What Qualifications Do You Need to Build Your Own House?

This video answers the question, "What qualitifications do you need to build your own house?"  We discuss the time required as well as the background, knowledge, and skills needed. If you don't have a great deal of extra time to self build, you may decide to hire a builder consultant to help with some of the leg work.  

The builder consultant can also help you with technical home building terms, bidding, and scheduling.  If you think you want to become an owner builder and self build your own house, you need to do an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses.  Are you capable of being on the job site every day? Are you comfortable with the self build requirement of managing other people?  Do you really have the skills to check quality for every type of construction activity when you build your own house?

Honestly answering these questions will help you determine who your team members will be and how they will help you.  The term self build is somewhat misleading as you won't actually be doing much physical labor (unless you really want to).  The idea is for you to take on the role of the general contractor...delegating the work to others.  So, you will hire a team to handle whatever you don't have time to do, don't want to do, or don't have the skills to do.

Hopefully this video will take away some of your anxiety about what self build really means.  It should also help you better understand that when we say build your own house we don't necessarily mean swinging a hammer every day.