Why Self-Build?

It’s quite interesting how we are set in our society on the idea of getting a mortgage as early as possible in life, so that, we can actually survive until the end of it. The biggest reason for this is that; there are no other real alternative. Either pay 2000$ rent to someone monthly, or buy lucky and sign a slavery contract for life. So to me the main question isn’t really ‘why self-build my own house?’, but mostly ‘why not?’

Merely 100 years ago building your own home wasn’t a big deal. Communities came together to lend a new family a hand to build their home, but for the most part the man of the family had to do most of the work himself. In Russia, we still have a saying that in his life time man has to – plant a tree, build a house and bring up a son.

As cities grew bigger and bigger, they became dominated first by brick high-rises and later by behemoths of metal, concrete and glass. Looking at the immense construction of metropolis anywhere in the world the ability of one human being dwarfed. As being a construction worker became a profession and houses became more complex; it brought even more doubt to the man-folk about their abilities. I know it very well from the inside, being highly specialized tradesman, I’m not even considered a carpenter. Everything I need to get by and everything I’m trusted with is installation of hardwood floors. If you, by any chance know few trades, that probably means you are not good at any of them.

A big part of highly controlled building regulations in the construction industry is obviously motivated by safety - both for the workers and also for the people that would be living in the house. You need a ton of credentials and certificates to build a house for someone else; but if it’s for yourself, just call a structural engineer to make sure it doesn’t collapse, and you’re good to go. It’s a sanctuary for everyone who wants to build their own home, it seems almost like a constitutional right.

 So really, what prevents us from taking on the entire house building project?

Professional knowledge – we live in the time of absolute informational overload, you can find everything online, the only problem is the time it takes to sieve out useful information out of the ocean of opinions, advertisements and google algorithms.

Tools – as a tradesman I do believe in using correct tool for the appropriate job. In extreme cases like drilling a well we do subcontract the job, but for the large part the required tools are well within reasonable price, available for rent, or in case of bigger machinery always available for resale.

Last, but by far not the least – Fear of screwing something up. That is by far a biggest fear, once some sort of mistake is made the project becomes so much more expensive. Well, not if you are doing the work yourself. From my experience, the mistake only means more work has to be done. And even more importantly, there is always a watchful eye of a building inspector and other people willing to help with a timely advice.

To me building our own house is portrayed as two distinct possibilities: One, working full time at a job, possibly enjoying work, and having very similar experience day in and day out, earn the money to pay someone-else to work full-time on my construction. The other, is the polar opposite, work full time on the house myself facing new experiences and challenges every day, learn new skills and accomplish something great.

So at the end, what pushed me personally to undertake this entire project was my personal view of life. I see life as an ability to experience world around us, whether it’s a positive or negative. Whether it is something we have to endure or something we can enjoy, it’s all we’ve got. Honestly, for me, it was barely a choice at all.