Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Cutting Housing Costs

[IAN_HIG (IAN_HIG]

We at Cascade Cohousing in Tasmania are doing almaost all the building
of our common house ourselves and 3 or 4 out of our nine complete
houses have been entirely or substancially owner built.  I guess
there are few impediments to owner building here compared to the US.
The owner built houses look just as good and are at least as well
built as the other houses on site despite the fact that none of the
owners (including my self) had done any building before.  We learnt
on the job, using common sense and reading a lot.  Two out of three
of us would havce described ourselves as "practical" and the thirs
certainly is practical now even if he did not consider himself to
be so when he started.

The common house has been a big job.  The first two of us to build
our own homes have supervised and organised the construction of the
common house.  We have done most our selves except, plumbing, electrical
(actually we did the wiring rough out) roofing and plaster finnnishing.
We hope to be using it in another three months.

I think ourbig lessons have been 1) don't underestimate the amount of 
time it takes to  build things, especially if you are learning.
2) allow an extra 5 to 10% for materials wastage if you are learning as
you go. 3)Beware of over engineering, by all means do a better job
than the minimum required in the building code, but don't waste 
time, money and resources by building with 3 times the materials that
are needed, 4)think about about the fact that different people with
have differenrt inclinations towards doing building stuff. 5) Choose
the jobs you do to maximise the dollar savings per hour worked, but
don't get so hung up on building effeciently that you forget to have fun,
6)i can't think of number six right now.

To finance an individual owner built house, the banks here have a
requirement that the owner has a 60% deposit (ie they will only finance 
40% of the toatla cost).  Becasue we have a single loan for all our 
construction and becasue a number of houses are complete an7y new houe
house will cost much less than 40% of the total value of the existing
houses and so is deemed to meet the 60 % deposit rule.  Of course
this in effect means that the rest of the group is carrying the
risk that the owner wont get there housebuilt, but we think it
would be hard for someone to fail who has an entire cohousing group
encouraging them.  Alsowe go through the budget and house plans of
potential owner builders fairly carefully.

For any one who has the time (and quite a lot of it) I would
encourage ownerbuilding.

Enjoy the process,  Hig.