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.
