Customer Reviews

How to Design and Build Your Own House

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

 

 

Anybody can sit down and draw a rough floor plan. But this book tells you to think in terms of how you use space rather than rooms. That simple piece of advice makes you think differently about what you want in a house and what you need. If you are thinking of building, GET THIS BOOK. Even if you're going to a contractor or architect, get the book and sit down with your whole family to make plans. You'll find out about personal privacy issues, how your rooms and spaces should flow, how to make your house more efficient not from an energy standpoint, but from a "how I use my house" point of view.

I used this book to design and build my first house 15 years ago. I am now a general building contractor and continue to use it so much that that first copy is worn out and I'm buying a replacement. It offers a wonderful combination of design ideas, structural tables, and common sense advice.

Great attention to many points which must be considered for design and building a home. While the material (particularily the pictures) are dated, the overall advice is timeless. Impressed that it admits not everyone is suited to the demands of the process.

It's not easy to cover such a huge subject, but these two architects do a remarkable job. The illustrator gets equal billing, and it's well-deserved, as the drawings alone are worth the price of the book. The best part is on design. I've never seen a book that allowed you to figure loads and size columns, or provided a worksheet to calculate heating requirements. The final section on construction is more of an overview but the important issues are always addressed. You'll need to supplement your reading, especially since newer technologies--housewrap, truss roofs, engineered lumber--are not covered, but everything in this book is useful.

As a person who is looking to build their own house the book provided a good start. It gave a great overview of how to design living area and incorporate ideas to the plan. As others have pointed out it is not current to todays innovations, however, it is a great start. I would use other construction type books to supplement the education received via this book. It also contains many formulas for calculating loads and other calcs for construction. I wish it covered more regarding slabs other than the crawl space one used in the example house that was being designed. It did go into detail about some of the more overlooked things in building a house - ie: stair and fireplace design. Overall, I don't think it would be for an experienced builder, however, it gives someone like me who does not know much about overall design and homebuilding a great start.

I bought this book a few years ago after reading the great reviews. After reading the book I was like "wow this stuff is extremely complicated you almost have to have a college degree or something to do this stuff" Well then I took Carpentry in Vo-tech and learned that things that they make seem extremely complicated in the book are really very simple. For example choosing lumber. You have a whole chapter in the book about different types of lumber, different species of tree, curing the wood and complicated tables to figure out what kind of species of wood you use. Well really its rather simple you go to local builders or home depot and just ask what wood is used for framing etc. usually a type of pine, but it varies for different regions.

While technically all the information is correct in this book its not in presented in an easy down to earth style. In my opinion the author(s) is purposely discouraging people from doing it themselves. He presents everything in an over complicated way and then encourages you to hire a proffesional repeatedly. If I was going to hire proffessionals to build my house why would I buy this book to begin with? Could it be that this guy makes (or did) make a living building houses and wants to maintain a level of job security? Though I can say most aspects of carpentry are like riding a bike, its very easily explained on paper and doesn't take much intellectually to comprehend, but like bike riding, its a skill that must be learned from repeated practice. Therefore, unless you have some background in doing stuff yourself or a knowledgable person helping you or you are planning to contract out the majority of the work I would not recommend building your own house either. The first factor is that a contractor has expensive equipment. To buy all the tools and equipment just to build one house doesn't make much sense. Plus the contractor buys supply's in bulk and gets them cheaper. So because of this you're not going to save as much money as you think you will. The other thing, like I said most of the skills take a lot of practice, which is great if you are building a new house every couple of months for a company, but to learn the stuff just for the purpose of building one house is stupid. My main plan however is to go into the industry and remodel old houses and such, and probably find work on occasion doing this stuff therefore it may make sense for someone like me to buy this book.

Many of the concepts are timeless but the edition I received was 15 years old and much of the technology and materials in house building have changed.

Great reference for all the phases of building. A good general overview, does not go in depth on each portion. A good reference if you plan to build your own house.

This book gives you an insight into the complexities of building your own house. Organization seems to be key.

I was looking for a book that had information one needed to know about subcontracting. I bought this book, because the computer search stated that this was the best book for this information, likewise, this book spoke more to it's topic "How to design and build your own house". It is obvious that what this book is speaking to, and what I was looking for are two totally different things, but it's very good for someone who is looking forward to literally building their own home, and not subcontracting.