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I received an email from someone interested in talking with me about contracting a project in Oakland, Oregon. As I told the author, I am not contracting these days as I am focusing entirely on teaching through my workshops, websites and consulting work. As a result, I have posted the request here for qualified contractors to respond to. Please let me know, via a comment to this blog, if you are interested in the project. I will connect you with the home owners. A project description is below.
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Back in October, I was asked to give some input and support to people who want to build their own house. The main question is “how to get started.” There is a lot to consider and a lot more to actually do, so often the jumping in point becomes the freeze point. In other words, right when you should jump, you freeze and question whether or not you are crazy to even consider building your own place. This may not be a bad question to ponder. Let’s start there.
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This may sound crazy, but a handling the concerns of a neighbor could be the most difficult part of your job. Most contractors and owner builders don’t do much to accommodate neighbors when it comes to building a new house or remodeling an old one. After all, they are not working for the neighbor. in fact, the neighbor really has no direct line of communication or dispute resolution with the contractor or owner builder (unless home owner association CCR’s require one). Even though this is the case, you may be surprised how much trouble a neighbor can create for you.
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Thanks for your patience everyone. I have been swamped and unable to make another entry in my blog for some time. Today I want to talk about what it is like to work with your local building department while acting as your own general contractor. You might think that in the progression of events the next piece of the puzzle would be working with your bank, not the building department. After all, you won’t be working with your building department until you are actually ready to build and you won’t be ready until you have the bank funding. Actually, although a common theory, this is totally wrong in my opinion.
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Photo: Library of Congress; reproduction number: LC-USZ62-92466
If I had to choose the primary place where owner builders, and contractors alike, fail when building a home it would be in the estimating of costs. This is one of the most important parts of the job to get right. If you make major mistakes, your job is doomed to fail before it even begins.
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I have written in the past about performing the steps necessary to identify the perfect place to build your house. I fully believe in the importance of knowing your site before you build or even design and furthermore suggest that the information regarding your building site be premiere amongst the important data you work with when designing your home.

As a contractor, there is another site evaluation that needs to happen. Consider that the building plans are already complete and the siting of the house has been decided. What else is there to consider about site evaluation?
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As mentioned in the last post “Part I: Know What You are Getting Into” you must know how to read plans for them to be any good to you. This is true for you as a builder and as a paper contractor. Subcontractors are not perfect and any one of them can misinterpret the plans on any given day. Your ability to catch those mistakes is paramount to the time line and ultimately the bottom line for your home.
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It is important that you fully understand what will be expected of you as you embark on the contracting of your home. It is easy to say that you want to contract the construction, but there is a lot to the process and perhaps the biggest pitfall is not knowing what will be asked of you before you start down that road. Nothing will create more worry in your process than realizing you are in way above your head only to realize it is too late to do anything about it.
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Photo courtesy of Midland Contractors, Inc. (www.midlandinc.com)

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting information about how to be your own contractor. Many of the people I talk to are excited about the idea of contracting their own house; however, once they get knee deep, they start to realize why contractors are paid the money they are. There is a lot to being a quality contractor and simply having a desire to do it yourself is not enough to do it well. You will need knowledge and a plan. You will need forms and contracts. You will need help.
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I receive several emails a month from people who need help with the process of finding land, working with municipalities, and building their straw bale home. For many individuals, this is the first time they have ever ventured out into the World of Green Construction, and the implications of building green can affect the approach they take to finding land and working with the local authorities in order to create the dream home they desire. I have written blog entries in the past about evaluating your site, but may not have mentioned information about working with local planning departments.
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This is often he most difficult part of becoming a professional bale builder. There is no book of standards out there from which to pull a “man-hour” rate for baling. So, how do you bid a house without gouging your client or digging yourself a financial hole? Experience is the best resource for any estimating question. If you have been lucky enough to work on a crew of experienced balers, you will have an understanding of just what is involved in baling a structure. If you have not, you need to either get some experience, or connect with some one who has that experience themselves. You can either work on some one else’s crew, or pick their brain for information.

Here are some thoughts on the subject.

1. You will need to charge for each linear foot of window in the house. Remember that the windows and doors in exterior walls need a lot of attention in order for you to be confident that they will not fail and cause rot in the bales over time. For that reason, a lot of time and effort is spent flashing the windows. In addition, a lot of time and effort is spent on the inside shaping those openings. Charge per foot of the window perimeter to cover your costs.

2. Charge per bale you put in the house (standard and custom bales have their own rate). Don’t base your estimate or bid on the square footage of the house. Instead, base it on the number of bales you will place in the walls. Consider that a 1500 sf with 8′ ceilings will not cost the same as the same size house with 9′ ceilings. On the same line, a house with 10 windows will not cost the same as one with 30 windows. Yes, you have covered much of the cost of the windows in the section above, but not all of it. Here’s why. A window or door interrupts the running bond of the bales and requires you to make custom bales. You need to charge for the custom bales because they take time and materials to create. On my homes, I charge for standard bales, and I charge more for every custom bale in the house. A custom bale is any bale that is altered before it is placed in the house. Niches and other alterations to the bales are priced separately.

3. Is the mesh system part of the engineering or simply for plaster reinforcement and bale shaping? The engineered mesh systems require a lot of nailing so the labor is higher for this system. Is the mesh a special order item? Is there extra shipping chargers associated with the material? Make sure you cover all these questions before you give your estimate.

Perhaps the most important aspect of any home construction project is a critical path. This is the time line that you must create for the completion of your home. The path is so important because it shows you exactly when things need to happen in order to keep the house on track for a desired completion date. This is the only way to ensure that the project does not go on forever! With a good critical path, you can inform sub contractors when they will be needed on site long before they actually need to be there. Of course, when you miss specific deadlines, it will affect the rest of the critical path so be sure to update it frequently. Whenever you update the path, be sure to contact all affected parties (subs and suppliers) and give them new dates for their work. your subs and suppliers will appreciate the amount of lead time and detail you are giving them and it will make the whole job easier to handle and predict.

Creating a critical path takes a lot of understanding about what is involved in the home construction process and it also takes an understanding of how long each phase should take. Creating a critical path with no building experience is not a good idea so be sure to hire some one who has the experience you need to create a realistic critical path for your job. Editing the critical path as adjustments are made is more simple and can be handled by anyone with basic computer knowledge and a grasp on the construction process at hand.

I offer critical path services for those of you interested in building your home with a guideline and map to success. The path is often offered as part of my consulting services, and I also offer them as individual packages for home builders. I can’t say enough how important these paths are so if you don’t know how to create one yourself and you don’t want to hire me, then hire a contractor in your local area who knows how to build with bales to create a path for you. It is well worth the investment!

I have received a lot of messages in recent days asking about the cost of straw bale construction. The basic question is: what does it cost per square foot to build a bale home? It is all but impossible for me to answer this question because there are so many factors involved in calculating cost. What region is the home built in? What design features does it have?
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Now that I have your attention, I want to talk about a common mistake that a lot of straw bale homeowners make early on in the process. Often the most fatal mistake of any job is underestimating how much it will cost to build that beautiful home you worked so hard to design. Common examples of this are not including enough money for framing materials or electrical fixtures. Not so common is the mistake that comes before the numbers are even run: who will build the house.
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I had a very close call on a job I am working on this week. While I was in Maine on vacation, $10,000 worth of cork flooring was delivered to the job site and set for installation. My project manager noticed that there were blemishes on the cork and stopped the crew from installing it. He had the crew open a random number of boxes of the material and all of them had the same blemishes.
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If possible, get any plaster that needs to be applied above the roof line in place before the finish roof is installed. If that is not possible, be sure to protect the roof from any dripped plaster. Once on a roof, especially a roof with texture like shingles, shakes, or clay tile, plaster is all but impossible to remove and the roof itself may need to be replaced in sections.
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With straw bale construction, a number of sub contractors will have to make extra trips to your job site as compared with a conventional home. An example of this is seen with roofing and plastering. On the house we are currently building, the design has a series of towers above the main roof line. In order to properly time the process, we had to work closely with the subs.
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If possible, get any plaster that needs to be applied above the roof line in place before the finish roof is installed. If that is not possible, be sure to protect the roof from any dripped plaster. Once on a roof, especially a roof with texture like shingles, shakes, or clay tile, plaster is all but impossible to remove and the roof itself may need to be replaced in sections.
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A house I am building is located on a rural lot that once held a mobile home. That mobile home had power and phone services to it; however, they were old and not suitable for the new, larger home. In addition, the underground pad mount vault for the power was located in the driveway of the new architectural design.
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Towards the end of a home’s construction there comes a time to walk through the house with the owners and mark areas of concern that need to be addressed. In some cases, the items may be obvious like a window covered in plaster or major blemishes on the floor. In other cases, the signs may not be that obvious. A good way to make sure all of the items get fixed is to walk the house with a notepad and a roll of blue tape. The notepad is to write down all of the items and then have the owners sign the list. After you and the owners have signed it, make a copy and give one to the owners. That way, there can be no question as to what was agreed to for fixes.
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