Episode 02: Should I buy, build, or renovate?

In this solo episode, Ashley breaks down one of the biggest dilemmas her clients face, should you build a home from scratch or buy and renovate an existing one? With wisdom drawn from both personal experience and years of consulting, she unpacks the nuanced pros and cons of each path through the lens of creating a truly healthy home.

You’ll learn why control is the most valuable currency in new construction, what pitfalls to watch for when inheriting someone else’s building decisions, and how to avoid the costly mistakes that can derail either process. Whether you’re navigating mold sensitivity, EMF issues, or just want more sovereignty over your living space, this episode will help you move forward with clarity, confidence, and grounded discernment.

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Ashley helps you renovate and build healthier homes to prevent future health issues from arising from your environment. Whether you’re searching for a new home, assessing concerns with your current one, or embarking on a renovation or new build, Awakening Spaces can guide you every step of the way.

Ashley brings her background in Building Biology and Building Science and years of hands-on experience helping families reduce mold, chemical exposure, and EMFs in their living spaces. Her clients gain homes that are not only functional and beautiful, but truly support their well-being and peace of mind.

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Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

you are listening to the awakening spaces podcast a show about building homes that heal and the sacred journey within i'm your host ashley spanovich a healthy home consultant building science nerd and the founder of awakening spaces around here we're not just talking about walls windows and wiring we're also exploring how the spaces we live in shape our nervous systems our health and our sense of self whether you're building from scratch recovering from an environmental illness or just starting to question what's really in your walls we're here to help you reclaim your home as a place of deep nourishment. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the Awakening Spaces podcast. Today, I want to talk a little bit about a decision that my husband and I have been pondering and something that I hear from clients all the time who are unsure what they want to do to get into a new, safe, healthy home. And that is the big question of should i buy a pre-existing home and do some light renovation or should i build a home from the ground up because a lot of people will move into several homes and continue to find issue after issue after issue and so that leads them to eventually saying that they want to build a home However, the flip and reverse can also happen where we build a brand new home and we move in and there's a ton of issues. And so people will rebuild a home after that. I've had people who've reached out to us on their intake forms and say that they're on their second or third build because the first two were not done properly because they just didn't know what they didn't know. So So there's a lot of pros and cons to each, and I wanted to just walk you guys through sort of what we're thinking and how we're approaching what our next steps are going to be in case this is helpful for you as well. So let's explore some of the pros and the cons of building versus buying and how to know which path is going to be right for you, because like anything in life, it just depends. So let's start with building. Many people think that building a home is going to be more expensive than buying a pre-existing home. However, that might not always be the case depending on what you buy into. So what are the advantages of building? The number one advantage to building is control. You have control over everything. The building site, the materials, the mechanical systems, the layout, the orientation of the home, the site that the home is going to be on. And so you really have the most control in the scenario from the ground up, you can design it exactly how you want it. The problem that I see people getting into with this is leaning too much on their team to guide them in the right direction without having properly vetted their team. Because maybe they just didn't know what they needed to communicate to their team. So they go through this entire process. They think that they've designed everything properly. And then it comes to building and the contractor's not looking at the plans or they're doing things the way that they want to do them. One thing leads to another and there's already building defects before you've even moved into the home. So even though it's, Building does give you the most control. You need to take that with an air of caution because you're only going to have as much control as your ability to vet and qualify a good team to perform and deliver the outcomes that you desire. So number two, building a home will give you more peace of mind because you will know that you had most the most control over the project and you're not buying into anybody else's shortcuts and mistakes. You can design a house that is high performing and that's going to be a lower risk overall for mold. And, you know, it's going to have better durability and hopefully lower utility costs. You design an EMF mitigation strategies. And so this does and can provide people with a peace of mind that you just, you can't get moving into or renovating an existing home. But let's look at the downsides of building. We already started talking about them when I mentioned finding the right team, but the biggest downside of building is it's so intense. You are going to be making thousands of decisions and there's a ton of moving pieces all happening at once. And it can feel really, really overwhelming So, it's really important to... do your research, list out things that are really, really important to you, and make sure you're prepared to answer the questions that are going to be thrown at you. And I always say that planning is the most important stage of the process because ideally we could get enough information into our construction document set in the early stages in the very beginning that when it comes time to building, there's no more questions left to answer. We don't want to be answering questions from our contractor on the fly while construction is happening. That is going to make the process a thousand times more intense and I mean, it's just going to wreck your nervous system if you approach it that way. So plan early, get all of the details figured out in the design stage so that you're not making those decisions on the fly. The second downside is, like I mentioned earlier, you need to find a good team. Coming from the lens of building a healthier home to reduce the risk of mold exposure, chemical exposure, and electromagnetic radiation exposure, your team doesn't necessarily need to be health conscious. I've worked with a ton of really awesome contractors who have delivered an amazing product and they were not health conscious builders. However, they were collaborative. And what I've realized in my time doing this is that finding somebody who's open-minded and collaborative is one of the biggest green flags in a contractor and team in general, because they're going to be willing to do what it takes to deliver you the best possible home. A good team is going to want to make sure that you get what you want, even if it's not what they're used to doing. So it is really important to vet your team, make sure that everyone is aligned with your goals and don't be discouraged if you live in a rural area and you think that finding a good team is impossible for you because I've actually worked in quite a lot of rural areas where we've had fantastic teams and they may not have known much about healthy building strategies or practices but again the most important thing is that you find somebody who's open-minded and collaborative who wants to bring your vision to life they also need to understand and respect your priorities around health which you know it can be a little bit harder to find people who do that but good builders are building homes for other people they're not building homes for themselves and so a good builder especially a good custom builder, is going to want to make you happy. And if your priorities are health, then that should be their priority as well. So number three, timeline. Building a new home can take a bit of time. It can take 12 to 24 months, depending on the project, on what comes up, what the setbacks are, you know, the permitting process, all those things. Preparation can be something that gets in the way and weather can also get in the way of your timeline and your schedule. For somebody who's looking to rush and get to something really quickly, then building might not be the best option and you might be better off doing some sort of renovation project. Remember, rushing through the planning stages of the build is really one of the biggest mistakes that I see happening. I see people who are in a desperate situation trying to get out of an existing moldy environment. They will rush the planning stages. Maybe they'll buy stock plans even. They'll rush the process of finding their team and they get into building and it's just, it ends up taking them way more time than they had ever anticipated, costing them way more money than they had ever anticipated. And it just ends up being a nightmare. And I've seen this time and time and time again. So if I can give you any Any warning, I would say never rush those planning stages. Take time, even if you feel like you're in a desperate situation and you're trying to get out. I would never go into building a home, rushing those planning stages. And then number four is cost building a new healthy home. It doesn't need to be expensive, but you're going to be paying a lot more upfront and it will save you a lot more in the long run, especially in energy costs. If you're building a higher performing home, the things that you do, the home to make it higher performing it's going to save you in the long run but it can be more expensive than building to code minimum so it is important to recognize that The costs of building a home may seem higher than renovating a home, but in the end, you are going to end up seeing a lot more unforeseen issues in a renovation project. So it might look like it's going to be cheaper up front, but then when you get into it, you start tacking on a lot of sneaky things that pop up because you just don't know what you're getting into. If someone is really deeply, truly committed to building a healthy home or having a healthy home where they have control, then I think that building is probably the best path forward because you, again, you still have a lot of control. However, building new might not be an option if you live in a community that has a lot of historic or really densely populated built up landscapes already where there's not a lot of room to build. But let's flip the script a little here and go to buying an existing home and then maybe doing light renovation. So what are the advantages here? I already mentioned this. It's going to be faster. In this option, you might be able to move in the house within weeks or even months. You're gonna be moving into a place that's got landscaping already established and there for you. Whereas if you were building a home, you're likely doing all of that work, all that landscaping as part of the project. So moving into your home, you're gonna, moving into a pre-existing home that you purchased you're going to have a lot of that already there. And like I said, if there's not a lot of land left where you live to build on, then renovating a home is going to be a great option and it can be done in a healthy way. You can totally renovate a home in a healthy way. However, there's a lot of things that you are going to want to consider to make sure that you're buying something that has relatively good bones. And we're going to talk more about that in the next episode where we go into what exactly to look for when you buy a new home so that you know it has good bones and that the infrastructure for a healthy home is there. But it is possible to build a healthy or to renovate a healthy home, I should say. But the thing you want to prepare for is that you are going to be inheriting other people's choices. You have no idea how the building enclosure and walls were built. And this is one of the biggest contributors to the health of the home is the building enclosure, the wall assembly of the building. So that's the building envelope is everything that connects the outside to the inside of the home and the windows and the doors and all of these areas. This is where we have the highest risk for moisture coming into the home. and for leaks to happen. Depending on what climate you're in, you're going to be fighting that climate. If you are really trying to build a very durable, high-performing, healthy home and you're choosing to renovate, my recommendation would be to consider updates to the building enclosure you may not need to do that depending on what had been previously done but i would recommend doing some sort of exploration of that building enclosure when you move in to see what it looks like inside of those walls and then you can know and have a better idea of well do i need to make upgrades to the walls like are we finding mold in the wall cavities from improperly sealed air sealing or you know poor insulation or whatever it might be inside that building enclosure one thing that you can do is you can do some cavity testing for mold sampling where someone can come in and every few stud cavities you can go in and do some air sampling in wall cavities or even that would be to do a flood cut around the entire enclosure to see inside the cavities and see are you dealing with anything inside the cavity that would warrant having to redo the building siding the insulation and the exterior walls because you can run into that with buying a pre-existing home and that leads me to number two there's there's just a lot more opportunity for other hidden health hazards. Even if a home looks really clean, there could still be mold in the wall cavities. I have seen really beautiful multi-million dollar homes that had microbial growth in the walls. That is a risk that you would be taking if you purchase a pre-existing home. Plan for that. Plan for a proper mold inspection, not just air samples, but an invasive mold inspection. This might not be achievable during the inspection period before you have purchased the home, but if you're really serious about knowing what's behind the walls, then doing some more invasive mold testing after you've purchased the home might be warranted. You could do best sampling during the inspection period and do the best that you can to be as invasive as possible, accessing the walls through outlets or opening up the escutcheons on plumbing fixtures and trying to get a borescope or something down behind the wall to try to identify as much as you can during that pre-purchase inspection period. But nothing is going to be as good as really getting in doing some invasive sampling or tearing out a bit of drywall just so that you can really gauge the level of um the building enclosure so just keep in mind that there's probably going to be a lot of hidden health hazards in the home and those can be repaired but it's something that you might unravel more and more of when you get into the home and when you start opening things up. Number three is that structures are going to be at the end of their life potentially. Even though building seems more expensive and buying seems cheaper, I've worked with a lot of clients where they've ended up having to do full foundation repair and a lot of structural things were wrong with the home. that they were not prepared for. Making sure that you're buying into something that has a good foundation, that has solid plumbing, has good electrical, because these things are gonna be really costly to fix. If you can buy something really cheap and just know that you're gonna replace all those things, then that's even better because then again, you're gonna have some more of that control back where you're gonna have all new plumbing, all new electrical, because those things are gonna be costly to fix. So it's just about knowing what you're willing to spend and asking yourself, okay, well, if it comes down to it, am I willing to invest in this? If we do, if we buy a preexisting home, because it is a possibility and want to invest heavily in inspections upfront so that we know we can have a better idea of what to expect when we actually get into the house in terms of our costs. And number four is exactly what I just said. There's just a can be a ton of hidden costs. When buying a preexisting home, you have to factor in those unforeseen costs. I think most of the time when people buy into preexisting homes, it ends up costing them a lot more than they initially thought. And That brings me to number five, which is it can be challenging to get loans to cover the cost of higher performance upgrades. Oftentimes the brokers don't really notice or appreciate some of the things that you're doing to the home to bring it up to a higher performing standard. So that can be really challenging. So I would definitely talk with your bank before you decide to build or just before you decide to buy understand what your options are understand what would be the worst case scenario if you were to buy into a pre-existing home that you wanted to renovate I would want you to imagine the worst case scenario of what could happen in terms of unforeseen costs and talk with your bank to see what you could get approved for. Just so you have an idea of your options and you know what you're getting into, because I think that has been one of the most heartbreaking things that I've seen different people go through is buying into homes without having realized that the home had a lot of issues and then they go to try to make these repairs and It costs almost more than the homeless value. Keep that in mind before you buy into anything like that. And just know that in the next podcast episode, we're going to talk about some of those things so that you have way more clarity moving into that process. And you can hopefully avoid some of these hidden mistakes and costs and things like that and avoid getting yourself into that type of issue. All in all, I think there's pros and cons to both of them. I think if you find the right property, if you can find something with good bones, it could be worth renovating the home and you can make a perfectly healthy home. But the attractiveness of building a home is definitely there because you have so much control and if you can work with a team that has your interests at heart and somebody who can help guide you through the process of building a healthier home, whether that's an independent consultant or whether that is an architect or a builder who specializes in that, somebody who is helping guide you in the right direction, I think that that for us at least seems like the best option. Like as my husband and I have thought about what we would wanna do, that seems like the best option. Land can also be so expensive. That's not something that I brought up, but the cost of land can be pretty expensive depending on where you're at. Here locally in Colorado, land is around 500,000 on its own. So at that point, we know that it's going to be a million dollar home if we decide to build. There are less expensive options for building. We will probably do an episode on prefab homes and tiny homes. I think that there are some other options. I will caution you against building whole barn construction homes because these... oftentimes, I don't want to speak for every single one of them, can actually create a lot of issues too, because there's not a lot of drying that can happen with that metal siding. And with metal siding, you also run the risk of more condensation forming on the metal siding itself. So we're going to go into that in a little more detail, probably do an entire episode on that. But when it comes to choosing well what is right for me should i build should i buy and renovate you know i think it really comes down to asking yourself a few questions the first one being you know how sensitive are you if you have severe mold illness chemical sensitivity emf hypersensitivity building may be the best path to help you fully recover But if that is you, I would just be extra cautious to not rush that planning and design stage and make sure that you do find the right team to work with to guide you in the right direction so that you don't get caught up in more issues down the road. And I also think that figuring out what is your timeline? Can you wait one to two years while you design and build and plan for the home? Because if you can't then maybe it's worth looking for a home and trying to renovate something or doing light renovation. I want to also take a moment to say that I'm talking about building versus renovating. That's not to say you have to renovate a home. If you buy a pre-existing home, you might be able to buy a pre-existing home that is perfectly fine and you don't have to renovate. So that's another option. But what I want to caution you on with that is that you will be investing heavily in inspection. So do set aside quite a bit of money. I would say set aside about$50,000 and that's on the low side of inspections and unforeseen issues with the house, just to be safe. I always set, when we've been looking for houses, I have been setting our budget for what we can afford about$50,000 lower just in case. And actually what we're doing is we're looking on the very, very, very low side because our goal would be to gut anything that we buy so that we have the most control over that renovation project. But, you know, that again does take a lot of time. It may not take one to two years to complete that type of work. So it's still going to be faster than building, but it can still be very time intensive. So. you would have to choose like, what is your timeline? What can you afford? What do you need to look for? And then understanding, well, what is your energy and your capacity for doing either one of those things? And then that brings me to finding a support system. Do you have the right team, architect, builder, consultant, or even friend or family member, people who are going to help you and support you through the process that can be really helpful during that time because the process can be really stressful. So I highly recommend anyone going through the process at all is doing some level of nervous system support where you're really taking time to care for yourself during the process because no matter which one, which direction you go, they can become overwhelming and stressful, especially if you're dealing with health issues on top of everything. So this was just a quick, short little episode to walk you through some of the things that we've been thinking about and kind of help you see my personal thought process when it comes to building versus buying. Since I've had quite a few people reach out sort of asking, well, what's the best thing to do? What do you recommend? And we're going to go into the purchasing process and the building process in the next two episodes. So stay tuned as we go a little more in depth on both of those. And then you can definitely look forward to me speaking with some really awesome inspectors and helping guide you through what it looks like to go heavy on those inspections, especially during that pre-purchase inspections period and during the construction process. So thank you for tuning in. I hope that you found this episode helpful. And if you have found it helpful, share it with a friend who's on the fence of building or buying and be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss what's coming up next. All right. I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for tuning into today's podcast. We have one more thing before you go. We are giving away one spot into our conscious construction container program, which is our signature program that helps you build and renovate your home from the ground up to reduce your exposure to molds, chemicals, and electromagnetic radiation. And even if you're not building a home, we've had a lot of students who have gone through the program who are not I'll see you next time. If you do it on both platforms, comment on the Instagram post that we have linked below and tag a friend who you think would love this podcast or could benefit from the podcast. And every tag is another entry. I just want to say thank you so, so, so much for being here, for listening and for leaving a rating and review because this is going to help us get better guests onto the podcast in the future to provide you with more value. So we really, really appreciate it. We really do appreciate every star, every like, every comment, and every subscribe that you can give us because it really does help us bring you more value in the future. So thanks again for being here and we'll see you on the next episode.