Armchair Builder

How Long to Build a Home?

How Long Does it Take to Build a Home

How Long to Build a Home?

If you’re thinking of creating your dream place to live, you may be asking, how long to build a home?   The shows on TV demonstrate a home being built in a week.  But this requires a huge budget and hundreds of workers going to town at the same time.  For those of us in the real world, months are required to construct the home of our dreams.  Just how many months it takes depends on a few key items discussed below.

Average or Custom?

The average home in the U.S. is approximately 2300 square feet and is constructed with materials that are preassembled prior to being delivered to the job site.  This includes cabinets, trusses, and stairs among others.  This typical home can be built in three to four months from the start of construction to move in.  When a home requires special products and installation methods, the timeline stretches out.  So to accurately answer the question of how long to build a home, we need to look hard at the plans and specifications.  A truly custom home requires more intensive, specialized labor and can take a year or more to build.

Subcontractors or Employees?

Are you using subcontractors or employees to build your home?  This will greatly affect the speed at which your home comes together.  When a home is built by employees, you are limited by the number of people who can work on the home on any given day.  However if subcontractors are used, the number of people who can work at the same time is only limited by the space available on the project to safely accommodate them.

Plans and Specifications

How detailed are your plans and specifications?  The detail on these documents will help to determine how long to build a home.  If all the details are in place, the people doing the building will never have to stop to get questions answered.  They will also keep you from having to tear out and redo work that was done incorrectly.  Having a complete set of Scopes of Work and Specifications for each building activity will help keep the project schedule moving along.


If you’re really concerned about the length of time it takes to build a home, be sure to finalize all of your design and product choices prior to starting.  Making changes after you start will cause delays and aggravation for you and your contractors.  In addition to causing time delays, making late changes will cost you big money.

On-Site Management

Having a project manager on site daily will speed up the process for building.  A good manager will be at the project first thing in the morning checking to make sure all trades scheduled that day showed up.  Owner builders who have the time will perform this role themselves.  However, if a day job prevents this from happening, a local building consultant will be a great asset.


Rain, snow and cold temperatures can cause delays in your schedule.  Once the roof goes on, the inside can progress even on bad weather days.  Work can continue outside during cold weather up to a point.  Insulating blankets and admixtures allow us to pour concrete in cold temperatures.  But when temperatures get to a point where the workers are no longer safe, delays will happen.  Even if the workers do continue in extreme temperatures, they typically slow down increasing costs.

So How Long to Build a Home?

You’ve probably already figured out the answer to the question how long to build a home?   It really depends on the situation.  The average home in the U.S. can be built in three to four months on a regular basis.  Custom homes can take anywhere from eight months to over a year.

Reduce the Time to Build

By getting organized, you can greatly reduce the time to build.  We offer some one-of-a-kind resources to help you get organized and efficiently build your new home.  The Builder’s Daily Construction Guide gives you daily action items required to make sure your home is built per schedule.  If any of these items are missed, delays will happen.  So check out these resources for sale at the Armchair Builder ESTORE to save time and money on your building projects.

Hopefully we have answered your question, How Long to Build a Home?  If you would like more details, take a look at our video discussing the schedule for building a new home.

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