If you total up the time you spent doing the work, and multiply that by what you could have been paid working doing something else, how does the savings change?
People should definitely build their own houses. Its custom fit to you and you get the satisfaction of doing it. But its also a lot of work, requires considerable time investment, and requires quite a bit of specialized knowledge.
But consider if I hired someone, I would lose 30% of my earnings to taxes. And then 50% of what I pay others goes to insurance/licensing/taxes/transportation etc. So really your labor costs should be about 30% if you bill your own time since it is tax free both ways and no overhead.
I.e. the majority of that 70% savings is not from labor.
I’m sure you did your homework and did everything by the book, but I’ve seen enough both online and in my experience with old houses (commonly modified without permit) to have an appreciation for licensing and permitting requirements.
A few years ago my friends’ landlord tried to rebuild the house’s deck until it got shut down by an inspector driving by. I thought it was outrageous until I walked over and saw what was being built, which was a laundry list of engineering and design failures. After that I was thankful that the inspector noticed and stepped in.
Licensing (and permitting) doesn’t exist for the ideal case where people practice perfectly without licensing. It exists for the average case, where people like to guess and improvise.
> End results, costs <30% of anything comparable offered commercially.
If you did the work yourself I’d expect similar savings. I think this is an example of DIY labor, not the cost of licensing.
Therefore the "crazy stuff" is what you wind up seeing it.
Therefore the "crazy stuff" is what you wind up seeing it.
Since you brought up a stupid anecdote I'll bring up my own stupid one. A friend of mine was out, mid thunderstorm, fixing the drainage ditch by the road he lives on as it was having problems and trying to go over the road. The state equivalent of the EPA happened to drive by and shut him down. Well, the road wound up getting washed out and the water found a new path of least resistance and caused tens of thousands of dollars of damage. Because the matter was on the state's radar everything took forever and more money to get fixed. To this day he regrets not handling the situation more aggressively.
/r/DIY loves to harp on that kind of thing, but most of the "death trap" critiques I read there are for things like decks 12" above grade. People need to get a grip.