Offbeat Homes

10 Reasons Why Building Your Own House Sucks

by Jennifer Chait on August 19th, 2007

Have I ever actually shown pictures of the house I helped to build? I don’t think I have. It’s the weekend so I’m going to take an offbeat detour and talk about me. The house I co-built is not in fact, that offbeat. However, being that I am the so named offbeat homes blogger I’m going to say that pre-qualifies my house to be on this blog.

My then partner designed it and it’s nice but not entirely green built. If I build again I’ll be doing some things very differently.

My buddy Deb over at Simply Thrifty inspired me to write a list post (her posts were so clever, check them out): Post 1 and Post 2.

I was thinking that since I’m showing the house, I’d cover why you should never, ever, consider building your own house.

1. SPIDERS! Big ones, little ones, and all of them wicked scary. Not to mention we built up on a mountain in New Mexico so you just know there were tarantulas around. In fact, a friend of mine who lived on a plot of land down the road caught one. Shiver.

2. It’s the slowest process known to man. Does it have to be? Why, no and maybe someday I’ll tell you how to cut building time. But in this case it’s just going to stand alone as a negative.

3. Clearing and leveling: What you may not know if you’ve never built a house is that you have to move all the trees (obviously) but you also have to make sure your land is flat and free of rocks for the foundation. We had no idea going in that rocks the size of boulders hidden in the earth would be such a problem.

Here’s the house when we started.

This isn’t even entirely accurate because it was a plot of empty land for about half a year before this. I just don’t have a picture.

4. Hidden costs: There are maybe 618 hidden costs when you build your own house. Is that number accurate? I can’t say for sure but it does feel like I estimated a little low. We got the land (an amazing plot — on a mountain top, acres of land, tons of trees, and views) for a song. So in theory it may have been inexpensive. If however you fail to plan ahead, hidden costs will get you.

Which brings me to…

5. Unorganized people don’t know what they’re doing when. Is my ex good at designing and building? Yes quite. Is he good at planning ahead and organizing? Never. This is a reason that only applies to those who can’t organize. If you aren’t organized please, please hire someone who is to do all the planning for your house. We constantly fell behind schedule because something was forgotten or not taken care of when it should have been.

Here’s the house in 2006 (maybe 1/2 year after the first picture).

6. No bathroom: I do not want to pee outside with the scary spiders. Nope I don’t. The house isn’t out in the middle of nowhere but to get to a bathroom you do have to drive. If you can afford it you could rent a port-a-potty I suppose but that just means you’re in a small dark space with the spiders — also not appealing to me.

7. Your hands go to hell: You can wear gloves. In fact I hear that’s a popular choice among home builders. But I don’t like them. I always felt like I wasn’t sure where my hand was exactly and it feels slippery. When you’re three and four stories up on scaffolding the last thing you need is to slip. I like going bare handed. But my hands were a mess. Lotion doesn’t help, loofahs don’t help. You know what helps; the end of said house building.

8. Child labor: It’s against the law and sad to see! Just kidding. I felt like I’ve complained enough for a few minutes so here are some cute kid pictures. My son Cedar and his best friend Johanna.

First we made them pick that whole pile of wood up. Actually, you can’t tell but they’re building their own house. It was a lot worse than ours but they did finish in record time.

Then we made them paint the whole house. Later we realized that they weren’t very good painters and we had to let them go.

9. Weather extremes: It’s New Mexico. There’s no a gentle spring or a crisp fall. There are basically three weather patterns in Edgewood, NM. Boiling hot, freezing cold, or windy enough to blow a car away. The wind will occur in both hot or cold weather.

And now we’re at the two year marker. Yes, two years…

Here’s the front view.

Back view

10. You can almost go blind: On the roof! Remember the afore mentioned wind that will blow a car away. We were on a deadline and decided that even though we were having heavy winds we’d go ahead and get the roof papered. In retrospect; bad, bad idea. One, we were all alone that day — just me and the old partner. Two our ladder was sketchy so we were using the rafters of the second floor to climb up to the roof.

If one of would have fallen that would have sucked. However we manged between the two of us to get the roof mostly (80%) done. In the late afternoon our work came to a screeching halt when a huge gust of wind blows sand completely under my goggles (great safety goggles) and into my eyes.

Oh my gosh. The pain was insane. Plus, I’m on a flipping roof. I can see out of one eye so I manage to shimmy down the rafters and luckily I survived. But it was one of the least fun times ever.
A really poor picture of the finished product.

I can’t find the others end result or interior pictures right now. They are not in my personal collection because I got so tired of the house not getting done that I moved to Orgeon thus was not there to take the pictures.

When I do find them, I’ll be back with 10 reasons why building your own house rocks. Yup there are a few reasons. But it won’t have anything to do with spiders.

So, are you all geared up to build now or what!

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