Building Your Home in Sierra Leone — The Roadmap

⚡️Note: This is a guide primarily for those who want to build a vacation or retirement home in Sierra Leone while overseas. If Sierra Leone is not your home country, no worries, this guide should be helpful to you too. Just replace SL with your African country and it should apply 🙌🏿

Building a home in Sierra Leone (SL) is the dream of many members of the Diaspora, re-locators, and frequent visitors. These dreams are filled with ideas of investing in the future or simply having a place of your own to rest your head on arrival.

Whatever your plans are, if you’re like most people, building a home in SL while living abroad (U.S., U.K., Canada, etc.), requires thoroughly investigating ways to make sure your investment in a new home materializes as you expect. We’ve all heard the horror stories of what can go wrong, and while those stories seem to be reducing as time goes on, for many people building in SL still feels like a black box (or furnace) where money goes in and hopefully the house you expected comes out.

Short on time? Here’s a quick summary of the main points:

• Build your team — There are 3 options we have for building your team. We recommend choosing a single contractor to handle your full project end-to-end. The shortcut is to find people who can verify the quality of their work.
• Set a payment plan — Based on the estimated cost of your home, it’s important to set up a regular payment schedule with your contractor and to put around 10% of the total cost aside for contingencies.
• Verify your steps — Get a full list of the steps for building your home (see below) and agree with your contractor on a way to verify the completion of each step, using images or video with GPS tracking

Our team offers support for following these steps. Just Fill out a request here and we’ll be in touch.

One way to deal with this anxiety, is to follow a process that helps you reduce your risk of being “duped”. This article is an exploration of that process and how you can get started implementing it.

Setting up

Just like a house, your construction project’s foundation is crucial to success. The pieces you organize in the beginning can be the difference between a lovely home of leisure or a never ending project that seeps cash like a leaky faucet. Finding the right team and having a clear project plan are the keys you need to set a good foundation.

Build Your Team

Every project needs a good team to succeed. There’s no magic trick for finding the perfect team (yet) but there are key things you should consider when searching for a team.

For building new homes, a few key members of your team will include the following:

1. An Architect — Designs the look of your home
2. A Quantity Surveyor — Produces a document that tells you what materials are needed to build your home and how much those materials cost
3. A Construction Team — A team of many individuals with various talents who unite to build your home
4. An Electrician — Wires your house for electricity
5. A Plumber — Installs the pipes in your home that handles gas, water and waste

Pick Your Team Strategy

People who have successfully built in SL (and Africa in general) have implemented a variety of strategies for building their team. Those strategies are summarized below:

1. The Custom Team: Build your full team from scratch — this requires finding every individual who works on your home yourself. You will need to assess their skills beforehand and judge the quality of their work afterwards. For this strategy, you really need to know what you’re doing when it comes to home construction. It typically works for those with the freedom to spend a lot of time in SL, or those who have someone they 100% trust to make the right decisions on their behalf. Both of these situations are pretty rare and probably don’t apply to majority of this article’s readers.
2. The All-in-One: Hire an end-to-end Contractor — for those who don’t want the hassle of having to understand every aspect of your construction, or can’t find someone that you trust who will, you can outsource this responsibility to a contractor. This can work if you find the right contractor and work with them well. It can go terribly wrong if you don’t.
3. The Hybrid: Different teams for different jobs— if you still don’t want to build a full team from scratch but also don’t want to trust only one company with the fate of your future home, you can try mixing teams. A standard mix would be finding a separate Architect, Quantity Surveyor, and Construction Team. This gives you a little more control but still holds a certain amount of risk if you choose any of the wrong people.

📣 Recommendation: For the non-experts looking to save time and increase your chances on quality (most of you), The All-In-One is the way to go BUT you need to spend a lot of time investigating to make sure you find the right contractor. It won’t save you from all issues, and you’ll still need to travel to SL when you can. However, a good All-in-One contractor makes a lot of the main worries go away.

Need help picking the right team? We offer a free service to help you find the people you need for your build.

Whichever strategy you go with, it’s extremely important that you interview the members of your team. Ask them about their past projects and find people who have used them before (Make sure those people were happy). You should be confident that you’re finding people you can trust, not just someone who you heard can do the job.

Home Design and Materials

Once you’ve figured out your team, you’ll need to take the following steps:

1. Discuss your home design with your Architect
2. Send the design to your Quantity Surveyor, who will create a document called a Bill of Quantities (BOQ). The BOQ lists the materials you need to build your home, the quantity of those materials and their prices
3. After seeing the price for your new dream home, set aside a contingency amount to deal with unexpected costs. The BOQ tells you how much your materials will cost, but it does not tell you how much it will cost to deal with certain issues that are specific to your land.
4. Take your BOQ to your construction team and ensure that they are willing to move forward with it. Once agreed, it’s the responsibility of the construction team to ensure that what is delivered in the BOQ is what they build.

⚡️Note: In Africa, although labor is cheap, materials are expensive. This is because many of the materials for your home will be imported. So unless you buy local materials which may be a different quality, the cost of your materials might be more than you would expect in the US or Europe.

📣 Recommendation: 10% of your total construction cost (including labor) is a good amount to put aside for any unexpected contingencies

Setting a timeline

Now that you know the estimated cost of your dream home, the next thing to decide on is your payment schedule. You need to agree on the size of your payment chunks and the specific dates of these payments. This is important because it helps your construction team receive regular cash flows, which ensures they can keep the team around and focused on your project.

If you’re not going with the All-in-One team strategy, you will obviously need to make separate payment arrangements with your various people/teams.

📣 Recommendation: If you’re not paying the full price at once, we recommend setting a schedule of payments based on when you want the house to be done. For example if your house will cost $25K and you think you can afford to finish it in 2 years, you may consider a schedule of monthly payment to your construction team of roughly $1K per month for the full 2 years. Or break up the payments based on the different stages in your BOQ.

This is an important component of your project plan that will help you and your contractor(s) stay close to the plan in the BOQ. If you end up interrupting your payment schedule, it’s best to discuss with your contractor how prices on your BOQ may change. Most likely there will need to be a review of your BOQ to get fair prices for everyone.

⚡️Note: Inflation pressures on the Leone currency mean that the cost of materials for your home are constantly changing. Your BOQ protects you from paying for any sudden increase in prices. But that also means that your contractor has to bear that difference. Deviating from your payment schedule will likely delay the project, putting more price pressure on your contractor. This is often a source of conflict between contractors and the Diaspora.

From 0 to Home

Now that you’ve done your setup, the next thing is to commence building. This is of course, the hardest and scariest part. It’s where the most risk comes into play. But if you did well on your setup, there’s a good chance it will be smooth sailing.

Tracking Your Build Progress

One method people use to see if things are going as planned is to exchange photos or videos with their contractor. Of course, one of the notorious horror stories are of people receiving photos from their contractor, but upon arrival on their land in SL, they discover no house and that the photos were of someone else’s home. Some methods people use to avoid this are:

• Having a trusted family member or friend act as a project manager and ensure the work is being done
• Paying a caretaker who lives nearby to keep a lookout
• Going to SL occasionally to verify the work and it’s quality

Some people will actually only allow building to take place when they are present to witness it. The problem that occurs with this, is that you will frequently need to re-negotiate the price of your materials or purchase the materials yourself.

📣 Recommendation: If you are relying on photos and videos to keep track of the build progress on your land, we recommend requiring GPS to be enabled with your photos or videos.

The construction, will likely take place in 3 phases. Below are those phases, the potential jobs and ways you can verify them. Keep in mind that no project is 100% the same, the jobs may vary depending on the nature of your home or land.

⚡️Note: For the phases below, there’s no replacement for a trusted expert(s) on site who can check the quality of each job. But having verifiable footage can at least help you check against your BOQ to make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for.

Phase I — Preliminary and excavation work:

• Clearing of site
• Excavation
• Landscaping, garden, drainage*
• Cesspit creation — A pit necessary to collect waste

📣 Recommendation: All the above can be checked with high quality drone footage plus GPS. The cesspit can simply be done with footage from a phone plus GPS, if need be.

Phase II — Foundation to Roof

• Foundation building
• Structural Work (a.k.a floating) — to build the stories of your home
• Ring beam — separates the windows from the roof and fixes them together structurally
• Roof structure and covering

📣 Recommendation: All the above can be checked with high quality drone footage plus GPS. Photo footage plus GPS can also be used to verify floating work.

Phase III — Finishing

• Electrical wiring
• Plumbing
• Tiling
• Painting and decorating
• Water well (if necessary)
• Access road (if necessary)

📣 Recommendation: Phone footage plus GPS can help you verify if the job is done.

Need help verifying your build steps? We can work with your contractor to get construction footage with GPS location.

Final Thoughts

Building a home in Sierra Leone isn’t easy, but many find it exciting. If you have the right process in place and start receiving regular updates, the visuals of seeing your home slowly come together can be addicting. The tips in this article won’t save you from all the issues but we hope it can give you more clarity on how to get started and where to reduce your risk.

Our team is actively working on ways to help new builders get started in Sierra Leone. We offer free services and tools to help you apply the roadmap in this article. If you’re planning to start building your new home in the near future, let us know here and we’ll reach out to help you get started.

Need help implementing the tips in this article? Our team offers support for your home construction in Sierra Leone. Just Fill our a request here and we’ll be in touch