“Man Builds House with STONES and LOGS in the Forest.” YouTube is full of bright ideas for building your own house: in a dome, underground, out of ferrocement, or bales of hay, or logs, We promise it will be cheaper, easier, faster. My advice is keep it simple, avoid shortcuts; the old solutions are best, especially for beginners. Building your own home, I mean really building it, without an architect or a contractor, can be stressful. The level of stress will be increased, needlessly in my opinion, by two things.
First, trying to do too much. I remember once visiting a couple who were building their own home. They showed me their plans for a Quebecois-style house, two stories with the typical bell-cast roof. Very large, very ambitious. In the meantime they were living in what would eventually be their two-car garage, a straightforward structure that they had converted into a temporary home. It was snug and cozy, and had the charm of a place that was improvised rather than designed. Shirley and I had just finished building our house (picture above), which was not much bigger than this garage. I remember thinking to myself that they should forget about the big house, and instead start here, with what they already had, add a screened porch, and in good time expand organically. Of course, I didn’t say this. I don’t know if their marriage survived their building project; many don’t.
The second stress multiplier is the Dream House Syndrome. Most D-I-Yers get to build only one house in a lifetime, so they want it to be perfect. That’s understandable, but it’s hard enough to build anything, without freighting it down with perfection. Reality will never quite live up to the reverie. Building a dream, not just a house, sounds good in a greeting card sort of way but disappointments are likely, perhaps inevitable.
William Wurster, a wise mid-century modernist once observed that architecture was the picture frame, not the picture. Anyone building their own picture frame should bear this in mind.