Now that I have been through the process (almost finished) of building my own house, it’s easy to break it down into the important parts/jobs of an owner builder. So before we dive into organization, I at least want to mention the commanding jobs you will be doing while you general contract your own home.
The first one, (which may not sound very important to you, but please don’t underestimate it) is the attitude. This entails everything from fully committing yourself, to what type of owner builder you want to be, to what your realistic expectations need to be. You can’t be a successful owner builder without first taking care of this.
The second job of an owner builder is planning. This may arguably be the most important one because the amount of planning you do ahead of time will directly effect the load you have to carry while your house is being built. It will also control how smooth and quick your build goes. The amount of money you save will be greatly influenced by your planning. And it’s worth mentioning how much stress it relieves if you have done your job planning as well. EVERYTHING will be effected by how well, or not well, you plan.
The third job is organization. You will have a nightmare of a build if you can’t find a way to keep yourself organized. Just the crazy amount of paperwork alone that will be involved in this, is enough to overwhelm anyone. There are schedules, contracts, budgets, receipts, and a million other things that must be kept at least moderately organized.
Organization is the topic of my post today, so I will get back to it in just a second after we go over your other jobs.
The fourth job of an owner builder is the hiring. You are in charge of deciding which jobs you will do yourself and which jobs you will hire out. Then you have to call, coordinate with, and discuss everything imaginable, with every sub contractor you hire. This is no small job.
The final big job that you will have is to execute your build. If you have done all of your previous jobs well, this part will be a piece of cake! It’s actually really fun to build a house as long as you don’t have a giant problem to deal with every single day. The problems that arise will be much smaller and farther in between if you have planned, stayed organized, and hired the right people.
That’s it! Owner building can be broken down into those 5 things, and if you rock at each one of them, your build will go wonderfully!
So now that you know your 5 jobs, let’s talk organization.
You should know up front, that I am NOT an organized person in general. Now before you go clicking off the page because I just blew all your confidence in me out the window, let me tell you why I am writing this post.
BECAUSE I am not an organized person, I learned some seriously awesome things while trying to get better at this skill. I started off with the best intentions of staying organized… then I fell off the wagon and started piling papers on my desk … then I reorganized everything in a different way to see if it worked better …. and the cycle continued.
It wasn’t just the paperwork, it was everything. I tried so many different things to find out what works best and what keeps everything the most organized in the easiest and fastest way. And now, I have a few very specific suggestions to staying organized while building a house. THAT is why I am writing this post.
- Downsize before you even start
Let’s be real … who honestly wants to take everything in their current house with them when they move into their new house? No one! Everybody wants to go through their things, get rid of stuff they don’t use or stuff that needs replaced, and start fresh in their new place.
One of the best things you can do for your building adventure is to go through all of your stuff now and get rid of everything you can. It will be much easier and less stressful to do it before you start building, then it will be to do it while trying to finish up your house and move in. It is very freeing to live with less “stuff” for awhile, especially when you have so much other “stuff” going on with building your new house.
Have a garage sale, sell things on the internet, or just give it away to a friend or goodwill. Go through things, clean out rooms or spaces if you can, and maybe even make a few extra bucks in the process. Also, if you will be building soon-ish, you may want to consider packing up some of the things you won’t need for the next little while. If it’s already packed up and ORGANIZED, you are cutting down on the craziness of moving when it comes time. I started packing things like baby clothes, extra dishes, less used books, etc. about a year before we moved in. It made packing up that much easier because part of it was already done and wonderfully organized.
2. Learn the right way to utilize Pinterest
There is a wrong way and a brilliant way to use Pinterest to organize your house ideas.
Picture yourself holding 100 beautiful magazine pictures of things you want in your home. You are standing in front of 25 cork boards with push pins. Each one is labeled with something like “kitchen counter tops” or “beautiful front doors”. Now you take each picture, one at a time, and decide exactly where it goes. When you are all finished organizing your pictures, you stand back and look at a perfectly organized collage of your future home.
Now rewind a bit and pretend you took those same 100 beautiful magazine pictures and pinned them all on 1 cork board labeled “home ideas”.
Which one of these two scenarios do you think is the brilliant way to use Pinterest? Please tell me that you said the first one….
So many people use Pinterest as an oversaturated board of a million ideas. You are not ready to start building if you are stuck in the “idea phase” and can’t move on to the “decision making phase”. You will end up with a jumbled mess where it is impossible to find what you are looking for.
Ideas are great, but once you are ready to move on to the decision making phase, you need to create as many super specific boards on Pinterest as you can think of. It doesn’t matter if there are only 5 pins on each board. And don’t be afraid to delete pins if you find something you like better!
When your electrician wants to know exactly what lighting you want in each room, it will take you all of 10 seconds to pull up each board on Pinterest and show him exactly what you want. It’s a time saver, a planning saver, a money saver, and makes it infinitely easier on everyone you are trying to convey your wants and needs to.
3. Use a huge written calendar to organize your time
Keeping your time organized is just as important as all that paperwork and other stuff that will pile up. You already have a regular life to deal with, now you have to add in a huge project. You need everyone in your house on the same page.
My favorite way to do this, HANDS DOWN, was to keep one of those huge desk calendars out in the open where everyone could see and add to it whenever they needed to. Write every little thing down, and use ONE calendar for everything.
I tried having a separate “construction” calendar to keep track of everything house related, but that backfired miserably because I needed to coordinate it with my life. I would end up scheduling a meeting with someone on the same day we were supposed to be having a soccer tournament or something.
If you want everything kept separate, just color code the things you are putting on the calendar so it’s easy to differentiate the regular life stuff with the house building stuff.
Oh yeah, and I hate not being able to plan out far enough in advance. You really need a calendar with at least 12 months ahead when building a house. Don’t try and find one at Walmart, I can’t ever find one with enough months on it. HERE is one on Amazon that goes a year and a half out. You will be glad when you can put your whole build on one calendar, trust me!
4. Set up word or google documents and be diligent about keeping your notes there
Oh my goodness, if I had known before I started how many papers with random notes I would accumulate, I would have been legitimately horrified. Every time you make a list, every time you call a potential sub contractor, every time you ask a friend for house advice, every time you call the building department, and on and on … you NEED to write it down. The amount of information you will be gathering is staggering! I honestly bet that I have over 1,000 random loose papers with stuff written on them that I need/needed at some point while building.
Sometime in the middle of our build I figured out that stacks of paper on my desk was probably the worst way to keep track of all of these. I tried a few different things, but ultimately it still ended up in either one stack or multiple stacks.
Writing things down on paper is fine as long as you can get a system down that works for you so you don’t have to rifle through 50 pieces in order to find the one you need. But I want to tell you what I started doing that worked soooo much better.
Google docs automatically saves anything you type or put on there to your google account/the cloud. That means that you can access them from any device at any time as long as you have your login information.
Instead of needing a note pad everywhere you go, you have a phone or a tablet or a laptop. Everything will be in one place, and nothing will be lost in the mountain of paperwork.
However, to really make it work (and be any better than a stack of notes) you have to treat it a lot like Pinterest. You need to start off by creating several specific documents, and then when you have a note to add you need to put it on the correct document so that you can easily find it.
You should create as many as you can think of ahead of time because if you wait until you are in the moment you might forget, or get lazy, and just put it all on the same document. This is the opposite of organized remember?
A couple other tips that I found really helpful with this are:
- Hit enter several times in between conversations or days so that you can see big separations.
- Every time you open it up to add more use a different font. It will make things easier to find and see the differences.
- Include the date and name of person you are talking to EVERY time
- If you ever wonder even for a second, create a new document. The more separated things are, the easier it is to find your information.
Oh yeah and DON’T try and keep all of your notes on the “notepad” on your phone. When your phone gets smashed or dropped in the wet concrete, guess how you get all those notes back …. you probably don’t. And that would be a complete nightmare!
5. Use a good old file box or accordion style binder
Even if you keep all of your notes online, you will still have paperwork to keep organized. You will have quotes, contracts, brochures, instructions, receipts, and several other things from several sub contractors that you must hold on to.
I love the file box system because it’s cheap, easy, and effective. But I actually used both a file box and an accordion style binder because I needed to be able to keep certain things with me in the car while most everything else could be kept at home.
For example, I needed contracts with me often in case I paid someone and needed them to sign or we had a disagreement that needed to be figured out. I didn’t need brochures with me because those were things I read through at home in my spare time, not while I am doing new house work.
Like I said, these things are cheap, easy and effective. Here are two links for a file box and the accordion binder that I used for less than $20. If you don’t already have some, get them now, start labeling your sections, and be organized from the very beginning.
file box with file folders included
accordion binder (you will want the one that closes. construction sites are VERY dirty places)
Even if you are the most un-organized person on the planet, you can still do this! It will be hard, and it has to happen, but if you use these suggestions and are determined to make it happen, then you have one of the main jobs of owner building already under control.
What’s your best organization tip? Leave it in the comments if you have a good one.
~Farmer’s Wife
FREE checklists and schedules
Access to the resources I created that helped Farmer and I save over $75,000 building our own custom dream home.
Trish Hand owner of Built by Hand LLC. says
Thank you for this post it reassured me I will be a success at my home build because I am already doing all these recommendations! I use excel for my planning, tracking, calendar for home build along with putting appointments in my cell phone calendar (which backs up to the cloud every night, so no lost info if my phone take a dive). My tabs started with wish list, house build calendar (that I got from the Owner-Builder book you suggested), products I found for specific parts of the build and reasons I want this so bad, so when I hit the rough patches I will have that tab full of reminders why I have to finish. Now I have tabs for ever category you can think of, including our 4 possible street names for our “private drive”.
I am going with Hobbs Vertical Insulated Concrete Forms so 75% of the “framing” will be done by my 14 year old and myself, saving tons of money! I just put the final check in the mail for my plans to now read For Construction!!! Eeeek
Also in my area you can’t owner build without having someone with a CCB# oversee the work so I read the book, passed the test and am in the process of getting bonded and Ins. so I can get assigned my own CCB#!
I just am wondering if with the baby coming (congrats!) will you be doing the hiring class anytime in the near future? That is my one concern is knowing what to make sure is included in the contract, what forms to have subs sign so they can’t file a claim of non-payment or anything else.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience, you made me a believer in my own abilities to do this!
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
That sounds excellent Trish! Way to go.
Elite Hire will be opened up again in the fall. I am planning on Sept-Oct ish. I will let you know when it’s time.
Best of luck!
Trish Hand owner of Built by Hand LLC. says
Thank you for opening the Elite hiring course! I just purchased and am ready to learn! Thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom and insight!
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
You are welcome Trish! Let me know if you have any questions.
Brooke says
I read in one of your posts that you should ask for the builder’s price. At what type of stores can you do that? At places like Home Depot & Lowe’s? What about at lumber companies and lighting stores?
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
Yes, all of the above. Every supply store I have ever been to either has builders prices if you ask for them or they have a contractors “club” basically that you can sign up for which gives you a percentage off. Sometimes it only applies though if you buy in bulk. Most of the time purchasing for our whole house was enough to get the bulk discount. Just let them know you are building your own house and you would like to know how to get their contractors pricing.