Building a mountainside home can be an amazing and exciting experience for those with the time and means to undertake such a project. For those looking to embrace a life in the mountains, constructing your own home will allow you to have more say in the location of your home, the design and layout, as well as how your home could fit into the ecosystem of the mountain. While building a mountainside home may be an attractive route to many, it is not without its own set of unique challenges. Here are a few things to keep in mind when planning to build your dream home in the mountains.

Stick to a Budget

This is true with any kind of large-scale project such as this but is especially true when constructing a home in the mountains. Consider the cost of purchasing the land, as well as excavation costs. These will likely be higher than they would be for a normal home, given the extremely varied nature of the terrain.

Once you’ve set your budget for the construction of the home, be sure to have some wiggle room for incidentals. If things go wrong and end up taking more time or money than you had planned for, you’ll want to have some money set aside to quickly deal with these inconveniences and keep your project on track. Failing to plan for incidentals can result in prolonged construction times which means an increased cost to you.

Access

What’s the point of building a mountain home if you can’t easily come and go as you please? Access should be one of the number one things to look for when deciding on a location to build a mountain home. This is another area to factor into your budget planning, as the cost of creating a new access road is no small amount, and could significantly impact your budget if not properly considered.

Along with physically being able to access your home, you should pay attention to whether or not that location currently has access to utilities such as water and electricity. If utilities are not present, then they become another factor in the budget. 

An experienced land agent, such as National Land Realty’s Land Professionals, should be able to help you to understand and evaluate the accessibility of a property. To get in contact with one of our Land Professionals, click here!

Site Analysis

Hiring an experienced engineer or site analyst is a great way to ensure that this location is the right one for your home. A site analysis will examine factors such as climate, soil composition, geography, and much more. These factors are much more important when building a mountain home given the more extreme nature of the environment. The last thing you want is to finish building your dream home, only to learn that it was built on unstable ground and won’t be suitable for living.

Find the Right Builder

You wouldn’t hire a pontoon expert to build a mega-yacht, so why would you hire a traditional homebuilder to construct your mountain home? Mountain home constructions come with their own unique set of challenges, so you’ll want a builder who is well-versed in the details of mountain home construction

The right builder is also someone who will know how to avoid disrupting the natural ecosystem with your construction. A mountain home loses much of its luster if the environment around the home has to be destroyed to build it. Many people are looking for a mountain home to be closer to nature, so it’s important to be aware of how your construction is impacting the environment around it, and work with someone who will be able to construct your house while also preserving the natural beauty of the land.

Below are some examples of various mountain homes, as well as a few mountainside properties National Land Realty has sold in the past. Looking through these photos may help to give you an idea of the kind of home or property that’s right for you.

At National Land Realty, we offer many areas of land perfect for building your dream mountain retreat. Here are some properties we’ve sold in the past!

And if you are into the ready-made mountain retreat we have that too! Take a look at this Smoky Mountain Retreat in Tennessee that we sold in the past. If you like the properties you’ve seen here, why not check out all of National Land Realty’s listings!