Some of it was due to my inexperience, however the people I dealt with lacked transparency about what they offer/provide. 

Or is my inexperience have my jaws dropping at what people are willing to pay in this current market?

If not - one thing you will have to realize that you will probably have new construction subs trying to get in your shorts a bit more preying on any inexperience they may sense you have with new construction and the corresponding costs.  

It's possible to go out of state but being a total newbie I feel like there are a lot of potential pitfalls to that since my inexperience could get me into a situation I don't want to be in.  

So you may feel that they are adding changes you didn't expect, when in fact, it's simply your inexperience with normal closing processes.4.

In my area, commercial wouldn't touch it since we weren't borrowing $500k and we hadn't found hard money (yet) due to our inexperience- that would have been our first property.

Permitting and our general inexperience really took its toll on the amount of time it took us to complete the building permit, right of way permit and traffic control permits but we finally broke ground April 25th, 2016.At this point we got a construction loan from an institutional lender for $1.2M mostly based on a strong referral from one of our teachers.

But, its going to tie up my time and due to my inexperience it will likely take twice as long and cost twice as much.

@Tj Hines Often times any deficits in experience and be overcome with cash.  

Appear, from my inexperience eye, to need a roof.