The ten most expensive mistakes when building a country house

The mistakes made on a country house are not spread evenly. Some cost money and get corrected; others leave a property that is of no use to anybody, and nothing corrects those.

They are ordered by cost, from the highest down, and each comes with the stage at which it is avoided. Which is nearly always one stage earlier than the one the owner believes they are in.

1. Buying a property below the Unidad Agrícola Familiar

It is the most expensive mistake there is on rural land, and the only one whose consequence is not economic but legal.

Absolute nullity means the transaction never existed. There is no fine that puts it right, it is not cured by the passing of time and no later procedure fixes it. There are rural plots paid for, fenced and occupied whose buyer can neither convey them nor obtain a permit for them.

2. Buying land that is not developable, believing it will be

Two versions of the same mistake. The first is expansion land with no adopted plan parcial, the partial plan that has to be approved before anything else: until that plan is approved, only agricultural and forestry uses are allowed there. The second is rural land in a protection category, which is simply not developable, and no procedure makes it developable.

The seller is not always lying. "It is going to be developable" may well be true. What nobody can tell you is when, and buying today at the price of that future is taking on a risk that cannot be quantified.

3. Leaving the water and the waste water until last

In the city, services are a line in the budget. In the countryside, with no public network, they are two complete environmental procedures: the water concession for the source of your own, and the discharge permit or approved treatment system for the waste water.

They are handled by the corporación autónoma regional, the regional environmental authority, not by the municipality, and they are administrative procedures with an application, a site visit and a formal decision. Where the permit file requires them, they come first and do not run in parallel.

4. Asking the wrong authority

In the countryside there are three authorities deciding different things, and confusing them costs weeks:

5. Believing that a ruling on the planning rules gives you a right

The ruling is an informative photograph of the rules on a given date. The only thing that freezes the rules is filing the permit application in legal and due form, with the file complete. A project designed over two years on the strength of a ruling two years old may find itself facing different rules.

6. Commissioning the soil survey last

The soil survey governs the foundations, the foundations govern the structure and the structure governs the architectural design. Commissioning it once the drawing exists forces you to work backwards, and on sloping ground that reworking can be total.

It gets said that below a certain area it is not needed. That claim is worth distrusting. What does hold is that the law requires a geotechnical engineer to take responsibility even for the one- and two-storey houses that are exempt from independent technical supervision: the exemption is from supervision, not from the survey.

7. Budgeting the works and forgetting everything else

The construction cost is what it costs to put the house up. It excludes the plot, the designs, the permits and the procedures, and that block is not marginal: in our experience it can add of the order of a quarter to 40% on top of the construction cost.

In the countryside there are two further items that barely exist in the city and are forgotten systematically: the access — the internal track, keeping it up during the works and the extra cost of hauling materials all the way there — and the electricity supply connection, which may require poles and a transformer of your own.

8. Indexing the budget with the wrong index

A budget drawn up a year ago has to be updated, and that is what the official construction cost indices exist for. The mistake lies in applying the total index to the whole budget.

Labour has been rising considerably faster than the total index. Anyone updating an entire budget with the general index systematically understates the labour chapter, which on a country house tends to weigh more than on a block of flats, because there is less repetition and less industrialisation.

9. Counting on thirty-six months of permit

It is true that the validity went up to 36 months. Not for every permit.

Anyone planning an extension while counting on three years, and remembering the renewal the month before, is already too late. And an expired permit with the works half done is a bigger problem than starting late.

10. Believing that one signature covers everything

An architect cannot sign the structural design or the soil survey. It is not a commercial policy: the law reserves those signatures to a civil engineer, and whoever signs answers for it in law. If somebody offers you "everything included" at a round price, ask who signs each drawing.

On the same side sits checking the professional registration. The register is public and free, and without a current registration there is no permit.

Mistake number eleven

It does not fit the list because it is not a single mistake but a situation: building at a distance with nobody watching the works on your behalf. A country house is nearly always far from where the owner lives, and that is exactly the case in which interventoría — independent technical supervision of the works — stops being an expense and becomes your technical presence.

Where they are avoided, in a single table

Eight of the ten are avoided before a drawing exists. That is the real moral of the list: on a country house, most of the money is won or lost in the weeks when it does not yet look as though anything is happening.