Greater Lansing

Building your own home

Michigan lets you build the house you are going to live in yourself, without a builder license, and lets you do it without an architect under 3,500 square feet of habitable space. Most people never find that out. What stops a self-build around here is almost never the building — it is discovering too late that the house costs more to put up than it will appraise for. That is the first thing worth checking, and it is the first thing we check.

What is actually wrong

Michigan genuinely allows this, and most people do not know it. MCL 339.2403 exempts an owner of property building a structure for their own use and occupancy from needing a residential builder license. You can hold the permit and act as your own general contractor on the house you are going to live in. The exemption has no time limit written into it and no condition about selling later.

It does not stretch to a spec house or a duplex. The exemption is keyed to occupancy — the home you will actually live in. Building to sell, or building two units, puts you back inside the licensing rules, and that is a different conversation with a different answer.

You almost certainly do not need an architect. MCL 339.2012 exempts a detached one- or two-family home up to 3,500 square feet of calculated floor area from needing plans sealed by an architect or engineer. Calculated floor area is habitable space only — it leaves out the basement, the garage, the attic, the crawl space, the utility room and the porch. A 3,500 square foot habitable house with a full basement and a three-car garage is well over 5,000 square feet gross. That covers nearly every house anybody around here is going to build.

The thing that actually stops self-builds is not skill, and it is not the permit. It is the appraisal. A lender finances what the finished house is worth when it is done, not what it cost you to put up — and across much of the City of Lansing a new house of ordinary size costs substantially more to build than the median home there is worth. The gap runs well into six figures, no lender will advance it, and no amount of skill with a nail gun closes it. In the township ring — Haslett, East Lansing, Okemos, Bath, DeWitt, Williamston — median values are high enough that the same house works. Which side of that line your parcel falls on is the first thing worth knowing, and our article on building your own home in Michigan sets the figures out town by town.

Owner-builder loans are rarer than the internet suggests. Fewer than one lender in five offers one, they commonly want 20 to 30 percent down, and most will only approve a borrower who is themselves a licensed contractor. The honest zero-down route is a USDA single-close construction loan, which finances land and build at up to 100 percent — but USDA requires a lender-approved, licensed builder on the job, so it is not a route for an unsupervised self-build.

The order most people use is backwards. Almost everyone arrives with a house in mind and asks what it costs. The order that works is to establish what you can borrow, subtract the land and a real contingency, and let what is left decide the square footage. Designing first and financing second is how half-built houses happen, and it is exactly why lenders are wary of owner-builders in the first place.

Where this stops

When it is not a handyman job

This is at the top of the page rather than the bottom because getting it wrong costs you a wasted visit. Insured, and no contractor license is claimed or implied — the Michigan residential builder license is not held.

No Michigan residential builder license is held. That means we cannot act as your general contractor, manage the build, select or hire your trades, or take a fee for running the site. This is the plain version rather than the careful one: an unlicensed person doing those things cannot legally sue to collect, and the contract is voidable by the homeowner. The license application is in progress and this page will say so when it changes.
You hold the permit, you sign the trade contracts, and you choose who works on your house. We can tell you what to ask and what a good bid looks like. The decision and the contract are yours.
Plans up to 3,500 square feet of calculated floor area. Above that the drawings need an architect’s or engineer’s seal and we will tell you so rather than quietly drawing it anyway.
No structural engineering, no truss design, no septic or well design, no boundary survey and no soil testing. Those are licensed specialties, named on the quote and referred out.
We cannot promise what a house will appraise at. We can show you what has sold nearby and tell you plainly when the numbers look unlikely, which is a service in itself and is sometimes the whole answer.
The owner-builder exemption is for the home you will live in. We do not help anybody use it to build a house to sell, and we will not draw a duplex under it.
No work has been invoiced on a ground-up house by this company. Everything above is what we will do, not a record of what we have done, and nobody should pick a builder on the strength of a web page anyway.

The work itself

What actually gets done

A feasibility review on the parcel before anybody draws anything — zoning and setbacks, whether there is sewer and water or you are looking at a septic field and a well, road frontage and access, and whether a house of the size you want will appraise against what is actually selling nearby.

A check of the address against the USDA eligibility map, because that one answer changes the whole financing picture and it is decided parcel by parcel rather than by township.

Permit-ready drawings for a detached one- or two-family home under 3,500 square feet of habitable space — floor plans, elevations, sections and the details a building department asks for.

A 3D model of the house you can actually walk through on a screen before it is framed, because almost nobody reads a floor plan accurately and the time to find out a room is too small is now.

A material list taken off the drawings, so the budget is built from the house rather than from a per-square-foot rule of thumb.

A build budget and a draw schedule laid out the way a construction lender expects to see one, with the contingency written in rather than assumed.

Walking you through the sequence — what has to be inspected before what gets covered up, where the long-lead items are, and which trades have to be booked months rather than weeks ahead.

Written scopes of work you issue in your own name to the licensed trades you choose, so you are comparing bids on the same thing rather than on a number.

Before you call anybody

Doing it yourself, and when that stops being the right call

Reasons to handle it in-house

The legal path is genuinely open and it is not a loophole. Michigan wrote the owner-builder exemption on purpose, building departments deal with owner-builders routinely, and nobody at the counter will be surprised to see you.
The saving is real. The usual figure quoted for managing your own build is 15 to 30 percent against a turnkey contract, and the general contractor’s margin is the single largest line you can remove from a build budget.
You will care more than anyone you could hire. On your own house, the thing a builder would let go at ninety percent is the thing you will go back and fix.
If you have the time, this is mostly scheduling and phone calls rather than skill. The trades do the work. The owner-builder’s job is making sure the right one is on site on the right day with the right materials, and that is a project management job.

Reasons to bring somebody in

It is a second job for the better part of a year. Trades turn up at seven, inspections get booked in the week, and a missed delivery costs you a crew day. People who do this while working full time usually describe the schedule, not the work, as the hard part.
The financing is genuinely harder on your own. Most lenders price an owner-builder as a higher risk or decline outright, and the one zero-down route worth having — USDA — requires a licensed builder on the job. The money is often the reason to hire one.
Mistakes are sequenced and expensive. Something covered before it was inspected comes back open, and a framing error found at drywall is a different number from one found at framing.
You carry the liability the builder would have carried. The permit holder takes on the responsibility a licensed contractor would normally assume, and an uninsured person hurt on your site is your problem in a way most homeowner policies do not cover.

What it costs

There is no price list for this, and here is what actually decides the number.

The same three words describe a twenty-minute job and a two-day one. Rather than publish a figure that is wrong for one of them, here is what moves it — so you can work out roughly which end of it you are at before anybody comes out.

The size of the house and how complicated the roof is. A simple rectangle with a gable is a different drawing job from a cut-up plan with dormers and three roof pitches meeting.

Whether you already have a boundary survey and a soil or perc test. Without them a lot of the feasibility work is provisional and has to be revisited.

Whether the parcel has utilities at the road or needs a well, a septic field and a drive put in. That is the single biggest swing in a build budget and it is decided before the plans.

How many rounds of revisions you want. Two passes is normal; an evolving brief is open-ended and gets priced as it goes.

Whether you want the budget model and draw schedule as well as the drawings, or just the drawings.

Whether the building department wants anything sealed. Under 3,500 square feet habitable it generally does not, but an unusual structural span, an engineered truss layout or a tricky site can still need an engineer, and that is their fee rather than ours.

How to get a real number

Somebody comes out, looks at it properly, and you get a fixed price in writing with the work set out line by line and the exclusions written down as plainly as the inclusions. Coming out to do that is not charged for, and neither is working out what is wrong. If something is found once a wall or a floor is open, it is priced as a written change order and you decide before the work carries on rather than after it is billed. Materials are supplied at cost with the receipt attached, first-time customers get 10% off labor, and labor carries a one-year craftsmanship warranty.

If this is happening right now

What to do in the next five minutes, and what happens when you ring.

Before anybody arrives

Find out what houses on your road actually sold for in the last year, not what they are listed at. That number is the ceiling on what a lender will put into your build, and it is the first thing worth knowing.
Call a lender before you draw anything. Ask specifically whether they do single-close construction-to-permanent loans and whether they will lend to an owner-builder. The answer shapes everything after it.
Check the address on the USDA eligibility map. It is free, it takes two minutes, and in the townships around Lansing it is more often eligible than people expect.
If you already own the land, say so at the start. Land equity is usually what stands in for the down payment, and it changes what is possible more than anything else you can tell us.
Find out whether the parcel has municipal sewer and water at the road. If it does not, you are budgeting for a well, a septic field and a drive before you budget for a house.
Write down the number of bedrooms you need, not the number you want, and the one room you actually care about. Budget will take the rest, and knowing in advance what you will not give up saves a month of redrawing.

Call the business line

(517) 505-7135

Answered Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 18:00. There is no out-of-hours line and this page is not going to invent one — outside those hours, leave a message with the address and what is happening, and it is picked up in the morning.

On the call you get asked what is happening, what else in the building is affected, and whether it is still getting worse. That is how it gets decided whether this is our job at all — and if it is not, you get told that on the phone rather than after somebody has driven out.

No trip charge
No call-out fee or minimum
No diagnostic fee
No charge for a return visit

True across all 84 written quotes this company has issued. Most contractors in this market charge to turn up.

Or send the details

When the right answer is not this company

You can smell gas: Leave the building and call the utility from outside. Not us, and not later.
Water you cannot stop: Your main shut-off first, then a licensed plumber. Every minute of this one costs money.
Sewage backing up, or several fixtures at once: A licensed plumber with a camera. That is the shared line, not a fixture, and a cable down one sink will not touch it.
Sparking, scorching or a burning smell at an outlet or a panel: Breaker off, and a licensed electrician. Electrical work here is repair and like-for-like replacement, and this is neither.
No heat, or heating and cooling equipment that has failed: A licensed mechanical contractor. That trade is not offered here at all, and knowing that in one phone call is worth more than a visit.

Questions people actually ask

Can I legally build my own house in Michigan without a builder license?

Yes, for a house you are going to live in. MCL 339.2403 exempts an owner of property building a structure on that property for the owner’s own use and occupancy, and that lets you hold the permit and act as your own general contractor even where licensed trades do most of the work. There is no time limit in the statute and no condition about selling later. It does not cover a spec house, a duplex or an apartment building, and it waives nothing at all about permits, inspections or the building code — you still pull every permit and pass every inspection that a licensed builder would.

Do I need an architect to draw plans for a house in Michigan?

Usually not. MCL 339.2012 exempts a detached one- or two-family residence up to 3,500 square feet of calculated floor area from the requirement that plans be prepared and sealed by a licensed architect or engineer. Calculated floor area counts habitable space only, so the basement, the garage, the attic, the crawl space, the utility room, the porch and the balcony are all outside it — meaning a 3,500 square foot habitable house with a full basement and a garage is well over 5,000 square feet of actual building. An unusual structural span or an engineered truss layout can still need an engineer on that one element, but the drawings themselves generally do not need a seal.

Why will the bank not lend me the money to build my own house?

Because lenders finance the appraised value of the finished house, not what it cost to build, and because owner-builders fail partway through more often than professional general contractors and leave the bank holding an unfinished house. Fewer than one lender in five offers an owner-builder construction loan at all. Those that do commonly want twenty to thirty percent down, a credit score in the 700s for the best rates, cash reserves on top and documented construction experience — and many will only approve a borrower who is themselves a licensed contractor. The zero-down exception is a USDA single-close construction loan, which finances land and build at up to a hundred percent, but it requires a lender-approved licensed builder with at least two years of single-family experience, so it is not available to an unsupervised self-build.

What actually stops most self-builds around Lansing?

The appraisal, not the construction. A new house of ordinary size costs substantially more to build around here than the median home in the City of Lansing is worth, and a lender will not advance more than the finished house appraises for — so across much of the city the gap runs well into six figures and the loan cannot be written at any level of skill. In the township ring the same house works: Haslett, East Lansing, Bath, DeWitt, Williamston and Okemos all carry median values high enough to support a new build. Which side of that line your parcel falls on is the first thing worth finding out, and it is the first thing we check. Our article on building your own home in Michigan has the figures town by town.

Will you manage the build for me?

Not today, and we would rather say that plainly than take the work and hope. Managing a residential build for a fee — selecting trades, hiring them and directing the site — is the activity Michigan reserves to a licensed residential builder, and we do not hold that license yet. An unlicensed person who does it cannot bring any action to collect what they are owed, and the homeowner can void the contract, so it is a bad arrangement for you as well as for us. What we can do now is the planning, the drawings, the budget and the sequence, and hand you scopes you issue in your own name to licensed trades you pick.

Can I build a house with the owner-builder exemption and then sell it?

The exemption is written around your own use and occupancy, so it is for the home you are going to live in. There is no holding period written into the statute, and life changes for real reasons, but building with the intention of selling is not what the exemption is for and it is not something we will help plan. If the goal is to build and sell, that is a licensed builder’s job and the honest answer is to hire one.

Start with the parcel, not the plan

Tell us where the land is, whether you already own it, and roughly the house you have in mind. Before anybody draws anything we will look at zoning and setbacks, whether there is sewer and water at the road or you are budgeting for a well and a septic field, whether the address is USDA eligible, and what houses nearby have actually sold for — because that last number is the ceiling a lender will finance to, and in parts of Lansing it lands well below what the house would cost to build. If the answer is that the numbers do not close on that parcel, we will tell you that plainly and early, which is worth more than a set of drawings you cannot borrow against. Where it does work we draw permit-ready plans, model the house in 3D so you can walk it before it is framed, and lay out the budget and draw schedule the way a construction lender expects. We do not manage the build and we do not hire your trades — that needs a residential builder license we do not yet hold. Coming out to look is free and there is no trip charge.

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