Building a house

First you have to design the house or at least buy a set of plans you know how to read. Or you can hire someone to do all this for you but if you do that just expect all this to cost about 4 times as much in the end. The property you buy to put your house on you need to check to see what is possible to do within the building codes of where you buy land. Often you can do more of you are outside of a city where the laws are usually much more stringent. So, if you are outside of city limits in a county there is often more leeway of what you can build.

Another factor is what the climate is like there but usually the building codes will reflect the climate wherever you build. However, in some other countries than the U.S. there might not even be building codes but then often there are many other things you have to worry about besides building codes there in that locality.

So far, (and I'm 72 so I'm not sure how many more houses I'm going to build at this point) I have only built homes in California from San Bernadino County to Siskiyou County which is where Mt. Shasta is. However, I have also helped build homes in Los Angeles County, Orange County, San Diego County and San Benito County in the 1990s. So, I have had a lot of experience building things and electrically wiring things. What I know the least about likely is plumbing but I can fix most problems in our homes anyway still. I just don't like the idea of building a house from scratch and having to put in all the types of plumbing drains and vents. I'm just not familiar enough for the first stages of plumbing before you either pour your slab or start your pier block foundation.

So, my specialties have been Landscaping Contractor, Electrician, Carpenter (not finish carpenter which do cabinets and tables and stuff like that and chairs), and I have also hung plasterboard but didn't care for that much and I have also insulated several houses (but I was usually living there at the time so this often was in lieu of rent).

There was a 1925 home that a lady I think had committed suicide in because her husband died in World War II and when we moved in I told my family there was a ghost there but she wasn't a bad one that would cause us problems. So, one day my 15 year old son saw her and it scared the living hell out of him (which is a good thing) and he straightened up his act after that and realized I was telling him the truth about everything.

I got my 15 year old son to help me insulate the attic with 8 inch fiberglass insulation that I bought in lieu of rent there on that 1 acre parcel of land with black Cherry trees almost 100 years old and apple and pear and blackberries growing there on the land. This would have been about 1990 then.

We bought masks and gloves to do this because fiberglass insulation is really awful in your eyes and hands and arms. We also bought enclosed plastic goggles to keep the fiberglass dust out of our eyes as well. So, if you are going to insulate unless you want problems the next month you need to wear gloves and long sleeves and long pants and plastic goggles that completely enclose your eyes and even then when you come out of the attic you want to take a shower to get all the dust off all the crevices on you where it might have gone.