Going to my grandmother’s house is like going back in time. When I think of ‘cottagecore’, it’s her home I think of. First, you make your way up a path framed by flowers. If you’re following her, you might pause while she stoops to pluck a stray weed. The single-level bungalow sits on a hill, and if you stand on your toes, you can see other sloping hills of the British countryside, in that light lime shade of fresh grass. From the kitchen, you can peer into the garden through lace framed windows, admire the orchids blooming on the sill.
In their early twenties, a young couple built this ‘forever home’ together. My Granddad wheeled in the bricks, and my Grandma laid the first one, complete with a lucky penny underneath.
When I was younger, I learned that my grandparents paid for their house outright, and I thought I would do that too. All I knew at that age was that debt was bad, and I declared (as a teenager) that I would never buy a house if I had to take out a mortgage. As you can imagine, that decision has not aged well as housing prices have skyrocketed. After learning more about the history behind my Grandparents’ idyllic home, I have taken away some valuable lessons about adapting financial strategies to fit the times we live in.
Guess How Much?
When I last visited my Grandma, I asked about how much it cost to build the house. Low and behold, she had a record of every pence spent. “Guess how much?” she asked, one of our favorite family games to play. I could tell by the playful gleam in her eye that I would be surprised, so I shot low. “Sixty-thousand? Forty?”
Now you, dear reader, try to guess. The house was built in 1962-1963. The costs tally the land (!), the workers, laying all the pipes and wires, the bricks and roof… everything. It’s a three bedroom, one bath bungalow in a small town in England. Do you have a number in mind?
Here are some scans she mailed me of the house then:
Front view almost complete. Moved in May 1963. Just in time to welcome the first baby in July (your mother!)
Grandma Mechanic
Revealing the Price Tag: Delving into the Financial History of a ‘Forever Home’
How much would it cost to build a house from the ground up, that you’d be happy to live in for the rest of your life? Here is final tally of everything it cost my Grandparents:
In case you’re curious about the three decimal places, she used the £sd or “pounds, shillings and pence” system. There was twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound.
I’m sorry, building a whole HOUSE cost less than £3000?! My jaw was on the floor. They did a lot of the work themselves along with the help of some friends, who they still know to this day.
BRICKLAYING STARTED NOTE Grandad wheeling in more bricks
Of course, we still have to adjust for inflation. The days when a nickel would buy a hamburger are sadly long gone.. The pound had an average inflation rate of 5.50% per year between 1963 and today, so we have to adjust by ~2,524%, which, to be fair, is difficult to account for in an on-the-spot guessing game.
Unveiling the True Value: Understanding Inflation’s Impact on Homebuilding Costs
£2,664 in 1963 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £69,917 ($86,915) today in 2024.
Not quite as mind-blowing as the original £2664 amount, but still less than any house I’ve seen on the market in a long time! It’s really cool to see the numbers and see how times change. Learning the total value made me curious how they saved up that sum as 20-somethings. To be honest, my first thought was that maybe they had help from their parents (the go-to thing people tend to assume about me too!) but my mom told me the story of how they made it happen:
They both worked hard and saved every penny for 5 years while living in a small flat by the river before starting the building. Then a flood destroyed all their furniture, which was a setback. I don’t think they had parents’ help, but Mum’s brother was the architect, so that helped a bit. I do know it was common back then in rural areas to start work at age 16 by taking an apprenticeship in order to learn a trade.
Also the winter was the coldest on record in the UK that year so you can imagine the stress trying to get the house finished during in the cold before the baby came!
Mom Mechanic
Timeless Lessons Learned from Grandparents’ Story
There are a few lessons to be learned from this. First, we can’t always follow the same footsteps of our ancestors. Times change, currency changes, so our expectations for ourselves (and the next generation) should change as well. Despite having a healthy financial portfolio, I won’t be buying a house without taking on some debt.
Also, it’s helpful to reflect on how inflation adjustments change what our money is worth. If you get too caught up in what things used to cost, you will find yourself miserable. You won’t even want to go out for a coffee and a snack, which are now triple the price you remember paying! If my Grandma wanted to move, but had her mind set on a £2,664 house, she would be utterly dismayed by today’s prices. However, as inflation rises, so do wages, and instead of anchoring ourselves to old markers, we can learn to accept that brunch is never going to be less than $30 a person again. (At least, not where I live!)
P.S. Perhaps I told you we paid 5 shillings an hour to the bricklayers + this rose to 7 shillings + 6 pence for the carpenter. We thought that was a lot. However a good investment considering today’s minimum wage anywhere is almost ten pounds per hour!
Grandma Mechanic
The last lesson I learned is that building a conservatory is totally awesome. When I visit Grandma, this is where I love to spend the afternoons. My plans for a dream home definitely include this luxury. Surprisingly, the conservatory cost more to build than the house did!
I hope you enjoyed going down memory lane with me. I think it’s so cool that my Grandmother took so many detailed records, and was willing to share them with me and you. Finding out the whole story helped me reframe from a shame-standpoint (my grandparents or parents did it, so I should be able to also) to more realistic: the value of money changes, and we need to change our perceptions with it. It’s also a testament to delving into family history— I didn’t know any of this until I started asking! Our family’s past with money will influence how we approach money today. The more you know about where you come from, the more you might understand yourself.
What about you?
Have you ever delved into your family’s history and uncovered something surprising?
Buy vs. Rent is a huge topic these days. Personally, I rent! What are your thoughts?
Do you live in your ‘forever home’, or plan to one day?
Share in the comments below!
Loved this – especially all the financial details your Grandma Mechanic recorded…seems that may be a “genetic” trait. LoL
My grandparents’ home in the NC (USA) mountains was built in the 1930s with no insulation and only a potbellied stove for cooking and heating. My mother said on cold mornings (which was often in those mountains), the frost would be inside the windows!
Unfortunately, the home and surrounding (gorgeous) land was sold when the family moved from the mountains. I’ve no idea what they paid to build the house or the sale price.
I couldn’t believe it when she pulled out all of the records she keeps! I know where I got it from 🙂
Wow! What interesting stories your mother must have from living there. It’s too bad there aren’t many records from it, but at least the stories live on in you.
Thank you for sharing this! It’s so interesting to me how our expectations for a “dream/forever” home have changed over the decades. I don’t think anyone in the US (and maybe the UK?) would dream of building a new house with only one bathroom today, for example. I’m also curious if your grandparents embarked on any other renovations over the years, aside from the conservatory, or if they’ve been happy with their kitchen, bathroom, etc. I feel like we are pressured to update interiors every decade or two now – the HGTV effect, if you will.
My partner and I are in the midst of self-building our home, and it is definitely cheaper than buying an existing home (we live in a high cost of living state). However, we are doing almost all of the work ourselves (only hiring out concrete and septic), and are building a barndominium. Depending on final finishes it’ll work out to ~$200k for a 2500 sq ft, 2 bed 2 bath house with attached garage (land was purchased separately years ago). It won’t have the architectural details many people desire, but will be nearly maintenance-free and allow us to FIRE far sooner than conventional homeownership would. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a dream house, and think your grandparents did it right!
Over the years, I think the kitchen has stayed mostly the same (but I’ll ask her!) but I do know that the bathroom has been updated at least once. Recently she replaced the tub with a standing shower for ease of use, and replaced the soft-sage-of-the-seventies with white (though I’ve noticed sage is coming back!).
Wow, ~$200k for 2500 square feet in a high cost of living state is incredible. Congratulations on that endeavor (I had to look up barndominiums—beautiful in my opinion!) and putting all of that work in will definitely make it your own. I’m so far away from living in a ‘dream house’ that I’m always fascinated by the stories of people building and finding theirs. Good luck with your self-built-dream-home!
Ar least with my grandparents, their “forever home” changed over time. If her husband was still alive, I’m sure my grandmother’s old home would still be her forever home. But it was too big for her and too far away from her support network to be sustainable. So she’s moved into a much smaller home.
The other set seemed to move as well, from a town in the middle of nowhere North Dakota to what I consider a Denver suburb and finally into a Colorado apartment as my grandmother on this side aged and needed more help.
One question I have, is how much planning did your grandparents have before they stsrted building? Were they thinking about long-term thingd like access to healthcare? I wonder how that kind of long-term planning fits into the idea of staying in a dream house.
As for me, I rent currently so that I can save more and remain more mobile (early in my career and not settled yet). But when early retirement comes I have a pretty good idea of where I’m going to settle to. Its got nearbish hospitals for those needs as I age as well as being close to all the things that check my boxes. Family won’t be far away either so I hopefully will be able to tale care of my parents when the time comes. My plan is to try and buy in cash (or be fairly close to that), either by pushing RE back a few years or lowering spending to transfer enough cash over into other vehicles like high yield savings accounts, bonds, or CDs to keep it secure until I have enough to make the purchase. Depending on mortgage rates of course.
Whether I build or not will depend on prices of land/cinstruction versus buying outright.
Of course all of my plans could easily change. If while I work I find somewhere else where I like my feet sticking to the Earth to at better I’ll stay there.
Overall, I liked the post. I thought some of the stuff on the cost and how they broke it out was interesting. I’m surprised they still have the records from the early 1960s.
I imagine they were planning for growing their family together, they settled in the town they grew up in. There is a town hospital, and a bigger one a couple hours away. I agree these days it’s great to keep the option to rent to be more mobile. Being flexible as plans change will help you in early retirement!
How amazing of your grandparents!
I love the conservatory. Am I correct that this is a popular feature in Britain? I had to smile that you were also eating pavlova, something I learned about from a British friend who makes it every year for Summer Solstice.
It doesn’t compare in cost or ingenuity, but when my partner and I built our home 20+ years ago, with little money, we also did it as inexpensively as possible. We first bought a lot, paying over time, and were able to pay it off with a small inheritance (total cost about 40k, astronomical for us at the time).
That paid-off lot meant that we could take out a construction loan to build the house, no down payment needed. The house went through multiple design iterations, shrinking and simplifying each time. In the end, it was designed to minimize labor costs too—so many feet wide to avoid cutting wooden panels (my partner had design experience).
Total mortgage ended up at 100k, also astronomical to us then, but ultimately cheaper than anything we could have bought already built! And although crowded at times, the little 2 Bedroom 2 bath house ended up being very adequate for our needs. It’s not my dream home, but it is still providing comfort and shelter.
It’s very interesting you have a similar experience building your home from scratch! 100k for a mortgage is amazing!
I do think conservatories are popular in Britain/Europe, but I’m not an expert. I wish they were more common in the U.S. I could spend most of my days there.
FM! Did you do the painting of your grandma’s cottage?
No, the feature photo is from unsplash! But it does look like something I could try to paint…
Really enjoyed this post – thank you!
Thank you Victoria!