building a house

[carolina-rig-01]

Britney and I have been house shopping for a year now and it is starting to burn us out. We have been very patient and picky in our quest for a new home. We know what we want and honestly aren't willing to settle for less, this is the place that we plan on raising our family and living in for a long time so it has to be a house that we are both very comfortable in. In the year of looking we found two houses that we absolutley loved and one ended up being too close to a flood zone and the other we got screwed out of by a crooked real estate agent. We have continued to look at way more houses than I can count and just haven't had "that feeling" about any of them. There wasn't many new houses coming on the market and after our tornado left 6,000 families looking for new housing the market got a lot tougher and a lot tighter for buyers. We have come to the conclusion that in order to get what we want in a timely manner we are just going to have to build a house. We found some land that we really like and it's a long ways out of town but is still actually a very reasonable drive to work for both of us and is only a mile or so from a major road that will be cleared off in ice and snow which is very important to me considering Britney drives with Lake in her truck a lot and I worry a lot lol. So my question is to those who have had houses built in the past. Is it as bad as everyone says it is? I mean how big of a headache is it on a scale of 1-10 lol. There is a lot of stuff that I can do myself to save some money but considering my work schedule and being on something of a time frame I will probably keep my hands out of it for the most part other than maybe laying some hardwoods, building a deck, and small stuff here and there. We found a contractor that we are going to meet with asap and discuss they details. We really don't know anything about this contractor but we are getting some refrences and the address to some of his houses that we can check out. We are still somewhat up in the air about taking on this project and if something did come on the market we would possibly just buy a house but building is becoming more likely. So lets hear some advice from experience.