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
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.