Building a Dream House in Kenya for Under 5 Million Shillings / Kenyan Real Estate / Kenyan Youtuber

The Story:
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In 2019 I set out to build a home upcountry. The decision to build was driven by two things:

The first was tough circumstances. My mother, having been a business person all her life, had run into business challenges. Her entire business was collapsing. We tried to keep it afloat but after a few years of trying, we realised we weren’t making any headway. The impact of this failure was made even worse by her emerging health complications. we realised it just wasn’t working out.

The second reason for doing it was that, as a child of a single mother, I really didn’t have anywhere else I could call home. I felt a strong desire to establish permanent roots, especially now that I had two children of my own. Mom had a small piece of land, less than half an acre, that was left to her by her father and we decided, that’s where we needed to build our family house. It was my first time undertaking such a project. Here I was about to invest all my life’s savings, KES 3.5M, and I honestly didn’t know where to begin. I felt out of my depth. I had to get a plan.

I found a great architect through my network and convinced him to give me a simple plan for the bungalow at a low cost. I also requested him to introduce me to a contractor who could take care of the build for me. I kept hearing that getting a contractor was the safest way to go if you were a novice in the construction industry, especially if you were not able to supervise the project yourself very closely.

I met the contractor and explained to him what I wanted, and he promptly provided me a quote for the project.

5 Million Kenya Shillings for the house only with basic finishes.

This was above my budget. I only had Ksh. 3.5M to spend. I thanked him for the quote and realised I had no choice but to go to my plan B. See, I had also heard that one could achieve great savings by finding a ‘Fundi’ and doing a self build without the services of a contractor. I felt apprehensive but excited by the challenge.

Through family connections in ‘shagz’ I managed to find a fundi and bring him on board for the job in August. I used the Mjengo Tracker to track every single coin I was spending. It made me feel in charge of the project. To my very pleasant surprise, I realised that I was getting way more bang for my buck than had been quoted by the contractor. Even though I was only able to go to the site once a week, I was pleased to see that the build team that my foreman had assembled was doing a great job. In addition to that, my half brother, who had some building experience, also joined the build team and was really assisting in ensuring everything was staying on track.

The house ended up costing me 3.5M with luxurious tiles, floor and roof. In addition to that, I managed to get some more money that I could invest in the build. I built a beautiful metal and stone fence with finely crafted pillars, a cabro driveway, invested in a fine garden, built a 30K liter underground tank connected to a 5K liter overhead tank, installed a water purification system that could filter particles up to 5 microns in size (very fine) that made all the water coming out of all the taps in the house safe for drinking, and built a 20 square meter store and SQ. All this for only 1.5M shillings more, which brought my overall project cost to 5M.

I had managed to build our dream home for what I had been told was the cost of a bungalow with basic finishes. A lot of that success, I owe to the fact that the Mjengo tracker enabled me to document, track and compare constantly. I was in charge! I hope it helps you in your project as well. You can download Mjengo Tracker on www.buildahome.co.ke

You can get Baraka Bungalow prefilled Mjengo Tracker and have instant reference to all costs associated with building this 4 bedroom bungalow in Kenya.

check out www.buildahome.co.ke
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- See all costs incurred during the development of this project
- Have a reference to compare against for quotes made to you on your project.
- See cost performance on this project vs the estimated costs for all phases of the project.
- View labour and material expenditure trends on a week by week basis
- Find out exactly where the money was going when it comes to materials purchases.
- See how the final actual costs compared to estimates in various graphs.
- See the total project duration

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