Some years back when I wanted to build my first home a good friend of mine Wilfred gave me good advice. He said when building your first home don’t go for fancy stuff, don’t go for big house plans which you may end up struggling to complete.
He said your first project should be simple and yet classy-your chief aim being to stop paying anyone rent! Once your starter home is complete then start strategizing for a bigger project where you will use experience gained from the starter home. You have to keep moving and therefore improve in terms of number of rooms, number of features-perhaps a bigger bathroom, more bedrooms, swimming pools,tennis courts etc.
He said look at the white community in Zim especially Harare, most of them started by living in areas such as Haig Park,Hillside,Waterfalls, Mabelreign, Sentosa, Greencroft. Most of these areas had starter homes for the white community and most of the homes were basic…a few bedrooms,bathroom,kitchen,dining and lounge etc. With time the white community moved to bigger places such as Mt Pleasant,Highlands,Glenlorne,Vainona and Borrowdale.
So you too can do it, start small and keep moving. A home in Kuwadzana, you sell it and buy a residential stand in Tynwald, you build and sell and move on to Glen Lorne or Chishawasha. The trick here is to be mobile-you have to keep moving. Do not look down upon an area like what some say when talking about high density areas, just grab a property improve, sell and keep moving.
Starter home versus Massive Projects
I urge you to visit some new developments in Harare- drive along Harare Drive where you can see incomplete housing projects. Some would have skipped the housing stages and instead of starter homes, you just move straight to Mt Pleasant, Glen Lorne or Borrowdale. The problem with being too ambitious is that sometimes you can build massive homes that you do not complete resulting in you selling the incomplete houses. Harare has a lot of such projects and I have copied below a couple of such projects. The problem with selling incomplete projects is that you end up selling at a discount!
