The Philosophy of Building a House 2: The Owner Builder

This explores some of the pitfalls and joys of being your own contractor when building your dream home.

[@stevebaryakovgindi]

I love your combining your different universes. The philosopher mind and the physical labor builder is great. keep up all the great work.

[@Great_Olaf5]

6:21 i get where you're going with this, but it's more complicated. Food is a good example for this. You are going to buy food, if you aren't growing it yourself, and even that has either financial and/or temporal costs. So I'm going to the grocery store, I have a list, on that list includes several things, bread, milk, eggs, ground beef, chicken breasts, etc. Before I even enter the store, I have a rough estimate of how much I'm going to spend on these things, from the moment I step into the store, I'm effectively considering that money already spent. Then, to my surprise, several of the items I'm getting have options that are on sale. Yes I have spent money, but I spent less than I'd written off on entering, I have more money than I'd planned to when I finished. That's why it's money saved. If you have a budget, you're right, shifting money from one part of the plan to another isn't saving money, you haven't gained anything over your initial plans, you've just spent less on aspects of the project you deemed less important to you.

[@joshuabeemer4062]

One of the erroneous presumptions you make is that hiring a gc will definitely yield a better product. Most potential owner builders will likely put more time and effort into building their own home than any GC ever will.

[@VellosAkim]

This is true, assuming the Owner Builder already has the same experience level, skill set, connections and resources as a GC. Otherwise a lot of the time and effort the OB will put into the project will be spent simply to get up to the level of performance of the GC, who has a greater amount of experience and training from previous jobs. If the OB doesn't have the same skills and experience as a GC, there are no guarantees that it will yield a better product. It would be like a freshman highschooler attempting to take a college graduates final exam in order to skip a semester of college, but they only pass if they do better than an actual college student who took the course. Sure, it's possible for the highschooler to pass, but it wouldn't be easy.