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My self-building journey began right after college in 1985. I painstakingly constructed a house in a marginal Los Angeles suburb where my children would be born. This venture of self-reliance started my homebuilding career. It made me especially sensitive to the need for affordable housing and the importance of self-building to get a foothold on the housing ladder. Since then, I have built every home I have owned, which is probably true of many builders reading this article. However, I was not a home builder when I started on my first house; it was in building it that I became one.
Self-building defined
One definition of self-building, or auto-construction, is the practice of investing one’s time and/or labor to construct one’s own home. Typically, there are strategies in place for replacing professionals with nontradespeople to create human habitats instead of real estate profits. The motivations for adopting self-building methods can vary, but they often stem from economic necessity. Sometimes it’s more of a personal challenge—along the lines of, “If I can build a house, I can do anything,” as was my motivation when I started.
Another use of the term owner-builder refers to a homeowner who takes on the role of the general contractor during the construction of their house. This involves managing the construction process, hiring subcontractors, obtaining necessary permits, and ensuring compliance with local building codes. While owner-builders in this context may also perform some of the construction work themselves, their primary role is project manager.
Owner-builders often construct for profit. In fact, in California, owner-builders must comply with specific regulations, such as not constructing more than two structures for resale within three years and ensuring compliance with workers’ compensation and payroll tax requirements.
Historical perspective
Historically, self-building involved families, independently or in coordination…
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3 Comments
Where I live -urban New England- self building by someone who is not in the trade is very rare but interesting to know that it’s still going strong in some part of the country. However old cities have a good number of people doing self-renovations of the older building stock and that’s sort of how I got started.
In MA, people who don't have a GC license can pull their own permit to renovate or build up to a two-family home. Either way it would be too challenging and expensive for most to go beyond that without being a full-time builder.
I agree with the benefits mentioned in the article, but one serious drawback of self building is that detached single family is probably > 95% of the outcome. And this low-density housing is the least efficient form of housing (land use, transport, building materials, heating and cooling etc.)
Something to consider is that the modular house concept makes things easier to the owner builder,
Thanks for this article. My family has a history of self building, going back to before WWII, but the old-timers who did it then are long gone, and no one seems interested now: Stricter building codes, permitting process, zoning, etc.
I have a younger relative who is actually going down this route (sort of - big renovations of existing houses), so it gives me hope.
I finished a renovation a few years ago, and due to all of the complexities of providing professional drawings to pull the permit, engineering approval, etc, I decided to just pay the GC and an architect. That was expensive! Which limited what we could do.
Next I want to knock down my old garage and build a new larger one, but this will be difficult, even for such a basic structure. I need a permit to demolish the old structure, which the country has no record of when it was built (it was built around 75 years ago), and the new garage can only be <50% of square foot of the main house.footprint, despite being on a many acre plot in an agricultural area (so not much bigger that what is here already).
I have been told that all I have to do is apply for a waiver, place a sign on the property advertising the formal proposal, wait an approved amount of time (60 days?), wait for the county council to schedule and then have a hearing, and if there are no objections, the process can go back to permitting services. That's not friendly to an owner, but trivial for professional property developers.
Ok, ranting done.
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