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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3059 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 29, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Homeowners of The Motte -- what would you differently if you could do it all over again?

I plan on building a house in the next 12 months on a lot about an hour away from the Gulf of Mexico America. It's going to be a two-story 5BR house with porches on the front and the back, built in a traditional Southern style.

I'm a bit overwhelmed as I don't even know what I don't know about building, and I want to avoid making costly mistakes that I'll have to pay to renovate later (or worse, be unable to fix at all). Happy to hear both from people who built and people who bought.

We're still at the very beginning, so my answers aren't very interesting, but:

  1. Working off a loan, but we also have enough investment money that we could make more aggressive payments if needed.
  2. We've picked a plan off of a builder's site that we liked. We're not really "dream house" people, we're pretty practical. We've actually like most rentals we've lived in that were just cookie cutter designs. The only times we were unhappy was when we lived in a place with poorly sealed windows overlooking a street (lots of traffic noise) and when we lived in a house with poor insulation in a place where the temps varied between 15F and 95F over the year. That said, I'm still thinking about getting an architect and doing a custom build.
  3. A few years ago, I picked out a great lot in the heart of a small, fast-growing middle class town on the outskirts of a larger city. The neighborhood is perfect and everything is walkable. Tradeoff is that we have to build now.
  4. It will probably end up being 4-5 years.
  5. TBD, but it doesn't seem like there's much in that area.
  6. I have family in the area, and I was very careful to avoid flood zones and flood zones adjacent properties.

We've picked a plan off of a builder's site that we liked.

Note that architectural plans are copyrighted, so if you want to use that plan you have to also use that builder, unless the same plan has been licensed by multiple builders from a separate architect.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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