We built our house from 2004 to 2005. We shopped around and found a local bank that was awesome to deal with.
The construction loan was an ARM at 1%, you only paid on what you used, so we took out several hundred thousand but only paid interest on the portions for which you wrote a check, the unused portion was just never yours anyway. There were no closing costs at all, the only fee was an application fee and that was it. They included 4 free inspections for installments. We already owned the land that we built on so we used every single nickel we had allocated for the house, paychecks, everything before we touched the construction loan. We even got the builder to give us 30 days on a few payments so we could use cash. By the time we got our first installment from the bank, which was for the value of the land, we were paying our builder for the MEP rough-in.
The final morthage was really simple, again, no closing costs, fees, nothing. We were very lucky to have sold our house about a week before we got our CO and we essentially gave that money to the bank to pay down the amount of the loan that we used. The way it worked at our bank was the rates on the date of the CO was the lock on your mortgage. We could select any mortgage we wanted, we could stay with an ARM, 10 year, 15 year, 30 year, whatever. We locked in at the time for 15 years fixed at 5 1/8, again no fees.
I laughed that when you buy a house you pay all these fees, when you build it, granted you bleed money uncontrollably, but there are no bank fees, 5 years ago anyway.
Good luck, it is only as stressful as you let it be.
