How to Build Your Dream Home

Are you wanting to know how to build your dream home? There are certain steps that you can take to do this yourself and save a significant sum of money.

You Could Be Your Own General Contractor

By being the general contractor, you don’t actually have to know how to perform any of the skilled labor. The general contractor just manages the work. As a general contractor you will need a way to track the cost of building a home, the schedule, coordinate all the material to be purchased and subcontractors. The video at the link below shows how the Home Construction Spreadsheet helps with managing these items.

You Could Perform Some of the Labor

If you can perform some of the skilled labor yourself, you can save even more. A rule-of-thumb idea of the cost for building a house is 3:1 (total cost: materials), meaning that if you pay a framer $30,000, you could have purchased the materials for $10,000, and you would have paid him $20,000 for labor ($30,000 – $10,000). So, most of what you pay for is the labor.

If you would like to perform a lot of the work yourself, but you are not sure about your skills, one idea is to see if you can setup consultancy agreements with skilled tradesmen. You could pay them a small fee for them to come to your site at certain times to check your work and provide input. You could save quite a bit by doing a lot of the wall framing yourself (something you could learn in a few hours), for example. But in some of the more intricate areas, they could provide you with know-how.

For plumbing, you could perform a lot of the pipe layout, PVC gluing, PEX layout and clamping yourself. These are skills that you could pick up with a few hours of training. Then you could have a consultant come out and give input on how to complete the work. Similar idea for the electrical, and other areas of work you are comfortable performing. Of course, you will need to check your local codes to be sure you are allowed to perform certain tasks.

Home Construction Spreadsheet: Tool to Organize Construction

Whether you are wanting to determine how much does it cost to build a barndominium or a mansion, you want to break this complex project into easy-to-understand and doable tasks organized in a way that will help you to know which tasks to undertake in say, week 6. This is the kind of granularity achievable with the Home Construction Spreadsheet.