When you first start thinking about owner building you may be thinking “How can someone who knows nothing about construction contribute anything to building a house?” I felt the same way. I knew so little about construction that building a house seemed as impossible as a snake learning to walk. I have talked a lot about being the general contractor, but I have not discussed yet what jobs or trades are so easy that even a construction idiot like myself can handle.
Doing some of the work yourself can save a ton of money. However, it can be really hard to know which trades or jobs are simple enough to not mess up big time. Once you have seen them done, it’s pretty easy to decide which ones are ridiculously simple and which ones should probably have a professional in charge. So today I want to tell you 5 jobs or trades that are so simple ANYONE can do them.
- Drawing your site map
In case you don’t know what a site map is, it is the map of the property you will be building on. When you turn in for building permits, the county will require a site map with your blueprints and all the other paperwork. Each county and city is a little different, so you need to check with yours to find out exactly what is required on your site map. What they want to see is the size and location of everything you will be putting on your property. This may include your well, your septic, your power poles, your driveway and entrance, your propane tank, and definitely includes your future home.
The reason I say that this is so simple that anyone can do it, is that it doesn’t need to be anything professional or pretty looking. Even a nice drawing using a pencil and ruler will work just fine. You are the one who knows your property best, or should anyways, so drawing it up will be more simple for you than for anyone else.
If you pay someone to draw your site map for you, they will have to come to the site, walk around for at least an hour or two, measuring everything. Then they will have to discuss everything with you anyways to determine where you want to place everything on your property. Then they will draw up your site map for you, probably using a fancy computer program, and charge you for that service. You may end up paying printing fees, traveling fees, etc. all for a picture you could have easily drawn yourself.
This particular job requires no special equipment, and will be basically free for you to complete. But, as always, check with your local building department, and also with your designer/architect. Some designers and architects will draw your site plan as part of the blueprint package, in which case it may not cost you anything extra.
Also note that in a few areas they require a stamp from a licensed professional for this. If this is the case, you may not have the option to do this yourself. Check with your building department for your areas requirements.
2. Moisture proofing your foundation
This job is as simple as painting your foundation with tar. It’s all going to be backfilled anyways, so it doesn’t even have to look good. You can drip, spill, mess up, or whatever else may happen, and no one will even see it once it’s backfilled. All that has to happen is for the tar to create a barrier that water can’t get through.
The only pain about this job is the fact that you are painting with tar. It doesn’t come off. So don’t set your 6 year old loose with a paint roller on your foundation because everything it touches (clothes, hair, shoes, etc) is pretty much ruined.
One little suggestion though: when you get tar on your hands, use gasoline to wash it off. Yes, straight gasoline. It came right off and then you can wash your hands with soap and water to take the smell away.
If you want to read the official tutorial for how to moisture proof your foundation CLICK HERE.
Also, I promised to start including a products list for you guys on each post so you know what products we used and liked and would recommend. So here is a mini product list for moisture proofing:
3. Clean up duty
Did you know …. general contractors hire crews for clean up duty. It’s not a secret or anything, just maybe something you hadn’t thought of … or maybe it’s just me that doesn’t think about some of these obvious things.
Cleaning up is not hard, it just takes time and has to be done at specific times. For example: When the drywall crew came in they created quite a mess with all of the pieces they had to cut, and there was a lot of dust. Once the drywall itself was up, and they had taped and mudded everything, the guy says to me “okay, you can call in the cleaning crew now” and I said “ha, I am the cleaning crew”. Then he laughed a little, realized I was serious, and then told me they wanted to start the texture in two days. Well, to start texturing, the floor has to be clean so the dust and particles don’t fly up onto the wall while it’s drying. Also, they need everything cleaned out of the house so they aren’t tripping over things while they look up at the ceiling doing their job.
Long story short, I only had 1 day to get the whole house cleaned out AND swept. That was a bit of a late night, but we got it done with the help of some friends.
I don’t say that to intimidate you, only to educate you. That was the only real nail biter of a situation that involved clean up duty. The rest were pretty relaxed.
Being your own clean up crew will definitely save you some money. And it’s certainly not a job that requires any amount of skill. My 5 and 7 year old were an excellent clean up crew, and they were willing to work for about $2 a day. They might even be willing to come clean your house for that. wink wink
4. Insulation
Ok this job takes a tiny step up in difficulty, but only TINY, I promise. I am thrilled Farmer and I decided to do our own insulation. The quotes I received seem really ridiculous now that I know how simple the job is.
The parts that are difficult are depending on which area you are working on. There is insulation under your floor if you built over a crawl space. There is insulation in your walls. And there is insulation in your attic.
Let’s start with under your floor: All you do is shove the insulation up in between your floor joists. The difficult part is cutting the insulation to go around things. There isn’t a whole lot to work around under your house usually, but it is sometimes tricky to move around depending on how large your crawl space is.
Insulation in your walls: SOOO easy. Even the spray in foam is so easy to use. We just read the instructions and sprayed it on. We were done in 1 day. Then we filled the rest with batting, which was just a matter of shoving it in between the wall studs. We used utility knives to cut the insulation to go around the electrical boxes, plumbing lines, etc.
Insulation in your attic: We rented the blow in machine from lowes. One person puts the insulation into the machine, while the other person holds the hose and blows it where it needs to go. So simple.
One other important thing to note is if you use fiberglass insulation, which is pretty standard, you don’t want the kids around it. It gets incredibly itchy. We chose cellulose in the attic so we wouldn’t have to deal with it, and that made the job much better.
The quotes we got for those three jobs were over $6,000. Easy peasy!
Mini product list we used:
Masks- you need these ones with the valve in them
utility knives- I LOVE this one because when the tip gets dull you just snap it off for the next one
we also used green fiber blow in insulation from Lowe’s
spray foam insulation– this is the brand we used and liked, but I don’t recommend getting it on Amazon because it’s more expensive
5. Painting
I would venture to guess that most everyone has painted SOMETHING in their life. Painting is not hard, but unfortunately it will be seen by everyone so it needs to look decent. Using a sprayer to paint a large area (like an entire house) is not as hard as it seems, and is WAY faster than rolling.
Before I go any farther, you should know that we did hire someone to paint the interior of our house, but it was because he gave us such a good deal it would have been stupid to do it ourselves.
I was fully planning on painting our house myself. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I knew it wasn’t hard.
I would highly recommend renting a paint sprayer if you are doing your entire house. It would have taken me a few weeks to roll everything no doubt. Our whole house was primed and painted in 3 work days.
The real work is in the prepping. If you buy the right stuff, it is super easy to cover all of your windows and doors quickly. Once everything is covered, you don’t even hardly have to worry about getting paint all over because on a new house you won’t have flooring or anything in yet.
*Tip I learned from our drywall guy is to ask the drywall crew to leave their coverings up instead of cleaning up after themselves. They already have to cover everything to texture the walls, so the work is already done for you. That is one reason that a lot of drywall crews also do painting if you ask them to. They already did the prep work, so all that’s left is to pull out the paint sprayer and paint everything.
Mini product list:
tape and platic cover in one- this stuff is sooo awesome!
So there you have 5 easy peasy jobs that anyone can DIY to save a bit of money on building their home. You don’t have to have experience or skill in construction to be able to help out with some of the things on your new house.
~Farmer’s Wife
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Access to the resources I created that helped Farmer and I save over $75,000 building our own custom dream home.
VAnessa says
Love your page! We will be building in five months and you are making me feel so much better!
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
That’s great! Good luck
Joleen Hiler says
Great tips! We are 6 weeks into our owner build after building a small shop home to live in meanwhile:) Here is what we plan to do ourselves.. septic (already did) saved 6k excavating ( Have a really nice neighbor whom we borrowed equipment) saved 15k my brother is an electrician and my husband is a plumber/HVAC will save 20k we might possibly do our own drywall because we under budgeted and I will paint with my Dads sprayer.. there is so many resources on you tube!! We just did all our own Windows and doors in a couple hours 18 all together.
P.s As far as playroom flooring we intend to put down laminate linoleum it’s sturdy and you won’t panic if paint or playdoh gets on it! Kids are so messy and it’s so easy to clean😉
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
Excellent! Thank you Joleen. Best of luck on your build, and way to go! Already on your way to saving a ton of money. Woohoo!
Korrine Moushon says
So who did you get to do the interior painting? We’re stuck on trying to decide to diy it or not. I want to, my husband no. We both work full time and have young kids, so my time is limited.
Also my husband wants to know how the clean up after spray insulation was. Don’t you have to sand it or saw the excess?
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
I have plenty of experience painting in our other homes, however, for our build our drywall guy gave us such a good deal to paint it that we had to say yes. The drywall guys have to prep all the windows, doors, outlets, etc for their job. That’s a huge portion of the painters job, so if you have the drywall guy do it they shouldn’t charge you for any set up. It ended up being like $1,000 to paint our entire house. I will say though, if we had done it ourselves, no doubt renting a paint sprayer would have been a piece of cake. Those things are so handy and quick. We could have painted our whole house in a couple of days.
As for our spray insulation, if you fill the whole wall then yes you would have to saw off the excess that foams out. We went with the spray and batt combo. We sprayed in approximately 3/4″ foam and then filled the rest with batting. Because we did it this way, there wasn’t hardly any spray foam hanging out that needed to be cut back. The stuff is expensive so lots of people do spray and batt together to reap the benefits of spray foam but keep the costs down. I was amazed as how easy and quick the spray foam was. I will never hire anyone to do my insulation again. (If we ever do any other projects)
Korrine Moushon says
I will get a quote from our drywall guys, thanks!
For the insulation, did your inspector give you any trouble doing it the way you did?
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
None at all. Our inspectors have been great. They are very helpful and supportive of us owner building.