My wife and I have been discussing for awhile the benefit of building our own home. Since a home purchase is one of the largest purchases you'll ever make saving money on the cost of building a home can have significant financial rewards in the future. We will be closing on our acreage soon and have been looking for a temporary structure while we build the home we've been wanting.
In the quest on the internet to find a good book covering all aspects of home building there were so many options I isolated the search using the following criteria:
1) I want someone who has done it from start to finish as an individual, not a builder who is writing it as he hired out most of the work as I want to see all the good and bad.
2) The books needs to be balanced, not some pump me up publication that side steps the pain and realities of doing it yourself.
3) It needs to provide plenty of pictures and I am a visual learner. I can read thousands of words of text but a picture helps me to reverse engineer some things that might be missing from the explanation.
With those basic criteria and more time than money I zeroed in on a couple of books but finally settled on Sweat Equity by Larry Angell. When the book arrived I devoured it in about 2 days and must say after finishing it I feel confident that I could handle the process and issue that come up along the way. The nice thing is Larry has provided a mini ebook to read that is really just the first few chapters of the book, it helps discuss the why more than the how and I think does a decent job of helping you understand the long term benefits of doing it yourself but also providing enough pain to help you realize you might want to walk away if you have a aversion to working hard.
Sweat Equity, Building a House at Half Cost
Visit Larry's site and look around, he provides a lot of good, free information as well as a mailing list although he doesn't send out things very often.
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