By living in the old house we tore down, for the entirety of the planning process, and the first 8 months of construction, we saved a lot of money.  The downside of our frugal ways was the repeated moving of our extra stuff.

The property originally had a very dilapidated garage, which we used to store the our “extra stuff”.  Doesn’t everyone have extra stuff?

About a year before construction started, in anticipation of demolishing the garage, we moved everything out and into two roll-off storage containers next to it.

But once we started construction, this turned out to be a bad location, so we dropped some new containers far in the back yard (the only place we could get to that was enough out of the way at the time) and lugged everything back there and into the new containers.

Those are our three in the back.  We added another half-sized one when we tore down the first part of the house, to store even more extra furniture, and we added the construction office and a container for all the sub-contractors to store their tools once construction started.

A couple of months ago, as we were working on a revision of our landscaping plans, we realized that once we dug the pool, there would be no access for a truck to remove the containers, so we had to again drop some new containers and lug all the stuff from the old ones to the new ones.

The next time we move all that stuff will hopefully be the last, ever.

I think the only positive thing to come out of all the moving (other than saving money vs self-storage) is that, every time we moved everything, we went through it and got rid of some of the stuff we didn’t need.