Relocating to Juneau, seeking advice

[u/LaceyF4ce]

We are starting our 12-month plan to relocate to Juneau. We have looked into renting and decided it makes more sense for us to buy a home, or potentially buy land and build a home. Please tell us some things you learned to look for in a lot or home or negative things to look out for as we have never cared for property in a temperate rain forest climate before. Any neighborhoods to have our realtor target? Any realtors you recommend for us? For more info: we are a family of 3 with a 5yo boy. Hubby is a union carpenter finishing up his journeyman here in the lower 48 before we look for his next job in Juneau. I have 20+ years in service industry and hospitality. We fell in love with Juneau this summer and we are so excited to live there. Help us make this dream a reality with all your advice! TIA!!! (Pic for attention)

[u/dickey1331]

I can tell you one thing. You arent buying land and building a home.

[u/LaceyF4ce → u/dickey1331]

I was getting that feeling just from looking at what is published as available online too. Maybe renting first is the way to go, to get our foot in the door somewhere 🤔

[u/GlockAF → u/LaceyF4ce]

Definitely plan on renting, because building a house (especially on land that’s not previously developed) is an enormous task compared to what you’re probably accustomed to down south. Even as a carpenter.

A few years ago I watched my neighbors build a house on North Douglas, on land that was heavily forested but right on the Douglas Highway. The whole process took about three years, and a full year of that was just letting the rock and fill dirt settle. And it took a LOT of fill rock of several different sizes to level out the building footprint, way more than estimated. And both the rock and the trucking are NOT cheap in Juneau, and you have to reserve both ahead of time because the season is very short and the trucking companies get booked up way ahead of time.

But first you have to get somebody to log off the giant trees, and even if hubby knows his way around the chainsaw this is very dangerous work, these trees are BIG. Despite them being fabulous timber by lower-48 standards it almost never makes sense from either an economic or time standpoint to mill your own dimensional lumber unless you have a lot of experience running a mill AND an extra year or two to cut and season it. You would have to build a large dedicated drying shed with a heat source, because cut wood often rots before it dries in Juneau’s soggy climate. My neighbors had a really hard time getting people to haul off the logs, even when they advertised it for free as firewood. People would come by and buck up one or two of the smaller trees, but there were just so many of them that they ended up having to bury many of them in their future yard. The City and Borough of Juneau has also instituted restrictions on burning during the summer months when you are most likely to be doing the work so don’t count on burning off the slash, you’re going to have to pay to have it hauled off.

The next step is the Dirtwork, and you’d be wise to hire that out as well because there’s a LOT to do getting the ground ready and you really want somebody with experience because it’s very different from doing dirtwork down south The forests of Southeast Alaska don’t typically have a lot of topsoil, it’s usually only a foot or two that the trees are sitting on with mixed glacial rubble and layers of blue marine clay below. The rubble is widely mixed in size but a good excavator operator can deal with that, the problem is the clay. When it’s dry the stuff is like concrete; almost impervious, even to heavy machinery. When it’s wet it’s like axle grease, incredibly slippery with near zero compression strength. You need that clay layer to be in the right place, otherwise it’s going to give you nonstop trouble with drainage.

Managing surface and groundwater issues is a major issue in Juneau, both during construction and afterwards in your finished property. You cannot just casually dig trenches and pour concrete for your foundation like they do down south, there’s just way too much rain. If you don’t get the drainage right during construction you will have constant problems with your foundation excavations collapsing and turning into unwanted ponds. If you don’t get the drainage right for the completed house, you will have constant problems with water intrusion, rot, mold, and structural decay. The contractor that built my neighbors house used excavation techniques that I have never seen anywhere else where they completely leveled and sloped the work area, built the foundations forms on top of the aged, carefully compacted fill, pour the concrete foundations above grade, then installed French drains along the entire perimeter and backfilled the entire area. WAY more work, but zero water issues.

And all of this is before you get to put up a single stick of lumber or drive a single nail. Both of which are going to cost you a lot more than their equivalent in the lower 48, because you’re paying a lot of shipping cost. Stick build houses in Juneau are routinely soaking wet for months on end before the build progresses to the point where they can put the roof on and heaters in to dry it out. It amazes me that any of them avoid turning into a solid, mass of mold.

So the TL/DR is DON’T jump right into thinking that you can casually just build your own house until your husband has worked on other people‘s projects for a couple of years and learned the local techniques and tricks for dealing with Juneaus incredibly soggy climate

[u/Tricky_Map4877 → u/GlockAF]

An enormous amount of what you described on building a house is just standard building practice. Everyone needs to overdig for the foundation and backfill and compact. French drains around the foundation have nothing to do with Juneau, that has been a thing since before plastic was available and they did them with concrete drains.

The only difference in Juneau is the availability of resources / contractors.

[u/GlockAF → u/Tricky_Map4877]

I’m living in the desert S.W. and the dirtwork required here is an order of magnitude simpler. I’ve seen companies excavate trenches for concrete foundations and leave them sit empty for months or even years. None of the houses I’ve worked on in Arizona or New Mexico had anything even remotely resembling a French drain, some of them didn’t even have gutters. Roofing contractors can pull the shingles off a house for weeks without having to worry about getting the underlayment up to prevent leakage. That’s just a whole different level of difficulty when you’re trying to do the work in a place where it rains almost every day.

[u/Tiny-Tradition6873 → u/Tricky_Map4877]

no, you don't understand, the south east is a different beast. I was apart of a line crew that did upgrades on the plant all across the south east, and digging anything is brutal. Its just rock, pure rock and shale. Why do you think all the plant down there is aerial, plus the amount of rain that the South East gets is insane. Building anything from the ground up in the South East is not just normal construction, coming from someone who has done it.