1st of many house building questions. Help please

Sancraft. Speaking of Habitat for Humanity, you may be a good candidate for them to help build your house. Have you tried this approach? Habitat for Humanity should have a decent program in your area since it was orginally started in Georgia (Pres. Carter).

Driving nails is not gender specific, so let's drop that whole line of discussion. I am a man, and I just built a house, but I know women who have done so as well.

The main thing you have to have is familiarity with your tools and your plans. It also helps if you know the little "Tricks" that professionals use in all crafts to get things looking straight and uniform.

IMHO, plumbing is the harder of the 2 jobs. Plumbing MUST be done correctly or you'll have toilets that won't flush and drains that won't drain, and leaks behind wallboard. Plumbing is also VERY strenuous work as there is a lot of drilling, boring and sawing during the rough-in. Not to mention the shovel work outside.

In my state, plumbing must be done by a licensed plumber and the rough-in has to be inspected before insulation and wallboard go up.

KY Will allow a homeowner to wire his own house, but he still has to have it inspected twice (rough-in and finish) by the state inspector before power can be permanently connected.

On some things, you'll have to have help...nobody can hang wallboard by themselves overhead (unless they've invested in a lot of jackstands). What I did was hire my rough in plumbing/electrical/excavation work. Then I hired a Framing Carpenter to help me frame it right. After it was framed and under roof, I hired 2 young guys and let them help do the rest (insulation/wallboard/flooring/fixtures/siding/doors/windows/etc.). When I finished, my house appraised for $50,000.00 more than I had in it.

Bottom line, do all you can yourself, but be realistic and willing to hire help when necessary.

__________________
"The most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." - Sir Isaac Newton
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Hi Sancraft,
Hugs to you and congratulations on your house. We are starting ours too. We have the pier and beam foundation in and will be starting the framing in September. Once the house is dried in, we will do most of the interior work ourselves.
As far as the foundation goes, we decided that it was above our skills level as well as not having the proper equipment to dig through rock. So we found a contractor that "hired" my DH and I to be his laborers. That cut cost considerably as it was only approximately $500 for his labor to finish out the foundation. He was meticulous in making things level and square which is definitely what we wanted for a foundation.
We will again do this with the framing, by helping him get it dried in, then we'll take it from there. Perhaps you have someone who might be willing to do the same thing. It sounds like you've got a construction crew ready to go, just need someone to head it up.
Also, when we get to the interior, I know I've seen a lot of how-to videos at the library for all types of interior work, so I'll be looking for them when it comes time.
I'm cheering you on and hope everything goes wonderfully for you.
mamabear

Like others have said doing plumbing is not as easy as it seems. Take it from someone that was a plumber for most of his life. But like others sad as well you can help every trade out some and save some money on every thing. Things like digging ditches, Drilling holes,Cleaning up after them and many others things really helps them a lot. If you talk with each sub contractor before hand I am sure all of them will work with you. If not maybe look for a different one that will :-)

You can do the plumbing. I plumbed our whole house by myself with no experience at all, & everything works perfectly. It's not hard at all if you get some good books & do a lot of studying before you start.
I don't think I could have done it if I had used copper, but with PVC, there's nothing to it.
I learned two things that make the job a lot easier--get a good PVC pipe cutter, & use the colored glue.
You will have to put a lot of the joints together first without glueing them, to be sure everything fits, & then go back & glue it. If you are using the orange colored glue, you can be sure you have everything glued before you turn the water on & have a huge unexpected leak.
I also wired in all the plugs, switches, lights, & ceiling fans, but we got an electrician to pull the wire & wire in the breaker box. It was too complicated, & I didn't trust myself to do it.

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Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. Mt.35:24

Sancraft
Not much I can add to the advice you have already got, except to say I'd rather do electric than plumbing.
The most important thing to remember is to do it right the first time.
Don't take the cheap route, don't take shortcuts, do it right. If not, it will absolutely guaranteed come back to haunt you.
As mentioned above, don't use chemically treated wood inside the living space. If it's dry, there's no reason to have it, and if it's not dry put your money in the roof.
However you do it, just please please do it right.
You'll be much happier with the house.

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Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
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Enforced tolerance is oppression

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

best advise is hit the library and see if theycan get a set of popular mechinic encyclopedias A to Z I found two different sets one from the 50s and one from the late 60s . these cover everything from art zebra pens they include numerous plans for just about anything you could want to build or fix . great reading for any homesteader.

Hey Sancraft! What an adventure you are having!

I am a mostly single mom of one (I have a wonderful significant other, but am not - yet! - remarried) with 6 acres and a house that is still under construction.

I used a package from these folks: www.cabins.ca It came in pieces and was put together on site. Something like that may make your life a lot easier as gets to 'closed in' so much faster - although unless you go with a single storey you will need some heavy equipment to do the lifting of the exterior walls in place. They say to take the finished package price & multiply by 2.5 to get your end cost, and that's about right for my experience.

You can read all about our construction adventures on my blog (applejackcreek.blogspot.com) - go back to about November of last year, when we started framing.

It is a HUGE job. I could not possibly do this myself. I have a full time job and the house was done for me with plumbing, heat and wiring (my neighbour down the way helped us do wiring - I was standing in the living room pulling wires and drilling holes in the floor and it was snowing through the unfinished roof!) and I moved in at the end of January.

What is it now, August?

I have JUST got some of the flooring down, the walls are almost finished, and the ceiling isn't started. I have discovered the hardest part of ceiling work is lifting big heavy boards over my head - frankly, I can't do it.

My recommendation would be to find a good contractor who will do your foundation, get your house framed and closed in, and then a good plumber to do all the water stuff and heating systems (I had one person who did both - possibly cause I do in floor heating, but lots of plumbers also do natural gas work, so if you can use a boiler they may be able to do it all at once). If you can find either newbies or semi retired people (my contractor was semi retired) you can probably provide some of the sweat equity.

Financing is a pain - I did find an owner build financer, but I've got a lot of money in holding bins at the lawyer's until I am all done. That means I have to find other money to pay for things I need to GET to done ... it's tricky.

Last of all, some practical suggestions from a smaller-framed female perspective:

- Avoid drywall if you can, that stuff is HEAVY! I have pine tongue & groove wood on the walls and it cost me less than the drywall would have, and has the added advantage of being light. There are lots of pieces, but I can lift each one and work with it, I can't work with a sheet of drywall.
- Try to find something small to put on the ceiling. As I said, I'm abandoning my pine 4x8 sheets ... I think I'm gonna put the same stuff I used on the walls on the ceiling.
- Get an air nailer. Man, that thing is great. If you can get a framing nailer and a finishing nailer, your arms will thank you. They are heavy enough, but swinging a framing hammer is hard, hard work. My SO worked on my house (he's normally a computer geek like me) and was amazed at how tired his arms would be at the end of a day - to the point where he could no longer even lift the hammer.
- Seriously consider professionals for all the finicky stuff, especially if financing is an issue. That sounds backwards, but it is better to get a loan to cover the pros doing it and then have the house done and built within a year or two than to do it a bit at a time, *if* there is some "deadline" you have to meet. I had pros doing a lot of my stuff, but hit a ton of delays, and then life happened. I am puttering away at it but I probably won't be all done until at least Christmas, maybe later.

I guess it comes down to trade offs: sure, you *can* do this yourself. You are smart, you can read, you can figure it out. Some of the really heavy stuff you might need help with, but there's ways around that. The bigger question is how *soon* can you do this yourself? If I had to build this house with my own two hands and two young helpers, well, it wouldn't get done. I have to work to pay the bills. I need someone smart and fast to get the walls up and the stuff working - I'll do the things that 'can wait' in my spare time (such as it is). When financing comes into it, it just gets messy. I have a fairly recent post about the money issues too, maybe it'll give you some ideas.

Good luck, whatever you decide!

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Apple Jack Creek
near Edmonton Alberta
author of Just Keep Knitting: a journey of healing through forgiveness, faith, and fibre and The Rookie's Field Guide to Supported Spinning

The flooring thing puzzles me, pressure treated is not a thing people put in houses for flooring - thaqt worries me as to what it is you are getting into? There are PT basements & such, but flooring you walk on - no way. Something is wrong here.

Let a pro do the electricity. You _can_ learn how to do it. I do not doubt your ability. However,t here are too many things to do, too many things to learn the rest of the way. Problem with electricity - it is fairly easy to make it work - sort of. Can be 5, 10 years later that the flaws show up 7 hurt or kill someone. Truely, a person can make 120v stuff work with just one wire & someground rods - but there is nothing good or safe about that. Much better to hire a pro for this job, you can waste a lot of $$$ copper wire just learning, and wiring a whole house is a bit of an extreme project.... You could hurt someone years from now......

Plumbing is your call. If you mess it up, you will know it. Might have to tear out a bunch of new walls you just made, or redig trenches & start over. But, you won't kill others with hidden traps, and most of the time you know pretty quick if you got the plumbing right or not. You would want to go with most all plastic for do it yourself with no experience. Learing to sweat copper while you are trying to learn the rest of building the whole house could be - a lot to bite off. But, your call.

On this project, be prepared for the _TIME_ it takes. Sounds like you willb e learning everything along the way, with no one to guide you. it will take you several timers more TIME than you will ever guess. It will be _painfully_ slow. Be prepared for that.

For that reason, I would hire out the plumbing if at all possible. Not because you _can't_, but because you will be so extremely busy you won't get to it.....

Time. It will be the big focus. You just won't have time to learn it all, do it all, get it all done.

You can do each & every bit of it. That's not the problem. The problem is learning as you go, & getting house to live in within a reasonable amount of _time_.

Myself, wife, & 2 friends are re-habbing my sis' barn this summer. Seven new doors; rebracing the hay loft; adding 3/4" flooring to the hay mow; new stairs upstairs; adding an upstairs door; replacing a few bad 2x10 framing; 3 windows; add3 outlets & a couple lightbulb fixtures; and other minor odds & ends.

We started in May, been going every weekend 2.5 days a week, and we are only now begining to see the end. This, even tho I have scaffolding, I bought an air nailer, and so forth - we aren't wanting for tools or experience - one friend works at the lumber yard....

Our project is small compared to yours. We ain't never done this before, but all 4 of us know some about construction & wiring & so forth.

TIME. You need to divide your time very carefully. I would let others handle the wiring for safety alone; and I would let others handle the plumbing just for the sake of _TIME_.

That's me, you know what you can handle, you do it your way.

--->Paul

Catspaw in right on the money - Home Depot is financing your materials for a specified period of time at a high rate of interest. You WILL have to secure a conventional mortgage to pay them off, but in order to do that the house MUST pass the bank's appraisal. Habitat For Humanity is an excellent suggestion for experience and help. You need to build something smaller like a goat barn or chicken house to get experience for you and the girls before you tackle a house that most probably HAS to be completed within a very specified time frame with NO allowances for weather, injuries, etc. Two-story homes are really tough without some sort of crane or lifting device to get those roof trusses in place not to mention the upstairs side walls. You really will need scaffolding for the upstairs wall framing/exterior sheathing and 4 x 8 panel of anything are heavy and awkward especially if there is ANY wind blowing. BTDT. My friends are building their own 2-story, got the upstairs walls framed in, nailed a tarp over as a temporary roof until they could get the rafters installed, had a really big rainstorm, tarp ripped off, interior had 2" standing water, delayed all further work until the water was out and the downstairs flooring dried out - took a week. They are working full time on their home, neither working at the moment. They hired out the foundation/cement work and have been working steadily since April and hoping to get the place enclosed by November? Then they can start on the interior work. Their place will be only 900 sq. foot down and less up due to the style of the roof. It CAN be done, but takes LOTS of preplanning and scheduling. If you have all the materials delivered at once you WILL need some way to protect them from weather also. Otherwise you have to schedule deliveries as you need the materials and allow for Home Depot delivery times.

I think it would be difficult...although not impossible to do this. MY DH, DS and two teenage daughters built our house from foundation up with absolutely no experience. It was hard and we are in the finishing stage now and that is the hardest. We uses a continuous block foundation four courses high on a footer. My youngest daughter 17 at the time laid all the blocks with the help of brother unloading and stacking. She was the only one with the patience to spend the time to make sure each block was level. ( we are perfectionists as well ) This is a two story house 3000 sq ft. One thing I agree with is the PT floor, you definitely should use 3/4 T&G sturdi floor. It runs $20-25 per 4x8 at Home Depot depending on the market. Never use PT for interior living surfaces. I agree with Frazzelhead on the drywall. It is very heavy and hard to deal with. It is taking 400 sheets of drywall to complete the house and if I could find a good source for wood I would use that instead because fo the weight and the fact that mud and taping really is hard to get right. Daughters have moved on from the big adventure and we are now down to me, DH and DS ( who is a moose and can lift whole tree trunks by himself) and we still struggle lifting, getting it in place and screwing. Use all the bpower tools and pnuematic nailers/screwguns you can. We hand nailed the framing all the way up to the second floor system before we purchased a framing nailer ( I told you we were totally inexperienced). I also agree with the reading. I went to the library before we began and checked out books on build it yourself and learned an awful lot. The fact that you will have the framing done is a plus. As for electric and plumbing, electric was easier than plumbing to me. We bought books from HD and taught ourself. Passed the electrical inspection first time. You just have to pay close attention to what you are doing with any three way and four way wiring. The soldering of the copper pipes for plumbing wasn't so difficult. Understanding the water supply made perfect sense to me, but because we designed our own plan, we didn't have a plumbing plan for the drain, waste and vent and understanding that was hard. Crawling under the crawlspace to place the pipes was "yuck" as well! We didn't get a loan, and have been paying as we go. We have been working on this four years with the first year to clearing the land, temp electric poles, etc. and only two and half years on the house itself. It is a everyday struggle mixed with times of sheer wonderment that you did this. Plan, Plan, Plan is my best advise and then be ready for those plans to have to be readjusted. Also, make time for fun or the girls will tire of the project.

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Christanie Farm...living life as it was intended

Of course you 3 can do this...and what a wonderful legacy for your daughters....there will be so many memories to share with the next generation and your girls will become "can do" women, like you!

I once read of 2 retired sisters that built a house using a hammer, saw, screwdriver, and all the rest of their tools were kitchen utensils of one kind or another.

I'm betting folks will come to your aid like they did when I had to get my place finished in order for the judge to award it to the kids and me in the divorce settlement. I'll be praying for you. Keep us posted.

Well, I feel alittle bit better now.....the advice is starting to hit the mark.

BTW, I do drywall by myself with out a lift [ on the ceiling,too]. there are some tricks. I don't recommend it. << re-read... don't.

All the stories about building a house with a swiss army knife and a q-tip are cute...unfortunately...the rules have changed.

Because of the drastic increase in forclosures and BKs the bank are really tightening the screws. In some places even the contractor actually has to pass a credit check along with the client.

That's why I stressed financials and learning/planning before you jump into anything.

dont' EVER give up what you REALLY want to do. Just use commons sense. Go to a bank and/or an independent mortgage company and have them run your numbers. They'll explain exactly what they expect of you regarding timelines, inspections, etc. (they won't tell you how they're raping you financially, but....)

>>> BIG ADVISE HERE <<< Be careful with the mortgage financing [different aspect]. All those no closing cost ditech thingys, reverse mortgages, ARMS, etc. There are so many tricks to pick your pocket it would make you puke. (wish I could just d/l my mortgage data to your brain).

If I could get anybody to build their own house my way, I would tell them to start with a small place specifically designed to accept additions as money comes along. As in preplanned headers where additions will be placed, along with correct placement of the house so there are no obstructions when those additions are installed, avoiding utilities where future footers will go, etc.

You'd be surprised at how comfy, affordable, and quick a 800-900 sq.ft. house can be built, knowing it will serve until expanded (especially when you can live there where you'll be working on the additions.)

Habitat, habitat, habitat, banks, mortgage company, banks, questions, questions, blah, blah.

uh....my brain is empty.

Do you know yet if you have to have inspections?
I think I remember that in your area, you did have an electrical inspection for your little cabin (?)
Anyway, our inspections cost about $1000 total.
We will not get an occupancy permit without the final inspections.
I hope, for your sake, your area is more lenient than ours


credit unions tend to do construction loans easier with owner/builders.

when the construction loan is over - it's over & you start paying your monthly mortgage payment whether or not you're living there - no extra increase in interest.

Yes, I agree with this -
We put T&G pine on our ceilings & then used all the leftover for trim.....it ran us about 48 cents a linear foot

delete

Sandra where you at girl talk to us? I was just thinking.Can you build on to your Cabin that you have now? If not can you just get an idea what you want to do.Save the money just to at least get the Shell up.Get it up fast,then take your time finishing it as you get the money to.

I just wish I was down there to look over the situation,there is so many ways of saving money.

Oh I really think I would just go with a single story.Plus I wouldn't try living in what I'm trying to build.Its just a pain working around stuff and having to move it all the time.

big rockpile

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I go to the Rock!

I second the single story plan as well. Most of our headaches and problems were dealing with heights and how to reach something etc. We live in ours while we are finishing and I agree it can be difficult, but with it being 45 miles from our other home in the city we just couldn't get finished driving every weekend and only working two days...living there has allowed us to to do smaller projects in the evenings after work when we would have normally been sitting on the couch watching TV in the city house.

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Christanie Farm...living life as it was intended

I've seen these houses, they are basically storage sheds. They are constructed on site by the company. You complete the inside. The one I went in was roomy and had a loft upstairs. It would make a great camp house. The model she is talking about is larger. I had the same idea when I saw it. This is VERY do-able. Good luck !!

And the model she is talking about is advertised to be finished off as a small camp house. I went in a model just like being used as a sales office in S. Louisiana about 3 years ago. Doubt if its still there, out near Kenner airport.

I've even thought of the same thing. The financing is not mortgage, but is Home Depot large purchase, and this company via HD has their own financing advertised.

If you are at Home Depot, go to their two storied stoage shed and pull the sales leaflet, you'll see the model. (Don't know if this applies outside the SE).

Angie

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Is there a pic on the internet anywhere??? Our local Home Depot was CLUELESS when I asked about it.