My Home-1 🏡 — How to Build a House with Almost No Money
When all you have is a piece of land, but you need a home.
I was never the kind of person who waited for things to fall from the sky.
Besides, I believe the only things that fall from the sky are airplanes and bird poop.
At that point in my life, I had very little money, a huge dream, and one certainty that no one else shared:
I was going to build my own home.
I had moved to another state, and my son had moved to another country.
So I was alone.
If I had to live on bread and bananas, I would.
I had saved enough to choose between two things: buying a small studio apartment or buying a piece of land in the place where I really wanted to live.
I chose the land.
In a gated community surrounded by nature.
Before the First Brick
The truth is, my house began to be built long before there was a single wall.
It began inside my head.
Years ago, I started planning.
I sketched.
Changed things.
Erased them.
Drew them again.
I knew exactly how I wanted each room. Not because I knew anything about architecture, but because I could see that house before it existed.
I was never very good at looking at shop windows and choosing something from a bunch of options.
When I want something, I usually already see it finished in my mind.
Then I keep shaping it, dreaming about it, searching for it, until I can make it real.
And finally came the hardest question:
How was a woman with very little money going to build all of that?
I didn’t know yet.
But there was one thing I was certain of:
I was going to make it happen.
That was when I started looking for the land.
After visiting several properties, the real estate agent showed me one that immediately caught my eye.
And probably no one else’s.
It was a piece of land that sloped steeply upward, ten meters above street level.
Ten meters.
Maybe written like that, it doesn’t sound like much.
But imagine building a house ten meters above street level.
That’s challenging when you don’t have much money.
But sometimes, not knowing everything is a way of not giving up.
And there was more.
The property bordered an environmental protection area.
Behind it was a forest.
I would have trees, birds, and, as time went by, I would discover that I would also have marmosets, foxes, lizards, and an entire world of native wildlife moving through the place.
I didn’t know yet that we would become close.
It was exactly the kind of place where I wanted to live.
The view was beautiful.
I fell in love with it the moment the first breeze carried the scent of the flowers.
And when you fall in love, you lose a little bit of your good sense.
I looked at that piece of land and saw my finished home.
There was just one small detail: I was the only one who could see it.
So I bought it.
My son and my sisters would say:
“You bought a hillside.”
The architect would say:
“Rosana, this is a hillside.”
I looked at that same piece of land and thought:
“It’s my home.”
And that was how the most improbable adventure of my life began.
I didn’t know it yet, but in time I would discover that accomplishing something great requires determination, not luck.
So I did what I always do.
I PLANNED.
I spoke to some engineer friends and told my friends that I was going to build my home. I also told them that if anyone had construction materials they were going to throw away, I would gladly take them.
And the first things started arriving.
I was given a door.
Two windows.
A granite kitchen sink.
I kept everything.
Every item that arrived was another little piece of my home.
But there was one small problem.
If I wanted to build, I needed money.
I already had a regular job.
But one job wouldn’t be enough.
I needed more income.
I started by working during my vacation, organizing documents for a company whose owner already knew about my skills in document control.
I gave it everything I had.
The owner was so pleased with what I accomplished during those thirty days that she hired me to continue organizing the documents remotely.
Little by little, I began investing in the infrastructure of the property.
I had the water installed.
Then the electricity.
And I had a retaining wall built at the back, along the border with the forest.
But I realized I would still need more money.
So I found another job.
I started working as a secretary for a postgraduate course that took place every other week: Friday evenings and all day Saturday.
I was earning money and gaining knowledge by attending the classes.
That’s when I discovered something curious:
When you work every day, you save money.
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Not because you don’t want to buy anything.
But because you don’t have time to spend it.
I still had Sundays.
That was my day to rest, breathe, and dream about that audacious project.
And that’s how it went for a year.
One year working.
One year saving.
One year slowly building the possibility of living there.
Then, with the water and electricity installed and the retaining wall finished, I sat down to plan again.
And I asked myself:
“Rosana, what do you need to survive in this paradise?”
The answer was simple.
Walls.
A roof.
A bathroom.
A kitchen.
That’s it.
I worked for another year.
I managed to save enough money to build only the walls and the roof.
In other words, the house could finally be born.
Rise from the ground.
But then I realized something:
if I kept paying rent, it would take much longer to finish the project.
That’s when I set a goal.
In four months, I was going to move in.
Without paying rent, I would have fewer expenses and more income.
Everyone said I was losing my mind.
And I was.
But I was deliriously happy.
I decided I needed to distance myself from everyone.
Including the architect, who, instead of encouraging me, could only discourage me.
And nobody needed to tell me what I was already facing.
DIFFICULTIES.
I no longer wanted to hear that it wouldn’t work.
I needed to keep believing that it would.
Every time I looked at the walls rising toward the sky, I cried with emotion.
My family, however, cried with worry.
They saw an unfinished construction site.
I saw my dream taking shape.
After ninety days, I had the skeleton of a house.
There were no doors.
No windows.
The floor was still bare earth.
There was no plumbing.
No electrical wiring.
But there were walls.
There was a roof.
And there was a woman completely determined to live there.
I hired an inexpensive professional, and with the materials I had managed to obtain, he installed a bathroom and a kitchen.
Everything was very simple.
But enough for me to survive there at first.
I asked him to run a few wires from the main utility pole.
He put a few light bulbs in the main rooms of the house.
The more the house took shape, the more I distanced myself from people.
Or perhaps, looking back, I sometimes wonder if they were the ones distancing themselves from me.
And, strangely enough, I didn’t miss them.
I had everything I needed.
The birds.
The trees.
The marmosets.
The forest.
And, most importantly, I had peaceful sleep.
Especially after working so hard.
At the end of the four months, I asked a carpenter I knew to come and help me.
He couldn’t believe my audacity either.
He said he had never seen anything like it.
He asked if I was really sure I was going to live there.
I pretended not to hear him…
With determined steps, I went to fetch the boards scattered around the yard.
And that’s how we began.
I brought the boards one by one and handed them to him so he could nail them into place.
They were boards that had already been used in the construction.
Together, we closed off the spaces where the doors and windows would eventually go.
We left only the opening for the door and the spaces for the two windows I had been given.
The daylight and the greenery stayed outside.
But somehow, there was plenty of light inside.
Perhaps because I was finally inside it.
And that was how I marked the date of my move on the calendar.
I didn’t have a finished house.
I had a house that was just beginning.
But it was mine.
And I had built every brick of it.
This story is not over yet.
Follow the next stories in the My Home series 🏡.
I still have many stories to tell.
