 800 million VND due to a loan for real estate business but was unlucky. I made the mistake of borrowing in a monthly package that only paid interest, not principal. If I didn't have the money to pay by the due date (March 2015), I would lose my mortgaged property.

Therefore, I was forced to sell my house or land to pay off the bank loan. I wanted to sell the land but at that time the real estate market was not as active as it is now so it was not easy to sell it. People offered too low a price. Finally, I sold the house for 1.2 billion. After deducting taxes, commissions for brokers, and temporary housing, my wife and I had 350 million left to build a house on our canalside land.

We plan to build a house on a 50m2 plot of land, leaving 22m2 for a garage. I plan to buy a four-seater car in the future, so I want to make a large yard to park the car comfortably. Because I don't want to borrow more money, I only hire freelance workers to work for me, not hiring a construction company, nor hiring an architect to design the house. I sketch out my ideas myself and the workers will build according to my ideas. The ground floor includes a living room, a bathroom under the stairs, a bedroom and a kitchen. The septic tank will be located right under the bedroom. The second floor includes a bedroom, a bathroom right in the bedroom and a worship room, which is also the family's office and reading room, along with a small balcony in front.

Excluding the yard, the total construction area is 100m2, the construction worker estimated the cost for me to be about 330 million, including cheap materials and interior equipment. The labor alone is 110 million. If I contracted the whole package, the construction worker wanted me to pay an additional 10% to cover any unexpected costs. However, my job allows me to be proactive with my time, so I bought the materials myself and only paid the workers for their labor. Excluding electrical equipment, I chose the cheapest one for everything, so in total I spent exactly 350 million.

Because I wanted to save tens of millions, I did not rebuild the foundation of the house, but used the old foundation that I had built when I bought the land 5 years ago. At that time, I had already built the foundation of the house, planning to build two floors for rent. Because I used the old foundation, my new house could not be built high, I could only build a fake cast-iron style, the ground floor had a fake roof, the upper floor had a corrugated iron roof.

After two and a half months, the project was completed. We moved into our new home but didn't feel very comfortable because you get what you pay for.

Because I didn’t do a new foundation, I also forgot to reinforce and waterproof the base of the wall. My house is next to a canal, after a rainy season, water seeped into the wall, and by Tet the wall was as dirty as the old house.

The ground floor roof was only made of concrete slabs, and every time my child jumped around upstairs, people downstairs could feel it clearly. I wanted to install a ceiling fan and a chandelier in the living room, but I didn't dare, so the items I brought back from the old house had to be sold at a cheap price.

I bought cheap water equipment such as water pipes, faucets... so they are easy to leak, causing water leakage. My two sons are active and like to play with the faucets, so my faucets get dirty very quickly. There are four people in the house but there are months when we use up 40 cubic meters of water. I also installed a shower for bathing, a sprayer in the bathroom, but because I bought cheap ones, the water pressure is low, making it very uncomfortable to use. Coming home from work tired, I get frustrated with such trivial things, my husband and I sometimes argue, life is not comfortable.

I bought the cheapest floor tiles, so after a year, a few of them cracked and broke. The reasons for the breakage were funny, once because I chopped a coconut on the floor, and once because my wife was pushing her bike and put her foot down on it. A few other tiles were cracked because my naughty children were hitting them with hammers.

The house we built ourselves has seriously deteriorated after half a year of living there, and the walls along the canal have also shown signs of cracking. My husband and I plan to stay, but we are also afraid that we will wake up in the middle of the night and see the house falling into the canal like some cases that have happened in Ho Chi Minh City. Therefore, last February, I upgraded the house, such as reinforcing the land adjacent to the canal by driving wooden stakes outside, re-tiling the floor, laying 1.2m high baseboard tiles to prevent water from seeping into the walls, replacing the water equipment... The total cost of materials and labor cost nearly 100 million, not to mention the whole family having to live with dust for a month.

My wife wanted to fix the septic tank buried under the bedroom because she felt like she couldn't sleep well. She also dreamed of replacing the corrugated iron roof with a flat roof to make a covered drying yard on the top floor, so that we wouldn't have to run from the rain during the rainy season, and at the same time, it would be more heat-resistant than our current corrugated iron roof. However, to fix the house as my wife wanted would cost hundreds of millions, so I still put it off, waiting until I had saved enough money. Sometimes I think, if when I started building the house, I had invested more money to hire good workers and buy good materials, I probably wouldn't have wasted money by building a house this way economically. However, I didn't tell my wife lest she complain because at that time my wife suggested borrowing money to build the house as she wanted, but I didn't agree.

According to VNE

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