Great post! So great that this will be the first time I post a comment here on HN. I’m from Sweden and I’m passionate about two things currently.
The first thing is that me, my wife, my mother and my father is building a house from scratch to me and my wife. I’ve never built anything before so a lot of what free time I have goes towards reading up on how to do it. We started building 1,5 years ago and started taking down trees in the small forest where the house was to be located three years ago. Anyone on HN building their own house?
The second thing I’m tinkering with is coding a game in swift playgrounds using only the iPad. It is a fps game built with Metal using only SDFs for rendering and collision.
I’m no longer building a house. My family did when I was younger. One day my Dad took us to a random plot of land and went “we’re building a house here”.
I figured he meant contractors, did not realize that for the next 5 years, every weekend was going to be building a home from scratch.
My parents are retired and live there permanently now. It was a wild ride, learned a lot.
Are there resources online on how to do this? I've always wanted to learn more about construction work, at least to the level where I can do some minor repairs.
Construction has to be something like one the most common and universal of human occupations, you can surely find heaps of documentation.
That being said, the actual techniques used tend to be localized and adapted to specific local conditions, available materials, geography and climate, labor cost etc. There isn't one standard way of going about it, you always learn the local Community of practice [1].
If you are looking to build the stereotypical noth-american stick frame house, the work of Larry Haun comes to mind [2]. The other major tradition is the European brick/concrete/AAC house, again, extensively documented; but you would start with a well engineered project designed by a professional, since failures tend to be sudden and catastrophic.
As for "repairs" the number of trades is almost endless, from the core like roofing, drywalling & paint, plumbing, gas & HVAC, electrical - which today includes house automation and data - concrete work, landscaping etc. to the uncommon like specialist thermal & insect treatment, stonework, chimneys etc.
Each trade has its own community language used by tradesmen in a certain geography, so you need to sink at least some hours to watch Youtube videos etc. pertaining to your specific problem. The number, complexity and local specificity of these trades is so vast that's inconceivable to learn them in bulk, you would always deal with the problem at hand, and if you continue this for a suficient number of years you become knowledgeable in the construction field.
And it's all made by humans (other than creepy cartoons and listicles). I had to take apart my vacuum cleaner to debug it (turns out the power cord got frayed inside the bobbin) and the websites were full of autogenerated crap.
YouTube? There's a channel by a vacuum cleaner repairman that has a video about my model. Turns out I didn't miss any screws or latches, I just had to give the housing a stronger yank to open it.
What's the zoning and regulations around building a house in Sweden? If you're connected to utilities like water/electricity, do you still need a professional to come out and certify everything?
Even if you're totally off-grid, do you still need someone to certify the build and the design itself? Any time I hear of house building in Europe I keep thinking back to that British version of Grand Designs, where there would be the inevitable house builder that would forget to add metal ties between masonry courses or something and end up costing themselves thousands of bucks.
In addition to the sibling commenter there are a couple of organizations with recommendations that one needs to follow. One of those concerns what standards to follow when building bathrooms. They are not technically required but I think it will be hard to get insurance for a house with a bathroom that does not follow the recommendations.
We did it in the pandemics. We started on April 2020, and Monday we are getting an electrician here to connect our solar panel array to the main network (Germany). Me and my wife learned a lot, we fought a lot, but was such fun. I value much more now the people that do that as daily job. Not everything looks perfect, and in our opinion it was definitely more expensive than paying someone to do it. If in one hand you can ave labor costs, in the other you spend quite often more money in more material (buy more then necessary, buy stuff that you dont need and etc). Have fun!
I know I'm a bit late in answering now, but just wanted to let you know, I'm honored my post managed to tempt you out of lurkdom :D
Also, building a house with your own hands sounds pretty awesome, I think there's a reason these 'do stuff the old-fashioned way' videos on YouTube have such a following (there are these pretty famous videos about a project similar to yours[1], if you haven't seen them). And good luck with the project!
Cheers for your first post here, welcome, and good luck in your endeavors! They are both things I too enjoy: building things in physical reality and in Swift.
The first thing is that me, my wife, my mother and my father is building a house from scratch to me and my wife. I’ve never built anything before so a lot of what free time I have goes towards reading up on how to do it. We started building 1,5 years ago and started taking down trees in the small forest where the house was to be located three years ago. Anyone on HN building their own house?
The second thing I’m tinkering with is coding a game in swift playgrounds using only the iPad. It is a fps game built with Metal using only SDFs for rendering and collision.