Customer Reviews

Do-It-Yourself Housebuilding: The Complete Handbook

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is about BUILDING a conventional stick-built American house. There's scant attention to design issues. This also isn't the book if you want to construct anything other than a standard stick-built house (no domes, concrete houses, log cabins, & c.), or to incorporate elements like solar heating or super-insulated shells. George Nash assumes that you'll follow the road most travelled.

Given that limitation, the book is just CHOCK FULL of construction details. Just as an example, the chapter on framing a roof goes on for more than 60 pages. IF you can follow it, there's a lot of meat inside. But if you're like me, even with a fair amount of carpentry experience you'll find yourself getting lost on more than one occasion.

There's no list of definitions (lexicon), and carpentry in particular has its own vocabularly. On top of that, Nash freely interchanges synonyms (such as "jack" and "trimmer" -- two terms for the same type of framing stud) in the text. Plus the index refers only to words in the text, and omits those in the MANY illustrations entirely. The end result is that I frequently had to do some time-consuming page flipping to track down a term that had escaped my memory.

The illustrations bear particular attention because of their ability to confound. The (black and white) photographs are described by Nash as "my collection of old negatives, prints, and snapshots". Many of them have poor contrast, so they don't clearly delineate the features that are supposed to be of interest. The line drawings are professional product, with strict attention to proportional representation, but nonetheless frequently do a poor job of illustrating what the text is talking about. This is the case for three reasons: (1) they were created independent of the text, and stitched together by an editor, NOT the author OR illustrator; (2) their strict proportional representation means that important but small details can get lost; and (3) each one was reduced in size (by an editor) to squeeze more onto each page and reduce the total book length. The end result is that the text and illustrations do NOT make a unified or even particularly complementary whole.

If you know what you're trying to accomplish, and have the time to slog through the details, this book will tell you most of what you need to build your own stick-built house.

For less detail, but a FAR superior starting point for creating your own house, buy "The Real Goods INDEPENDENT BUILDER: Designing & Building A House Your Own Way" by Sam Clark. Read Clark's book cover-to-cover, then keep it open to the same subject area as you read "Do-It-Yourself HOUSEBUILDING"; anytime the Nash book confuses you, you can step back and get a clear overview from Clark's excellent work before you dig back into the details of the Nash book. (Even Clark's index is superior. Clark's book is about 500 pages with generouse whitespace; Nash's book is about 700 dense pages. Yet Nash's index is only 3/4 as long as Clark's.)

Overall, George Nash has pumped his tome full of almost all the construction details a do-it-yourself housebuilder could hope to find in one place. But this is NOT a book for beginners.

Ten years ago, when I worked as a carpenter, I used the then current edition of this book as a reference for details of jobs I worked on. It is a book that anyone with even a passing thought of building their own addition or doing their own remodelling job needs. The completeness of this book in every edition I have seen, is such that anyone reading it could build a complete house from start to finish, cover to cover.

A very, very good book.

If this book's not complete, the seven hundred pages come pretty close to it. It has chapters on everything, starting with selecting a site and house plan and ending with landscaping. There are plenty of drawings, charts and photographs to illustrate the topics. For example there are almost three pages of drawings of various types of electrical boxes and their installation. The dialog is clear and easy to understand. You can learn why you need to do something, not just how to do it.

The chapter about stairs describes rise and run and how to figure out how to build and place stairs. Again there are lots of diagrams showing things like how to measure angles on stringers accurately and how to get the tread level.

Each chapter covers various types of building practices and materials and isn't limited to any particular style. For instance the roofing chapter covers asphalt shingles, wood shingles and shakes, concrete and clay tiles, and even what I was interested in - tin.

Not only are there pictures of how to do things correctly, but there are occasional shots of owner-builder mistakes. It helps to know what not to do as well as what to do.

If it's not covered in this book, there's a bibliography in the back with a section for each chapter.

when we decided to try and takle this home building adventure, we started with selecting several how to books for help. the only one that seems to be in plain english, and a real step by step process is this book. this is the only book we are using out of the 8 we purchased.

This book is a must-have and must-study if you want to build your own home. As the earlier reviews indicate, you can build your home with just this book. I think the illustrations are confusing and/or poorly done in places, excellent in others. Some of the illustrations crowd too much line art with too little text onto a page. Sometimes it would be better to see different representations of the same object. Detail photos keyed to illustrations would be helpful too.

Also, be cautious about doing your own electrical and/or plumbing work. Electrical mistakes can burn your home down. The author stresses you must study your local codes backwards and forwards, and that is especially true with electrical wiring.

This is a darn good book. If you want to swing a hammer and put up your own house, read this book along with a copy of your local building code.

The dedication at the beginning of this book sums it up: "For Dad, This is the answer to your question, if I wanted to be a carpenter, why did I spend four years in college?" This book is superbly written, by an extremely knowlegable man who can explain every aspect of building clearly. True, it is loaded with details, but they are put into a larger and very orderly context. In fact, I LIKE the details, since I don't want any surprises in the building process. It's a refreshing change from the glib overviews presented in so many how-to books. This book is not just for homebuilders; the chapters on plumbing, electrical, etc. far surpass the usual do-it-yourself books on these subjects, and are great for anyone comtemplating home improvements of any kind. It is a GREAT BARGAIN. If you are going to build anything larger than a doghouse, buy it! It's in a class by itself.

This book has alot of good information for the novice builder. It covers almost all aspects of house building. Some of the details are a bit confusing, most of the pictures are dark and hard to see detail, and a few of the, "see detail xx-xx", were'nt even to be found. Also, no under slab plumbing was covered.

This book tells would-be house builders everything, from design issues all the way to making sure the cabinet doors latch. The book is full of technical details about how to do anything related to building a house. Mr. Nash's book presents alternatives to everything in such a way that the reader is able to make very educated decisions about construction. The level of detail is comprehensive, but not overwhelming. Anyone who wants to build a house needs to read this book.

This is one of the best books on do-it-yourself house construction. Each stage of construction is explained in detail and in an orderly fashion. This book has a lot of information which sometimes can overload you. But, overall, this is the best book I found.

Comprehensive! I built myself a house and am now happily working in the construction trade. If you are planning on building a stick-built house this book will serve by itself--if you buy multiple books it will be the one you keep referencing. Sam Clark's "Indepedent Builder" is helpful for design ideas (and is stronger in that area) and general contemplation, but Clark does not provide the details you need to know when you finally put your tool belt on and start building. I don't understand other reviewer's complaints about the (high) level of detail or the lexicon involved. If you are about to build a wall you should want to know everything you can about it--Nash leaves extremely little guess work. Every sentence tells something worth knowing. If you are working with all the various structural and decorative pieces that make up a house you want to know what to call them, and Nash employs a reasonably consistent terminology. The black and white pictures might be a little dark but there are plenty of very helpful and clearly drawn line drawings--parts are labeled and you can get the lingo down quickly if you really want to. Overall, you just couldn't ask for a more patient, thoughtful, and thorough writer--any gripes are so minor they aren't worth voicing. I am grateful to have this book!!