My house build journey : Location

Welcome to the first article in the series My house build journey ( Mitt hus byggresa in Swedish ), where I will be sharing my journey of building a house.

Building a house has always been one of my dreams and have pondered over it for many years. The dream has evolved, changed shapes, moved continents and finally it started to materialise when I managed to buy a site ( tomt in Swedish) last year.

I was in two minds if I should cut the chase and settle for an apartment in the city. I currently live and work in Malmö, Sweden. There were many new apartment constructions happening in the city and I did visit many apartment viewings( visnings in Swedish). But then I decided I will go through this journey of building a house for the better or worse.

I started looking if there were any vacant sites that is closer to Malmö. Hemnet is a very popular property listing platform in Sweden. There are property listings mostly private ones or from builders. Either it didn’t fit my budget or the public transport system to that place was less. Another option was that municipalities publish sites that are being developed in their area regularly. In that search I came across a municipality called Skurup (about 40kms from Malmö) which had few vacant sites. I visited the place on a weekend.

It is a new street added to the municipality with some ongoing house constructions. It fit my first criteria which should close to a public transport system. So this one was about 10 mins walk from the station. The frequency of trains to Malmö was also good. I also checked price which fit my budget and registered myself in the municipality queue. Then I was waiting.

The way it works

1. When your number comes up in the municipality priority queue, you get a notification to pick from the available sites. After a few months, I got my notification and I picked one of the sites of the 4 that were available.
2. I communicated to the municipality the selection and they sent all the details of the site, geo technical survey result, conditions and contracts etc. One of the conditions was that , I needed to get final inspection( slutbeskitning in Swedish) of my house within 18 months of signing the contract.
3. We discussed and came up with a…