How to build your home : Options on putting up a house

That building is an uphill task for many people is a fact. So how does one make the most of the resources they have to get the best building experience?

The odds seem to be against you. You are a low income earner who does not have access to that much credit with the idea of owning a home very far away from your dreams.You are not alone. There are many examples of many people in this category who, thinking outside the box, have employed a few tactics and managed to achieve their dreams of owning a home.

Buying land jointly
It may sound bizarre, the whole idea of jointly owning a piece of land but if saving up enough money on your own does not seem to be working then maybe you can consider the idea of teaming up with the friend/colleague/relative who has the same dilemma but shares your dream. And this is not mere suggestion; there are people who have done it.
Willy Ssali who works with Uganda Revenue Authority knows two vendors in Owino market who sell him shoes that did this.

Because they could not buy land independently and the process of trying to fly solo would be expensive and take much more time, they decided to team up with each saving Shs10,000 per day. And you know how faith coupled with action seems to yield results; “In six months, they had saved up Shs600,000, enough to buy a plot of land in Mukono,” Ssali remembers. This was five years ago. They divided this land before each embarked on his own house project.

Finish one room or two rooms first
You are really desperate, really desperate and you would want to have your dream home and leave the woes of rent behind. If you have already started having children, then soon, it will be a cocktail of rent and school fees woes soon.

To reduce on the demands of your finances in a way that will enable you transfer what you pay for rent onto your own house, you can build a room (if you are single) first, or two, if you have a family. This is what Yusuf Kaggwa who lives in Kawempe did.

“I had a prime plot of land in Kawempe that I had inherited but there was no way I was going to build a nice home while paying rent of Shs150,000. So I got a loan of Shs3m and I put up a boys’ quarter of two rooms. When I had finished re-paying the loan with what I was paying for rent, I started saving up to build my house which I am now about to roof,” the primary school teacher says.

Kaggwa advises that you could also consider the option of getting a loan, then building a shell house that you can move into to save on rent as you look for money to complete things like electrical wiring, piped water, tiling the floor and plastering the house.

Hire one builder and get involved
Now this one is a new one for most people, the prospect of being that manual labourer in the course of your house construction. But this is exactly what Haruna Mutabaazi, a fitness trainer did. Of course, he is into fitness is what you will think, but he disputes this line of thought arguing that the people who become porters on their sites are just as ordinary as any of us.

With gym training sessions starting in the evenings at 4 pm, Mutabaazi hired a fore man-a good one, he advises-and then he took up the job of being the site porter who ferries water, carries bricks on a wheel barrow and mixes cement and sand under the guidance of the foreman who did the technical work.

“These porters learn on site, so why couldn’t I?” He asks, “if it was going to save me a lot of money while helping me supervise at the same time.”
Mutabaazi says that if you are the kind who does not work over the weekends, like teachers, you can get a fore-man to only come over the weekends when you are available to do both the supervision and the manual work on your site.

With his gym salary of Shs350,000, Mutabaazi boasts a two-roomed house that has a verandah and a small kitchen on the outside. It is his home.With tips similar to Mutabaazi and Kaggwa’s maybe you can pull off that dream of owning a home.

anamaganda@ug.nationmedia.com