I've built a house, in the sense that I was working as the general contractor and hiring out crews and tradespeople to do the actual work. My involvement differed anywhere between hire-a-crew and pay them when they are done down to doing certain things myself 100%.
A few takeaways:
- Things seem simple from the outside, before you do them for the first time. They are in actuality quite complicated. Even something as straightforward as painting a wall will be hard when you are doing it for the first time. You will make mistakes if you do it yourself. Try to do it yourself only in areas where you can tolerate such mistakes.
- The more project management experience you have, the better off you will be.
- Keep things simple. If you are trying to do things non-traditionally, you are not only attempting a non-trivial task for the first time, but will also have limited or no resources to lean on when questions or problems arise. Walk first, then run. If this is your first house AND you are trying to build it autonomously, you are trying to do two things you have little experience with. Consider building your first house using traditional methods. Try to automate it when you build your 5th house.
- Why a concrete house? How will you insulate it? Do you have enough funds to do it this way?
- Learn as much as you can before you even buy a plot of land. Read about foundations, building materials, roofing, windows, exterior doors, interior doors, wood flooring, tile flooring, concrete flooring, flooring in general, wall tiles, plaster, drywall, painting, insulation, plumbing, electrical work, stairs, waterproofing basements, ground settlement, building codes, gas installation, pest-proofing, garden planning, driveways, carpentry, weatherproofing, heating, cooling, ventilation, sewers, patios, exterior finishing, fences, gates, garage doors, how heavy a truck full of cement is and whether they can access your property on the type of road that is present, liability insurance, permits, weather forecasts and what things can be done in what type of weather, dumpsters & garbage disposal, portapotties, area maps to see what is planning in your neighborhood, earthquake considerations, flooding considerations, wind and snow loads, glass & mirror installations, safes, interior and exterior lighting, and particularities of hiring crews.
> - Things seem simple from the outside, before you do them for the first time. They are in actuality quite complicated. Even something as straightforward as painting a wall will be hard when you are doing it for the first time. You will make mistakes if you do it yourself. Try to do it yourself only in areas where you can tolerate such mistakes.
I'm not a home-builder but I am a home-owner. Let me add that any work you do yourself the flaws will be about 10 times as noticeable and annoying to you as if you'd hired someone to do the work and it had the exact same flaws.
I think that depends on personality maybe? I'd rather live with sloppy work I'm proud I did myself than to think I hired somebody and they delivered a bad job.
I think his point was that you don't look as closely to the works others people do than the works that you do. Sure if you know there's flaws on both and they are identical, I agree with you, I would rather it be from myself, but I would most probably not takes as much attention at the works others people do than on mine.
I think that's a property of having experience doing something, rather than of having done that particular instance of it.
For example: I re-did some grouting in my bathroom, and only after that started to notice the imperfections in other areas not by me. Bits of tile I'd seen everyday for a years, that only after I had experience grouting I realised had grout smeared over them and let to dry.
Right, once you do a job you never look at it the same. By hiring it out you never know the details. The same quality of work might look better to you if you didn't do it, but it may be more satisfying if you do.
Well, it's true that homeowners sometimes bite off more than they can chew, but that's not really what I'm talking about. Even if you do a great job, the minor imperfections are going to be very noticeable to you. Whoever did the staircase in my house splashed woodstain on the white paint parts (it's got white for the front of the steps and natural wood on top) and I never even noticed until I did basically the same thing to the side of the house staining the deck.
Also, if your house is in the right area people will buy anything.
As someone who has done some home renovation projects, this is so true. For example, if you mess up a grout line when you tile, your eyes will be drawn to it every time you see it.
I assembled my bed before two days and the panel covering the hydraulics is bit off angle because of my mistake. It still bothers me every 5 minutes @-@
Did you spout that last paragraph off the top of your head? That is a staggering bullet list that I suspect has several layers of unwritten sub-bullets. I have a whole new respect for home builders.
It's really crazy how much there is that you don't think about up front if you've never built a house.
My first build (this summer) was a playhouse for the kids, 8 square meters single story. I built it mostly like you would a real house, omitting a few details (like insulation between inner and outer walls, since it's not heated anyway). I ended up with a budget overrun of 40% and spent close to twice the number of hours I estimated up front. It turned out really nice though.
If you're thinking about building a house, I would definitely recommend doing a playhouse or a shed first.
I just finished pressure-washing and painting a deck for some friends. Simple, right?
I estimated 20 hours, with another 4-8 of uncertainty. The job took 43 hours. So >100% overrun on my best-case estimate, >50% over my worst-case. If you don't have experience, it isn't just estimating the time that's hard, it's hard to estimate the uncertainty too. And I'd done a couple of decks before, just never any with as much railing or a second story.
I nth everybody else's suggestion to take on a couple simpler projects first. If you've never painted, paint something non-trivial. Then build a playhouse.
Needed more practice in construction estimating, which is yet another discipline that you wouldn’t immediately think of when someone says “build a house.”
A friend of a friend runs a pipeline construction company (think the people that would actually build Keystone XL or the likes) and he has a team of estimators that run all the numbers on a given project and come up with a budget. He then double checks their numbers by chartering a helicopter and flying the route with an an old construction foreman, who basically eyeballs the thing and and does some mental math. Apparently it was uncanny how often the two estimates were within 10% of each other, but that the old guy eyeballing the thing had saved him on a number of occasions by recognizing issues/costs that the estimators had missed...
After spending his entire career in construction, one of the last jobs my dad had before retiring was in preparing bids for proposals. The company wanted people with lots of experience in the bidding process. Not just on-budget, on-schedule, but people that had been through over-budget, behind-schedule so that they knew what to be aware of as potential pit falls.
When I was in college one of the big promises of BIM was "we'll have information rich models that will make estimating easier and more accurate!"
I'm not directly involved in that process in-industry (ended up in light fixture manufacturing), but my impression is that BIM models are usually good enough to kick out a set of drawings, but you wouldn't want to count on any information that you pull out of it electronically being accurate.
So you still have "contractor to verify quantity" notes on everything, and presumably someone going through the drawing figuring out how many "Type F 2x4' troffers" and how many faucets and how many of every other little detail that will take money or time.
It's a pretty intensive process, but given the amounts of money at stake if you screw it up, hugely important to get right.
Software development is more like - couple hundred percent over spec in time and cost, code base is a mess, almost nobody uses it and finally, after a couple of years, management changes and the new mgmt calls a spade a spade and terminates the project.
At least that's often the case in huge organizations trying to do crazily ambitious projects (esp. given their general incompetence). I tend to consult on such shitstorms because it pays well. The scars are for life though...
I looked around my house and tried to remember the decisions I needed to make along the way. Some things did not apply, like seismic considerations.
Once you've built a house, you realize that every single little thing you see, and every thing you don't see because it is covered, involved a decision about technology, materials, crew, method, minor adjustments, and sometimes fixups. I mean, EVERY ONE. Each square inch. It did not get there by accident.
As for the list, the good news is that most of the knowledge and experience came from others. For most of those things, I just needed to find our enough about it to know whom to turn to, or to make a decision to NOT to do it because it involved more costs and complications (i.e. basement).
You can build an app that allows you to post 140 character messages on a feed in a couple of hours of work. Building Twitter took years, countless man-hours, and a mind-boggling amount of money.
if we knew or cared about anything like that almost 3 decades ago when we were building houses in Siberia as summer student jobs i don't think we'd have been able to build anything :) (just out of curiosity checked couple years ago using satellite photos - the houses are still there :) Though right now i'm very happy knowing that my townhouse meets all the CA tough building codes :)
I am curious. Which points of that list didn't you consider in any way and at anytime - except for specific features of the land that would force you to take into account the possibility of earthquakes or flood - while building the house ?
One of those neglected sub-bullets is initial cleaning - the last stage.
I'm an initial cleaner, a type of cleaning that takes place for new buildings.
We use a host of specialized tools and techniques, here is one tip on glass. Typically removing concrete, paint, plastic, plaster, caulk from it.
Most cleaners and builders use Stanley blades and score lovely scratches all over your expensive windows - today can be 15% of materials costs. When the sun rises you'll want to cry. The more modern or expensive your window the more surely it shall be damaged.
There are three options. 1.2 mostly works on older glass types, usually not to be used on toughened glass or low e-glass and never interior door glass or veluxes.
The construction trades are filled with a zoo of techniques that individually seem obvious - which must be why few doing DIY do it the right way ever. I subscribe to Fine Homebuilding and read their articles because I know I can't wing it on everything when I self-build - even caulking is a specialization, and few professionals seem to know how to airseal or fully flash a building.
Engineers should be aware that building has one of the lowest rates of automation. The main difference between builders today and builders half a century ago is pneumatic tools. When you think of it - all house are built by hand, and the factory built housing paradigm has tried to get off the ground and failed dozens of times, prefabs aren't much more common than they were centuries ago.
You won't automate the construction of your house and profit (the important bit - or it means you invented a kind of toy) without a giant breakthrough in AI. The nearest you'd get to automating a process and profiting from it will be gang cutting studs with a circular saw.
+1 to everything here, and want to emphasize permitting/zoning since it's buried in the bullet list. For example, even if you have the knowledge and skill to do your own plumbing, in most places you cannot just do your own plumbing (legally).
I am building a house for the first time (hired a GC, but making the infinite number of decisions involved and writing the checks) - I went in knowing it would be more work and more expensive than I was planning, and it was even more work and even more expensive than that still.
I'm thinking about dipping my toes into this world by building a shed. As David Lynch said:
"Whenever you can build a shed, you've got it made"
"I'm a shed builder. If I was just left alone, I would build sheds. I would plan them at Bob's Big Boy Coffee Shop, and I would become very excited with these coffees and a chocolate shake. So, when I left Bob's, I would be racing home with plans for certain parts of a shed, right? Then, I would find the right kind of wood and I would start cutting them up with my power saw, nailing it, fitting it and working it. And I would be almost in heaven with happiness"
I'd say it's an excellent way to get a feel for what it takes to build a home. There are a TON of details, especially if you don't want it to rot.
If you intend to heat it in the winter, be sure to consider the effects of condensation. I made the mistake of building my first shed without proper ventilation, and it was like indoor rain when I turned on a space heater. For my second, more permanent shed I've followed building codes for real homes to avoid making any more big mistakes like that.
I'm building a kids playhouse at the moment and I feel the exact same way. I'm in here working at the computer just enough that I can bail to the backyard for the day and cut timber.
+1 to this post by koliber. Only thing I would add is to plan as detailed as you can everything beforehand. Draw it up, visualize it. What sort of hinges on doors, how will the cabinets swing, etc. etc. Before you even start building a wall you have to decide how wide you want the trim around the doorway as you'll want the light switch just that far from the door and you'll want a 2x4 there with electrical. So there are a lot of cascading intertwined non-obvious decisions and it is remarkably expensive to refactor a house partway through construction.
First, try to understand a process. Draw it. Imagine going through the process of building it. Draw it again. Look at your friend's house to see how it is different. Try to imagine how that one was built.
I have an interesting tale of how the patio door installer almost caused my kitchen countertops to be installed 2 inches lower. The story is a bit convoluted because many things are tied together in the house. You have levels for your foundations, sills, door bottoms, door tops, window tops, subfloors, and floors. Different layers have different widths. Wood flooring ends up being a certain width, and tile flooring another. If you want things to be flush when you're done, you need to plan everything meticulously, backwards, across months of time and different crews.
Moral of the story: pay attention to the levels of everything, across the house, all the time, in one place. Double-check this and verify all the time.
Are the software tools used to build a buildprint smart enough to take into account the local code, comfortable spacing/clearances, etc.? Is there a blueprint equivalent of lint?
Almost certainly not for local code. My experience is that building codes make the IRS tax codes look clear and concise. Often multiple conflicting rules apply and you're trying to hammer out some reasonable common sense with 2-3 different people in planning office one of which is almost certain to go on vacation while you're in permitting process. You'd be luck to get city plan reviewer, architect and contractor all in the same room for an extended discussion.
There are architectural programs that will render a 3d space to help with visualizations. Or any 3d drawing program like autocad can help as well.
Generally the linting is done manually when you ask for bids on your plans from contractors. If your plans are really poor they won't bid or they will come back with suggestions or prices that incentivize you to rethink things.
>Even something as straightforward as painting a wall will be hard when you are doing it for the first time.
Painting is one of the things I do myself, in part because it's something I do often enough that I more or less know the various gotchas, techniques, etc. It's also the case that, when redoing areas that were already painted which is most of what I do these days, I can take some very timesaving shortcuts that someone I hire can't. I can repaint a ceiling without bothering with meticulously masking all the edges and corners. If I don't repaint 100% of the area it probably doesn't matter unless things are in really bad shape.
I've never hired anybody to do interior paint, so I'm wondering: do pros ever actually tape a ceiling border? I've always just cut in by hand. I've found that it's usually high enough that any minor imperfections aren't noticeable.
The last time I did a wall or ceiling, the crown molding had been painted so many times, it would have been nigh impossible to tape it and get a satisfactory result. But I've been living in old places.
Are you in a newer place with fewer uneven spots to tape around?
I've never seen a pro use tape, unless they are spray painting. My guess is that it takes to long when you're probably being paid by the job not the hour.
Yes, and when you paint as much as they do they get good at it. I've seen a guy who's freehand looked better than what I can do with tape - and he was much faster.
I often get frustrated and resort to tape, but although it seems better while I'm doing it, I remove the tape and invariably discover that it's hard to (or at least, I'm bad at) taping straight.
Learnt that lesson the hardware, I do not have a steady hand.
Also if you go the tape route, buy trade tape (in the UK it's commonly known as Frog Tape (though that's a tradename there are generics), comes off without lifting paint, doesn't suffer from creep and is brightly coloured (green) so you can see it against the underlying wall.
>Are you in a newer place with fewer uneven spots to tape around?
Hah. 200 years old.
I've used masking tape when I've been making changes in color or it's been around new cabinetry, windows, etc. As I say, when I'm touching up, I'm usually pretty sloppy. No crown moulding.
My landlord's son-in-law was telling me about his adventures building a house. He seems very capable and takes on a general philosophy of "this is actually not that hard" which makes everything seem more accessible. He's been blogging about it at http://www.savingsustainably.com and you can see the whole process up until now (house is still under construction, I believe).
If you look for the desired task on YouTube you will find a LOT of REALLY USEFUL resources ranging from 2 [1] minutes video to 30-minutes [2] long video with all necessary details.
In addition to the parent's advice, I would say for you to prototype/test the technique/task you are trying to accomplish before doing it in the actual part.
You will screw it up even the simpler tasks so make sure you screw up something that you don't care about before trying it in "production".
If you have permafrost, there are many, many other issues to deal with. (I live in/near permafrost). I think what you are referring to is that in most areas, you are required to extend the foundations below frost depth.
Right. And even “small” things like deck footings need to use sonotubes or similar to get below the frost line. Otherwise one or two years of frost heaving will ruin that new deck.
A lot of stuff is blind hard the first time. Practical physics / material science is subtle. But if you're quant inclinde, you will get up to par fast.
A few takeaways:
- Things seem simple from the outside, before you do them for the first time. They are in actuality quite complicated. Even something as straightforward as painting a wall will be hard when you are doing it for the first time. You will make mistakes if you do it yourself. Try to do it yourself only in areas where you can tolerate such mistakes.
- The more project management experience you have, the better off you will be.
- Keep things simple. If you are trying to do things non-traditionally, you are not only attempting a non-trivial task for the first time, but will also have limited or no resources to lean on when questions or problems arise. Walk first, then run. If this is your first house AND you are trying to build it autonomously, you are trying to do two things you have little experience with. Consider building your first house using traditional methods. Try to automate it when you build your 5th house.
- Why a concrete house? How will you insulate it? Do you have enough funds to do it this way?
- Learn as much as you can before you even buy a plot of land. Read about foundations, building materials, roofing, windows, exterior doors, interior doors, wood flooring, tile flooring, concrete flooring, flooring in general, wall tiles, plaster, drywall, painting, insulation, plumbing, electrical work, stairs, waterproofing basements, ground settlement, building codes, gas installation, pest-proofing, garden planning, driveways, carpentry, weatherproofing, heating, cooling, ventilation, sewers, patios, exterior finishing, fences, gates, garage doors, how heavy a truck full of cement is and whether they can access your property on the type of road that is present, liability insurance, permits, weather forecasts and what things can be done in what type of weather, dumpsters & garbage disposal, portapotties, area maps to see what is planning in your neighborhood, earthquake considerations, flooding considerations, wind and snow loads, glass & mirror installations, safes, interior and exterior lighting, and particularities of hiring crews.