John Folds - Everything You Need to Know About Building the Custom Home: How to Be Your Own General Contractor

Copyright 1990 by John Folds and Roy Hoopes

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Taylor Trade Publishing
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200
Lanham, Maryland 20706

Distributed by National Book Network

Designed by David Timmons

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Folds, John

Everything you need to know about building the custom home: how to be your own general contractor / by John Folds and Roy Hoopes.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-87833-653-1

1. Architect-designed housesDesign and construction. 2. House constructionFinance. I. Hoopes, Roy, 1922- II. Title.

TH4812.F655 1990

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Although the title of this book is Everything You Need To Know About Building The Custom Home, a more refined title might be Residential Construction Management, because the ultimate purpose of this book is how to manage the project.

Within that objective, there are several others: to (1) help you build a quality home; (2) save money on building your home; (3) shorten the time it will take to build your home; (4) avoid the pitfalls and hurdles that confront any homebuilder, but especially the first-time homebuilder; and (5) prepare you for dealing with a general contractor if you opt for that choice.

We want to help you to enjoy one of the most rewarding and satisfying experiences of a lifetimebuilding your own home. More and more people are building homes and finding that it is not as difficult and is far more rewarding than they had imagined. Not only do you save money by being your own general contractor, but you have the satisfaction of having constructed your own environment. It is something, Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look...

Most people spend the greater part of their life in their homethe primary window through which they view the world. To have created it yourself, to know why a wall was built (and what is inside it) is a rare privilege. And there is nothing that will bring a family together like planning and building their own home. Its really exciting, said one young man who had helped his father and mother build their house, to be able to look at that wall and know all the wires and pipes that are in it, and to have stained those beams myself.

Most people think that to build a home you have to know a lot about architecture, bricklaying, carpentry, electricity, and plumbing. Not so. Most professional builders are essentially managers. They leave the actual hammering, nailing, and wiring to specialists. If you have the urge and skill to do some carpentry, painting, or even electrical wiring, you certainly can do it(although we do not recommend it). But it is not essential that you know how to do any of the construction work that goes into a house. There are plenty of capable tradesmen out there willing and eager to help youfor a price, of course. The most important thing for you to know is not how to plumb a house, but how to get the best plumber at the right price to do it for you.

This book will help you do that. It will also enable you to control the uniqueness and quality of your house from start to finish, avoid some of the major and minor pitfalls an inexperienced builder might confront, shorten the time frame of your building project, and save moneywithout sacrificing quality.

The builder or general contractor on a house construction job is essentially a manager. He gets paidusually from ten to twenty-five percent of the total cost of the housefor managing the project, not for doing any of the actual construction work. And once you grasp this concept and learn a few fundamentals of construction, there is no reason why you cannot provide the management function as well as a builder or general contractor. You dont need to dig a footing, pound a nail, or paint a board. In fact, we recommend that you do not do any of the work yourself. First, youre probably not as good as the person you could hire, and second, when you consider not only the value of your time, but what we call the soft cost, youre going to be more expensive than the tradesman you can hire.

There are two costs in building a househard and soft. The hard costs consist of lumber, nails, concrete, etc., and the labor to install these materials. The soft cost is for permits, insurance, interest, and so forth. We have found that, for the nonbuilder, any hard-cost savings obtained by doing the work yourself is offset by the increased soft cost incurred.

In fact, even when you convince the lender that youre not going to do any construction work but simply serve as the manager, you still might have trouble obtaining a construction loan because of your inexperience. But there are homebuilding courses available to the average person. Sometimes the certificates you earn from these courses will convince a lender that you have the knowledge to manage the building of your own home: We also hope this book will help you persuade a lender that youre qualified to build a house. Certainly if you completely absorb the information we provide here, you should be able to build your own house. Both the authors of this book have built a house, and one of us has spent twenty years in the homebuilding business.

There are more than twenty critical elements to be considered in purchasing land for building a home. Even if you already own your land, we recommend that you do not skip this chapter. It is essential to your project that you have not overlooked any building requirements. To assist you, we have provided a checklist that you should utilize prior to signing the contract to purchase your land and before going to settlement on your purchase.

It is important to note that the act of purchasing land and the act of settling on the purchase are two different things. When you purchase you are commiting yourself to the potential ownership of the land. Nevertheless, once you sign the contract, you have a certain amount of time to button down your decisions. This can be a decidedly helpful grace period, especially if you are waiting for your financing to be approved. But this period can also be tremendously stressful for some people.

Immediately after purchasing your land and prior to settlement, you will very likely experience a rejection process that can wreak both emotional and physical havoc. Your body, mind, and soul will try to reject your purchase. This very upsetting and real phenomenon will occur anywhere from one to six hours after you purchase the land, and may continue until such time as you actually settle on the property. It can be compared to the process of rejection that your body goes through after an organ transplant. After the purchase, you are unconsciously trying to convince yourself that you have done the wrong thing. Even your friends and family may work at convincing you that your decision to buy property was incorrect and should be reversed. But you should not be dissuaded based on either emotional factors or well-intended advice. Its natural to feel a sense of uncertainty after you have purchased anything, especially something expensive. But if there are no factual or technical reasons for not buying the property, trust your initial instincts and accept that the decision was the right one.