The biggest advantage of DIY over buying is no taxes or regulation. I built a house without codes or inspection for $30k, meanwhile it would cost you $300k+ for same.
Code compliance is not a prerequisite for selling a property with a structure on it, and it isn't a guarantee that you can't get the structure insured. If it was you'd never be able to get homeowner's insurance on older homes.
This depends heavily on where you live. I bought a house in a city with a realtor who was fairly new and didn't realize the city mandated inspections upon sale. When I tried to sell the same house a few years later, the buyer's agent did know about it, and when the city came out, they required several updates to the electrical wiring in the garage and to replace an old-style gas valve that had fallen out of code.
Neither I nor (to my knowledge) the previous owners were in any way penalized or even notified that the required inspection was missed when I bought the house and registered it as my primary residence at the city hall (for property tax purposes).
It mostly seemed like something to benefit buyers given that, and I would assume that a company changing hands would mean the the purchasing party has already done their due diligence.
This was some years back in Minnesota. The particular town (a suburb of Minneapolis) was apparently infamous for nanny-state governance, and nothing of what I've heard since has me wanting to go back.
With that said, I've still got a few friends who enjoy living there, so to each their own I suppose.
Yeah that's pretty typical. Every city has at least a few of those rich suburbs full of jerks that run the town that way. I bet they probably have a bunch of police policies that amount to "harass the crap out of anyone who can't just pay for compliance with everyone" too.
Honestly, I wasn't even in one of the "rich" suburbs. Unfortunately, the whole area tends to want to mimic the worst of other metro policies.
The police were actually pretty decent, as was enforcement of other policies like "your grass is half an inch too long" type stuff that I'd heard of elsewhere. For the most part, if the house didn't look like a junkyard or have a lot of visible peeling paint, they didn't pester people overmuch.
It absolutely is not. I've purchased two (2) homes with catastrophic damage to their foundations and structural members, bad plumbing, and worse wiring. The mortgage company didn't make a peep. The insurance company did pitch a bitch about a brick porch attached to one of the homes, so I ended up spending a day and a half repointing it, but that's all.
I’m not sure where you live, but mortgage companies require inspection reports and if the inspection fails of structural condition, you’re not getting a mortgage where I live.
Seems like more of a scare tactic than anything, and not one I would be worried about.
In my opinion, most people are so obsessive about mitigating exceedingly rare downside risk that they throw their whole lives away, leaving nothing worth protecting.
At $50/sq ft for a home you'll have people lining up.
New home prices are more than double that.
Even renting a home costs more than $1/sq ft per month in the area where we own our rental property.
Congratulations. You sound like you'd fit right in with my family. Most of us have been building things for a long time.
Note to anyone else who might want to give it a whirl - you don't have to buy all the tools. Most of them and all the larger tools are available to rent on long or short-term rental contracts at rates that will save you money if you're only gonna do the project once. The skills are the important things to own yourself.
Be open to learning and unafraid of the mantra that you either do it right or you do it over again until you have done it right.
Also consider Buying tools new, and then selling them when you’re done, especially for those that you need for long periods during the project. Tools tend to sell for decent prices and quickly in the aftermarket as they are practical items that people need to use to make more money.
Not the original commenter, but I’ve done extensive renovations of different sizes, and walls off restorations of 3 houses.
The 30k to me, sounds possible ish, but also hard especially without a helper.
Personal example, I’ve gotten many materials for free. Including several hundred square feet of hardwood floor.
But thinking through some basics of just tools needed, and being cheap- and also with an assumption that you have time, and land with wood.
And assuming you find cheap / used tools but not junk.
But when I start to think through things aside from that:
If you start to buy materials…
I think it could be done, if you did a cement or block foundation yourself, and did very basic construction.
But my just off the cuff guesstimates, assuming 1500 sq ft ranch house:
Lumber for framing: $4,100
Toilets: $240
Fasteners: $500
Drywall: $1,500
Piping, fittings: $1,000
Electrical: $2,500 (assuming electric stove, and electric dryer)
HVAC: $8,000
…. I start to see a hard time doing it for 30k, but, I’m sure there’s a way!
Leftover materials from a construction site have to be disposed... Unless you are a builder who wants a house and owns a truck and some land... It is a weird house, but built with pretty nice materials. I bought it from the nephew of the builder.
This is how my grandfather started his home-building business. He built one house using scraps, cutoffs, and reclaimed materials from demolitions. Once he completed the house a local man who had been watching the construction offered to buy it. He sold that house and made enough money to buy another lot and build another larger house. People started coming to him to have him build homes and he became a custom home builder, building homes, churches, businesses, etc. all over the area for around 60 years till he passed away.
Do not attempt to mill your own lumber for your own house. Unless you are building a log cabin in BFE Alaska where you can't truck anything in and need to remove the trees anyway it just ain't worth it for the labor you'll have invested.
Second, blocks and bricks are a massive f-ing waste of labor when working as an individual since you have to handle them so many times. It's worth forming up 10yd worth of stuff and paying for a truck.
You can probably get it done under $30k if you are super cheap and only buy materials at auction and buy used tools.
Having milled my own lumber, I will 100% say it is not worth it for the time and energy involved if I was using it to build a house.
It is worth it when you have trees that will otherwise go to waste, and you can get high quality appearance / live edge / etc cuts out of it.
If I had a lot of trees that needed to be cleared, and lots of time, I might be tempted to try using a portable mill in the 25hp range.
Bricks as an individual are miserable to handle. Even with tongs it’s tedious. When I was younger, I once reclaimed tons of brick from a house that was being demolished. More recently from a driveway someone removed. Both times in small amounts(<1,000 bricks) for specific projects.
I do know of a story of a restaurant, local to me, that somehow ended up needing to reclaim all these bricks that had mortar still on them. They invited over everyone they knew, gave out free beer and wine, and lots of eye protection, hammers etc. I can’t imagine it was an easy project but they successfully reclaimed it to build part of their facility.
I built my block foundation in 4 weekends. I would use a truck for footings and grout next time as mixing and wheel barrowing 300 60# bags of quikrete was brutal. Total cost was <4000, but that includes excavator rental and site prep. If you hire a truck i think it is difficult to handle that much without help and you are fucked if it sets too soon.
A concrete truck would not even make it down my road though... and many of the blocks were carried in small bundles by 4x4 truck. Building a road for heavy trucks would probably cost as much as the house.
> If you hire a truck i think it is difficult to handle that much without help and you are fucked if it sets too soon.
Foundations, walls and footings are cake because they're all formed, you just gotta finish the top. It's the flatwork that has lots of finished area for volume and is very laborious
I wouldn't recommend it if anything were to go wrong. It's a quick way to end up in bankruptcy if anyone gets hurt, or if your neighbors property gets damaged
Not getting hurt isn't hard. Not trashing your neighbor's property is even easier. But this isn't the kind of project one should take on with zero experience. Do yourself a favor and buy a backhoe that's a runner to start with even if it costs 5x more than a project.
I mean sure, maybe. I could also contract a disability or disease or get hit by a bus while risking my hide earning an extra couple hundred grand to buy a house.
Probably, if you do something blatantly negligent and kill someone. Short of manslaughter, though, I suspect jail or prison time is pretty unlikely. You'll still be financially ruined if you don't have insurance or your insurance won't cover your foolishness though.
Also reasons for codes, don't want to have to wonder if every building you're in is a death trap. And when buying a house you don't want to have to tear it apart to inspect it and look for balloon framing or lack of fire stops.
Nobody is building death traps to live in as their own home. The people who are only on a deathtrap budget are not engaging in those projects, they're renting. The people building death traps are slumlords dividing shit and fly by night contractors and flippers altering things <screeches in open floor plan>.
That is false. Plenty of people build death traps as their own home. Nobody will know if you remove a load bearing wall without a permit so long as you are not obvious about that work. Slumlords are generally in a place where people will know.
Slumlords do want cheap, but they need to get money from the bank and that means the bank will care about quality. Slumlords also don't want to lose everything if the building burns. Note however that quality to a bank and slumlord are things you cannot see and so their buildings often look dangerous while being safe. (I'm not saying all slumlords are perfect, just that their reputation is on a few graphic failures that often were 100 years ago)
The permit isn't what keeps you safe (except from being shot by the government at the behest of people who think like you). What keeps you safe is not doing a shit job. When working in one's own home it's far easier to just over-build things than to engineer things to the bare minimum or pay someone to tell you what that minimum is.
Also slumlords are the guys doubling the number of units in an existing triple decker, not the guys building new stuff.
Flippers bid the death traps to oblivion during circa 0% loan inflation binge fest during COVID. I tried looking for a freestanding deathtrap first but they were all 160k+ and that's burnt to a husk. That is how I ended up DIYing from raw land.
