besides tax, what are ongoing costs composed of? i think that you will find that a house can be made in such a way that besides tax, there isnt much cost. and you dont have to have insurance to own a house, people think that because lenders force you to buy insurance. and, once again, if the house is designed properly, there isnt any need to buy insurance for it. and bringing up depreciation and op cost makes absolutely no sense.
There's really no way to design a maintenance-free house. A typical house has a lot of parts slowly failing all the time, meaning you will eventually need expensive repairs on various timelines (sometimes many years, so it can be "ignored" for a while at your peril). Roofing, HVAC systems, sheetrock damage, repainting, replacing aging flooring/carpeting, replacing failing major appliances, etc.
You'd have to design and build a custom home way outside of the designs considered normal for the market to make it significantly more (but not completely!) maintenance-free in the long run, at a significant increase in construction cost. But then you've subjected yourself to another hidden downside: the more strange/custom/expensive a home is, the less liquid that home will be on the market if you decide to sell later. A home that's awesome to you but not-awesome to 95% of the market doesn't move. And if you're stuck with it and it's a significant chunk of your wealth, then you can't move cities for that new job or whatever.
if the house is made of icf construction, it wont rot, suffer from termites, warp or burn. if you have a metal roof with steel trusses, your roof will last a very, very long time. all of this also makes the house impervious to fires both inside and outside as well as high winds. they make houses in southern florida that arent made out of stick and that dont simply fall over in a strong wind -- i look at those a lot for guidance. the construction cost is only slightly higher excluding the steel trusses. my house wont be very big so i can afford the steel trusses. even without steel trusses, you can make it practically fire proof. coating the outside of an icf house with cement based stucco will make that house classified as a non combustible structure in the eyes of the code, and you can insure it as such.
you mention hvac. i will not have hvac. you mention repainting, i dont have to paint if i dont want to. you mention flooring, my floor is concrete. you mention sheetrock, the sheetrock will be fine.
all of this is well within code and well within what i would call normal. but i hope that people will find it strange or un-buyable because that would reduce the market value of my improvements to the land and therefore lower my property tax. i am aiming to get the lowest operating cost possible, and having a home that has low liquidity actually greatly helps that. not every home has to be a flipping scheme.
I chose our current house in part because of the slate roof and unpainted structural brick exterior (both very low maintenance). I admire your search for low operational cost housing; I hope that your eventual house comes out just as low cost as your optimistic projections above.
im going to dig into every source of information i can on the subject of houses and their materials. my plan for the house has already evolved dramatically and will probably continue to, terminating in a design that stands a very high probability of satisfying my requirements. i very much hope that it works because unlike some people here, my prospects are not bright -- they are unsure at best. this is probably the only way that i will be able to retire in a house of my own without waiting until im 70.
I think freneticfox said it best, but i'll add that there are sometimes non-financial costs to having your home sway too much to the custom side of things.
Example: Did you ever have to run out to your local hardware store to pick up a small widget (e.g maybe a few screws of specific size, length, etc.) late at night...only to find that the store doesn't stock that exact type of widget that you need...the hardware store doesn't stock what you need because most of their customers buy typical stuff, and your needs are too long-tail. Let this seemingly little annoyance happen to you a couple of times before you start hating that your home is "one-of-a-kind". And then you begin to buy parts/widgets that cost too much - either because you have to drive all over the place (and maybe you buy an extra widget to avoid repeated future searches) or because the widget costs a premium to begin with...Or, worse, you begin to use 3rd party repair providers - because they regularly stock weird widgets like what you need - and then you're paying them a slight premium to repair (which maybe you could have repaired if you only had the freakin' part/widget)!
Or...What if your property has trees on or near it...and your area goes through seasonal changes where the leaves fall? Maybe you care (or don't) about raking up leaves...Or, maybe your town has ordinances - or your community has local "rules" - about you needing to keep your land "neatish", and then "forces" you to clean up your area through fines, etc. Here again, you can pay someone else to rake/pick up the leaves, or you can do it yourself. Bam, you pay one way - either time or money.
There are countless other examples - no matter the home or location - where owning a home requires investments in time or money, and often both. And, if anyone tells you that "they love working on the house, or cleaning up their yard"...and that it doesn't count as money or time used up, then managing their home is basically their hobby...and hobbies cost money and/or time.
i mean, ill just rake the leaves. itll take an hour. maybe ill design a robot to do it. i would rather do all of that than work to earn money to pay someone to rake the leaves. thats just my personal preference.
You don't need to take care of every eventuality, just the ones that are most likely to occur where the house was being built. For example, if you were building a house in Japan making provisions to mitigate against earthquake damage would be wise, but making the same provisions in the UK would be a waste of time/money.
who says that the house has to be so weak that it blows over in wind? who says i have to make it out of tinder? have you ever asked yourself why it is that california home owners build houses out of wood literally upon the ashes of a previous wood home that burned down? the answer is that there is no reason. there are other options.
On-going maintenance for a home is typically ~0.5% to 1% of the home's value. That might seem high, but it's an average across all years. When you need to spend $25,000 replacing a roof, it pulls the average up.
