I grew up from the age of five in a large 1906 Sears mail order farm house in the rural farming area east of Seattle which is now suburban.
I looked carefully but the design is not shown in the archive images which only go back to 1908. The house had three rooms and a kitchen with covered porch on the main floor, five bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. It had a large attic and two basements, one smaller than the other and which may have been a root cellar. It was balloon-framed with full-dimension lumber and had nine-foot ceilings. My father extensively remodeled the house, modernizing the electrical and plumbing, adding bathrooms and a library room.
As a kid, I got to know the son of the family that built the house and who lived next door when I lived there. He was an old man. He told me the house cost about $6,000 to buy and build.
My family sold the house long ago and it still stands today but has not been maintained and is now in truly terrible condition. The five acres it sits on is now super prime “wine country” and worth a bundle.
These kinds of homes still exist [1]. How it would work (and still does) is you buy the materials and plans from them, they deliver it, and you have to build it yourself.
The prices are still comparable when adjusting for inflation.
Is it still allowed to build your own house in the US?
Here in Japan, it would seem almost impossible. Just recently build a house. It took almost as long to just get the approval from the city vs the time to build. Additionally, AFAIK you are technically not allowed to touch anything with electricity or water without license. Forget about connecting to the city grid.
Depends on the laws in your local area. But many places where I live allow you to build your own home as long as you follow the building codes.
But nothing's stopping you from buying one of these and hiring a professional to do the build. Would still be much cheaper than buying a property with a home on it already.
I don't know where you live but in the Midwest US around medium-sized cities, it costs _significantly_ more to build vs buy unless you inherit or otherwise somehow luck into some cheap land.
Building involves a surprising number of large one-off costs: clearing the land, excavation, running utilities, digging a well, installing a septic field, getting permits and inspections, legal fees for contract review, etc. None of these are reflected in the market price of a middle class SFH. This is the main reason housing developments are so popular, the developer is able to amortize these startup costs over 30-50 houses all at once which is the only way they can build new houses that are price competitive with the rest of the market.
My father-in-law is in his 70s. He built a new house in 2016. He's a builder so he could do almost all of the work himself (apart from electrical and heating) with two hired helpers. The concrete was poured by a company. The roof trusses were designed and premanufactured, then delivered to site and installed by him and his guys. I think he had someone come in for some tiling jobs. Other than that, it was all off-the-shelf material.
All in, he spent around $300k including the plot.
Then COVID happened. Now, similar houses on his street sell north of 800k.
Aren't they all reflected in the market price of housing?
It's just that a lot of existing housing is out of date (so prices below new construction) and people work to profit by reducing them below what an individual can achieve working on their own.
In my small town, houses that are "move in ready" command a premium, because higher end buyers are less willing to put up with the typical condition of the aging housing stock.
The newly built community homes are much cheaper. They are just commodities though. From what I have seen the construction is very poor and most people are going to want upgrades across the board ($50k+ more).
Crazy expensive to build vs. buy. A modest 1600sq ft home is $400k+ to erect on your lot. You will have thousands out of pocket before you get there and if you carry a construction loan you are paying raw interest the whole time.
When it comes to what's on your property, every place I've lived in the US lets you do your own work as long as you follow code, you just can't do professional work for other people.
Connecting to the grid might be different though - I've never had to mess with that.
I only know my particular area, but as a homeowner, I can do any electrical work I want on my dwellings. If I owned a rental, I couldn't do electrical work on that. I still have to pull permits and pass inspections, but it's really not as bad as most people assume. Just do competent work and check your wire gauge derating math a few times before you start pulling things.
My main panel, outside, is effectively "half mine, half the power company's." The side with the meter in it is tagged off and I can't get into it without going through power company indicators. But everything on the other side, with the breakers, is my problem. Then everything from the box out to the pole transformer is the power company's problem.
Again, this isn't going to be broadly true everywhere, but that's the usual breakdown of things, and outside a few areas in the US, you are legally permitted to do electrical work on your residence.
I mean, I did my own massive ground mount solar install, grid tied, without having to bother an electrician. It just required the normal permitting process and such.
(we did a DIY addition build during COVID in the US in 2021)
In Michigan, you are absolutely allowed to do your own build on your own land. It just has to pass code inspection, and it has to pass at every stage. (i.e., they want to inspect structural/electrical/plumbing/hvac/etc, before you put drywall up, to ensure things are actually OK underneath, and then inspect it again after drywall is applied).
Getting utilities can be hard and expensive if you are building off-grid. But there are so many vacant lots that already have power+water+gas at the street, that you don't really have to do that unless you really want to live in a specific off-grid location. (Suburbs and some townships make a lot of their money from this, so they usually want you building near their pre-existing utilities and hooking up to it)
Sewage tends to be the hardest part -- some places have "most" utilities, but not waste & water. And people assume they can just put in a leech field "septic tank", but since most of the state is already swampland, you have to be careful of how and where you put that, so you don't poison the water. (They will make you get a land survey to prove your location is safe to leech from, and they will inspect your install, and yes people complain all the time about it, but when they didn't do this, people did poison the water all the time, and then accidentally drank their own waste water and make themselves sick, or accidentally poisoned their neighbors water and made those folks sick, etc).
People complain about the licensing and permitting and inspections, but honestly, it's all been extremely fair and pretty quick and cheap. If you aren't passing your inspections here, you're likely doing something grossly negligent (or are about to do something grossly negligent).
I can give you an anecdote about my parents trying to permit a new garage building on their property in southern California, the process was anything but fair, cheap or quick. The inspector actually raised an unrelated issue on their property about a patio cover that was installed by a previous owner and has been standing for 30+ years, they wanted him to pull a building permit and pay all the inspection fees for it before they would even begin to process his garage permit. Including digging around one of the footings for the existing patio cover to see how deep the footings were. Ultimately they paid some adjusted fee, didn't even have anything inspected. Just basically were extorted by the city in my view of things.
I had the exact same thing happen to a house I owned in Utah. I had purchased a house that had a mother-in-law apartment in it, which I could offer my parents to live in, as my Dad was in bad health waiting for a transplant.
At one point, after about 5 years of me living there, there had been a leak under the sink in the bathroom and at the same time the stove also went out (within the same month). We were doing better financially so we decided to take this as an opportunity to renovate the mother-in-law suite as it was starting to show its' age. We wanted to improve the bathroom significantly (remove the tub and add a walk-in shower), update the very dated materials, and add a gas-line to the stove (since the main kitchen upstairs had a gas stove already, and the gas water heater was on the opposite side of a wall where the mother-in-law stove goes).
Anyway, we had a plumber come out and quote the work and he wanted to get a permit for the work. That was fine, I wasn't intending to do anything shady, so we requested a build permit and the inspector came out and told us we weren't supposed to have anything in the basement at all. No kitchen, no side entry doorway, no bathroom, no two bedrooms, no kitchen. The entire mother-in-law suite was around 1,000 sqft, it wasn't insignificant, and he was saying the previous owner never permitted it.
We basically got notice from the city that our house was illegal and could be condemned if we didn't first pay permitting and get inspections on the current home, before we do any new work. Keep in mind, I had owned this home for over 5 years when this was happening, I never did the original work, and the original work was now so old it needed to be replaced and updated. The plumber estimated by the plumbing work and code it was built to that it had to have been built at least 20 years prior. Based on the materials and designs of things like vanities, tilework, trim, kitchen finishes, etc I would have estimated that it was also about 20 years old.
So yeah we basically got extorted to pay the permitting for work that was so old it was now being replaced. Then we had to do the same thing again for the replacement work. Then on top of that, then next year our house was assessed at $180k more money, increasing property taxes significantly. This was in ~2016.
Here in SF, there's an online permit database accessible from the property lot database [1]. A new or prospective owner can check for permits for past additions. I don't know how far back it goes, but I'm pretty sure it's at least 40 years.
No guarantee of course that there would be something similar in your area, let alone accessible anonymously. Not to mention that maybe it wasn't obvious that the in-law was an addition, and that it's civilized to assume that the previous owners didn't cheat.
.. are truly crooked in many wealthy areas of California (and elsewhere) today. Everyone directly involved benefits from it, the only direct loser is the newcomer..
Sure. It's completely possible to build a house in the US. But it's a big place.
The rules vary by state (50), by county (Ohio alone has 87 counties), and municipality (if in a city) or township (if rural), and/or other AHJ. There are thousands of combinations of rules so it's hard to generalize beyond "Yes, it's possible."
Some areas have very strict zoning, building codes, and inspections. These can be challenging to build in, with oversight over many details, but it can be done and people do accomplish building homes all the time in these conditions.
Meanwhile, some other areas have no zoning at all and only the most rudimentary of building codes (rudimentary like "There must be a working sewer connection or septic system" and approximately no other requirements). As a practical matter, in these places a person who owns some land can build what they want and nobody is empowered to tell them not to.
And, of course: There's a myriad of in-between variations.
In my locale, the only thing that matters is passing the code inspection. I have friends who have done major remodels, including additions. The piece of advice I got was to talk with your inspector before starting. In my city, they have office hours and will help people avoid surprises such as finishing the interior walls before having the electricals inspected -- stuff like that.
>Is it still allowed to build your own house in the US?
Yes, but you're at the mercy of the discretion of and have to pay rent (metaphorically) to potentially a ton more parties than you would have 100yr ago. You're gonna need several (local, but perhaps 1-2 state depending on situation) government inspections all of which may involve having to track down some licensed professional and then pay them a fee for inspecting your work.
I think in a "normal" case you can expect to shell out for electrical, plumbing, sewer/septic, HVAC, plans/engineering, environmental BS depending on distance to regulated stuff (wetlands usually) inspections and sign offs. There's probably one or two things I'm forgetting and perhaps one or two can be omitted on a case by case basis. A bunch of municipalities are gonna add their own BS on top of "the usual" stuff, like permits for tree cutting, permits for a construction dumpster and whatnot.
And keep in mind, some of these parties are likely to go out of their way to try and f you one way or another and/or give you the runaround until you go away because they don't want to deal with homeowners, they want to deal with businesses.
Also worth nothing that some municipalities expect strict goose stepping compliance. Some really DGAF what individuals engaged in noncommercial development (i.e. building your own house with the intent to live in it) and so long as you're not building rickety garbage they would rather you just not call them until it's done (though obviously they can't say that).
In regard to having to have some licensed professionals inspect the work, you'll still often have to do that even if you hire someone to do the job. It is just often baked into the cost to do the job, and the people doing the job will do all the legwork for you.
To add to the sibling comments which have already covered the general idea; in many places in the US you can also do your own work and then have an inspector sign off on it.
Another inexpensive option (depending on location) is a factory-built house. These can be built in warehouses in "slices" narrow enough to fit on a trailer. Some of them are also on the designer side, e.g. https://www.plantprefab.com.
Makes me wonder if it would be economically advantageous to buy something like this https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi... and then spend some time (how long?) putting it together, instead of working to earn money to take out a mortgage to buy more-or-less the exact same thing.
Where I live it looks like someone lost their home (I guess through job loss etc) before it was finished. Right when framing would've started. The lumber was already delivered including all the roof trusses. The only thing actually standing was the concrete basement walls, I-beams and flooring. Those parts were done quite fast as well.
Then, for a very long time nothing happened. The people I saw there once, looking at everything I never saw again.
But then, couple months later, always in the evenings, a single guy could be seen building walls on the floor and putting them up one by one and soon enough there was Typar looking at us. The only other people I saw there helping was one time when he was putting up the roof trusses. He did all the roofing (plywood and roof tiles) himself. The last roof tiles actually went on literally a day before the first snow.
I bet he worked construction for a living anyway but it shows that it is definitely possible solo. Sure, a framing crew puts up a wall in no time but with a few simple tricks anyone can put up a wall in sections all by themselves.
If you’re not using a loan to finance the construction or land purchase, it’ll definitely be economically advantageous because you’re not paying all the interest on the mortgage. At current interest rates you’d pay over $400k in interest on a $500k 30 year 20% down mortgage. Even at 3% you’d still pay over $200k in interest.
Paying interest is horrible. Unless your investments are expected to do better than the interest rate. No way I would pull money out of the stock market to pay off my 2.25% mortgage.
It doesn’t need to beat the stock market to be a net win.
Edit: Suppose you had a 500k investment paying ~5% you could sell to avoid a 500k mortgage at 6% that seems like a good idea. Unless you’ve got a high paying job so you could get a sweet home mortgage tax deduction.
Similarly, a dividend paying stock may have returns of 5% but if you’re paying capital gains when selling that stock you’re also getting 5% of money that would disappear when sold. IE If you would keep 500k on sale a 550k investment paying 5%, it’s effectively paying you 5.5% of 500k.
The cost of new construction is mostly labor. It would be cheaper to purchase a modular home and take advantage of production line efficiencies. With some forethought you can start small and plan for future expansion.
This is the same conclusion I came to when I tried to think about creative solutions to reduce costs.
(Things like factory produced or assembled pieces like modular homes and sandwich panels, on-site earth bricks, more glass to reduce assembly time per square meter, etc.)
But indeed, every saving was counterbalanced by an additional cost added somewhere else.
If you click through, they literally say "this is not a kit" and then talk about it being a materials list. I guess these days people would expect a kit to come ready to assemble.
was going to ask if any of the prefab vendors have pre-certification for their models. gov picking designs vs. setting standards firms can build to and pre-certify seems a bit soviet even for canada. I'd be surprised if there weren't a certification fast-track for pre-fab building firms.
Not sure what the objection to the gov't picking designs, but this is the result of consultation with industry and are being designed by private firms. Lots of more details in this article [0]:
> The government has selected two firms to deliver on the first version of low-rise designs: MGA | Michael Green Architecture, which will work on plans for British Columbia, and LGA Architectural Partners Ltd., which will cover designs for Alberta, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, the Atlantic, and the North.
> Though, Fraser will also be launching an open submission process that is soliciting additional designs from industry members who may submit existing prefabricated housing builds. Companies who build modular, 3D printed, or panelized houses have until Nov. 8 to submit to be considered for inclusion in the first iteration of the catalogue.
govt should set environmental engineering safety standards and then people can make their livings building things that meet them. a catalogue of designs that meet environmental standards is great.
my concern was the govt was picking favoured designers to mandate their designs instead of people innovating on what other people want. it sounded like the gov was acting like some kind of national HOA, and I would be surprised if that were the actual case. that case would be creating another generation of le courbusier and brutalist housing estate atrocities, and presumably they've learned.
not a crisis, and I have to respond because that whole narrative is BS. I've seen what this "speed" does with ontario greenbelt destruction and new sprawl approval. if it were honest growth, it would be condo towers in the outer burbs to increase their density to meet the need for nearby jobs, but those approved houses are just sprawl with cheap mortages where the few salaries and real estate profits exit the country in the form of remittances back home anyway. it's a massive wealth transfer out of the country in exchange for votes.
the demand is policy driven and not organic to an economy producing demand for homes based on endogenous growth. it's a fake crisis that could end with the stroke of a pen.
Canada had Eatons Homes in the same time period, although historiography of them is quite scant. Eatons Homes were ordered from the T. Eaton catalogue and shipped by rail across Canada. They were very useful on Canada's prairies where sparse local forests were not suited to timber logging for building materials. Ironically, they were also briefly brought into some of British Columbia's lush forested towns for which local mills did not yet exist.
That's only for the materials and plan. You have to build it yourself. See my response to the parent comment. You can still get homes like this today for $15k or less [1].
I have been researching that same question lately.
Most of it comes down to:
- Modern houses have much more systems installed. Think HVAC, electricity, hot/cold water, sewage, lightning, networking, etc.
- Safety and quality requirements/expectations of houses have improved. Think thermal insulation, sound insulation, fire safety, roof load, wind resistance, etc.
- Material quality and sustainability have improved. Think no more asbestos, less flammable materials, no more lead in paint and pipes, etc. These were all used because they were very cheap, safer alternatives are often more expensive.
- Wages and safety of workers have improved (for them) significantly.
- Material prices (delivered) have gone up significantly. Partially due to better wages and safety of workers in the supply chain, but also due to scarcity (for example: our population grows faster than trees).
All of these are true, but they only cover about $100/sqft (see my sibling message.) Production efficiency and technology have also improved for a lot of stuff, bringing prices down at the same time that they were going up.
When people complain about the cost of housing, they're usually not talking about the first $100/sqft, but about the other $100-$1400.
These houses still had to be built, hooked up to plumbing, wired for electricity, have a lot cleared and excavated, concrete poored... Also you still need to decorate and provide appliances.
Add all that in and you'll see theres a few 100k worth of additional work not in the kit
So that $52k price is really just for building materials and plans, but doesn't include land, permits, building costs.
That house looks to be around 2000 sqft, i.e. about $25/sqft in current dollars. There are three effects at play, roughly:
$25 => $50 due to stricter codes and higher scarcity of some materials
$50 => $100 due to higher wages everywhere in the country
$100 => $200 to $1500 due to intentional supply restrictions in specific areas
The last effect includes a whole range of artificial shortage policies (height and volume limits, zoning, red tape, ...) It also includes the "zooming inflation" on local wages due to the housing shortage's effect on the cost of living.
The vast majority of homes in our city built between 1900-1940 are kit homes. This is likely true for any residential (non-urban) of that era. If you pay attention today you'll see that even spec houses are built off a standard set of plans from just a few sources. So even where timber and custom builders were more available they probably ended up building off a subset of common plans for the region based on weather and customer preferences. Someday after all the land developers are gone on to the next iteration, we'll have the same revelry about spec houses.
I love the idea of this but jeez these things are ugly. I wish someone would make a simple kit or prefab that actually had a nice design. I’d consider buying it.
Some of these (like the Wabash and the Osborn) can be seen in suburbs around New Zealand thanks I guess to the common practicalities of building wooden houses and some culture transfer around this time period.
I believe they are of the style known as Californian Bungalow.
The Wabash doesn't even have a bathroom, so it was from the days when an outhouse would be used.
On the other hand, "From the screened porch you can enter direct to the combination dining room and living room without disturbing the women in the kitchen."
Used to own a 1917-construction house, can confirm the lumber thing. It was wild. The huge framing beams visible around the foundation in the basement were damn near veneer-quality by today’s standards. The diagonally-laid underfloor boards were so flawless that most could have been hardwood floor themselves (aside from their probably being pine, I mean).
We still had good finishing wood into the 80s or so. Lots and lots of blue-collar family homes still being build with solid wood trim and doors. That dropped off over that decade and was just about gone by some time in the ‘90s, and now we put cardboard trim and fake-wood doors in $750,000 houses.
I regularly walk by the Denkmann building at Augustana College.
Frederick Denkmann was one of the founders of Weyerhaeuser, and my hardwood floors were likely sourced from him. He is responsible for a few other things around town.
If we had 1915 housing-to-population ratios, that apartment would probably be pretty cheap. Unfortunately, since the 70s and 80s most US cities have made it more and more difficult and expensive to actually build housing in the first place.
I don’t think that was true on a square footage basis: you probably paid much more of your income for less housing than we do today. Also, housing is not a permanent thing: buffalo has a lot less people than it once did but also less housing units, they just don’t stay around for a hundred years without upkeep, if the capital isn’t there to keep them up they disappear.
Do remember though that this does not include land, heavy building materials like bricks, or labor. It is cheaper than a house is now, but not by as much as it may originally seem.
I'm guessing you would expect a longer life out of the offerings from 1920 than today as well. We've gotten really good at making things last just long enough to clear warranty before falling apart to save money, back in 1920 they were mostly using real lumber.
We still use real lumber today. And modern building materials technology is far ahead of whatever was available in the 1920s. Give me the lowest price house built to code in 2024 over the lowest price 1920s house anyday. Especially in neighborhoods with underground utilities (far less chance of power outages in storms).
Plumbing, electrical, insulation, foundation, HVAC, communications, will all perform far better.
In 2024 you can buy showerheads with actually decent flow rates. Just need to adjust them properly or buy decent ones.
And I'll take a good modern toilet over any one I've used from that period. Constantly getting clogged. Sure, it used a lot of water, but they didn't flow well.
These catalog homes are not really adaptable for local climates; for example, many of the Sears Craftsman homes in Seattle have issues with mold due to the constant rain.
This. When we went house shopping in Seattle, we saw alot of craftsman houses with basements and most of them were depressing and expensive, especially the basement, like 1500 sqf on paper but half of that is almost unusable. The newer townhomes were about the same price with no basements but three stories above ground instead, so we wound up in one in Ballard.
I don’t mourn the old houses being torn down to make way for three town homes on the same plot.
That would be a classic location for Sears Homes, like it was all across the Great Plains where local timber and mills were scarce in that time period.
I grew up from the age of five in a large 1906 Sears mail order farm house in the rural farming area east of Seattle which is now suburban.
I looked carefully but the design is not shown in the archive images which only go back to 1908. The house had three rooms and a kitchen with covered porch on the main floor, five bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. It had a large attic and two basements, one smaller than the other and which may have been a root cellar. It was balloon-framed with full-dimension lumber and had nine-foot ceilings. My father extensively remodeled the house, modernizing the electrical and plumbing, adding bathrooms and a library room.
As a kid, I got to know the son of the family that built the house and who lived next door when I lived there. He was an old man. He told me the house cost about $6,000 to buy and build.
My family sold the house long ago and it still stands today but has not been maintained and is now in truly terrible condition. The five acres it sits on is now super prime “wine country” and worth a bundle.
That's roughly $205,000 adjusted.
Check the same build on your existing lot now, $400k
Woodinville?
Between Woodinville and Redmond overlooking the valley.
These kinds of homes still exist [1]. How it would work (and still does) is you buy the materials and plans from them, they deliver it, and you have to build it yourself.
The prices are still comparable when adjusting for inflation.
[1] https://www.americanmadehousekits.com/house_kits
Is it still allowed to build your own house in the US?
Here in Japan, it would seem almost impossible. Just recently build a house. It took almost as long to just get the approval from the city vs the time to build. Additionally, AFAIK you are technically not allowed to touch anything with electricity or water without license. Forget about connecting to the city grid.
Depends on the laws in your local area. But many places where I live allow you to build your own home as long as you follow the building codes.
But nothing's stopping you from buying one of these and hiring a professional to do the build. Would still be much cheaper than buying a property with a home on it already.
I don't know where you live but in the Midwest US around medium-sized cities, it costs _significantly_ more to build vs buy unless you inherit or otherwise somehow luck into some cheap land.
Building involves a surprising number of large one-off costs: clearing the land, excavation, running utilities, digging a well, installing a septic field, getting permits and inspections, legal fees for contract review, etc. None of these are reflected in the market price of a middle class SFH. This is the main reason housing developments are so popular, the developer is able to amortize these startup costs over 30-50 houses all at once which is the only way they can build new houses that are price competitive with the rest of the market.
My father-in-law is in his 70s. He built a new house in 2016. He's a builder so he could do almost all of the work himself (apart from electrical and heating) with two hired helpers. The concrete was poured by a company. The roof trusses were designed and premanufactured, then delivered to site and installed by him and his guys. I think he had someone come in for some tiling jobs. Other than that, it was all off-the-shelf material.
All in, he spent around $300k including the plot.
Then COVID happened. Now, similar houses on his street sell north of 800k.
> He's a builder so he could do almost all of the work himself
So $300k plus a ton of skilled labor. That's a lot more than just $300k.
I'm sure that includes labor.
[dead]
Aren't they all reflected in the market price of housing?
It's just that a lot of existing housing is out of date (so prices below new construction) and people work to profit by reducing them below what an individual can achieve working on their own.
In my small town, houses that are "move in ready" command a premium, because higher end buyers are less willing to put up with the typical condition of the aging housing stock.
The newly built community homes are much cheaper. They are just commodities though. From what I have seen the construction is very poor and most people are going to want upgrades across the board ($50k+ more).
Crazy expensive to build vs. buy. A modest 1600sq ft home is $400k+ to erect on your lot. You will have thousands out of pocket before you get there and if you carry a construction loan you are paying raw interest the whole time.
When it comes to what's on your property, every place I've lived in the US lets you do your own work as long as you follow code, you just can't do professional work for other people.
Connecting to the grid might be different though - I've never had to mess with that.
I only know my particular area, but as a homeowner, I can do any electrical work I want on my dwellings. If I owned a rental, I couldn't do electrical work on that. I still have to pull permits and pass inspections, but it's really not as bad as most people assume. Just do competent work and check your wire gauge derating math a few times before you start pulling things.
My main panel, outside, is effectively "half mine, half the power company's." The side with the meter in it is tagged off and I can't get into it without going through power company indicators. But everything on the other side, with the breakers, is my problem. Then everything from the box out to the pole transformer is the power company's problem.
Again, this isn't going to be broadly true everywhere, but that's the usual breakdown of things, and outside a few areas in the US, you are legally permitted to do electrical work on your residence.
I mean, I did my own massive ground mount solar install, grid tied, without having to bother an electrician. It just required the normal permitting process and such.
(we did a DIY addition build during COVID in the US in 2021)
In Michigan, you are absolutely allowed to do your own build on your own land. It just has to pass code inspection, and it has to pass at every stage. (i.e., they want to inspect structural/electrical/plumbing/hvac/etc, before you put drywall up, to ensure things are actually OK underneath, and then inspect it again after drywall is applied).
Getting utilities can be hard and expensive if you are building off-grid. But there are so many vacant lots that already have power+water+gas at the street, that you don't really have to do that unless you really want to live in a specific off-grid location. (Suburbs and some townships make a lot of their money from this, so they usually want you building near their pre-existing utilities and hooking up to it)
Sewage tends to be the hardest part -- some places have "most" utilities, but not waste & water. And people assume they can just put in a leech field "septic tank", but since most of the state is already swampland, you have to be careful of how and where you put that, so you don't poison the water. (They will make you get a land survey to prove your location is safe to leech from, and they will inspect your install, and yes people complain all the time about it, but when they didn't do this, people did poison the water all the time, and then accidentally drank their own waste water and make themselves sick, or accidentally poisoned their neighbors water and made those folks sick, etc).
People complain about the licensing and permitting and inspections, but honestly, it's all been extremely fair and pretty quick and cheap. If you aren't passing your inspections here, you're likely doing something grossly negligent (or are about to do something grossly negligent).
I can give you an anecdote about my parents trying to permit a new garage building on their property in southern California, the process was anything but fair, cheap or quick. The inspector actually raised an unrelated issue on their property about a patio cover that was installed by a previous owner and has been standing for 30+ years, they wanted him to pull a building permit and pay all the inspection fees for it before they would even begin to process his garage permit. Including digging around one of the footings for the existing patio cover to see how deep the footings were. Ultimately they paid some adjusted fee, didn't even have anything inspected. Just basically were extorted by the city in my view of things.
I had the exact same thing happen to a house I owned in Utah. I had purchased a house that had a mother-in-law apartment in it, which I could offer my parents to live in, as my Dad was in bad health waiting for a transplant.
At one point, after about 5 years of me living there, there had been a leak under the sink in the bathroom and at the same time the stove also went out (within the same month). We were doing better financially so we decided to take this as an opportunity to renovate the mother-in-law suite as it was starting to show its' age. We wanted to improve the bathroom significantly (remove the tub and add a walk-in shower), update the very dated materials, and add a gas-line to the stove (since the main kitchen upstairs had a gas stove already, and the gas water heater was on the opposite side of a wall where the mother-in-law stove goes).
Anyway, we had a plumber come out and quote the work and he wanted to get a permit for the work. That was fine, I wasn't intending to do anything shady, so we requested a build permit and the inspector came out and told us we weren't supposed to have anything in the basement at all. No kitchen, no side entry doorway, no bathroom, no two bedrooms, no kitchen. The entire mother-in-law suite was around 1,000 sqft, it wasn't insignificant, and he was saying the previous owner never permitted it.
We basically got notice from the city that our house was illegal and could be condemned if we didn't first pay permitting and get inspections on the current home, before we do any new work. Keep in mind, I had owned this home for over 5 years when this was happening, I never did the original work, and the original work was now so old it needed to be replaced and updated. The plumber estimated by the plumbing work and code it was built to that it had to have been built at least 20 years prior. Based on the materials and designs of things like vanities, tilework, trim, kitchen finishes, etc I would have estimated that it was also about 20 years old.
So yeah we basically got extorted to pay the permitting for work that was so old it was now being replaced. Then we had to do the same thing again for the replacement work. Then on top of that, then next year our house was assessed at $180k more money, increasing property taxes significantly. This was in ~2016.
Here in SF, there's an online permit database accessible from the property lot database [1]. A new or prospective owner can check for permits for past additions. I don't know how far back it goes, but I'm pretty sure it's at least 40 years.
No guarantee of course that there would be something similar in your area, let alone accessible anonymously. Not to mention that maybe it wasn't obvious that the in-law was an addition, and that it's civilized to assume that the previous owners didn't cheat.
[1] https://sfplanninggis.org/pim/
> licensing and permitting and inspections
.. are truly crooked in many wealthy areas of California (and elsewhere) today. Everyone directly involved benefits from it, the only direct loser is the newcomer..
source: San Francisco residential remodels
Sure. It's completely possible to build a house in the US. But it's a big place.
The rules vary by state (50), by county (Ohio alone has 87 counties), and municipality (if in a city) or township (if rural), and/or other AHJ. There are thousands of combinations of rules so it's hard to generalize beyond "Yes, it's possible."
Some areas have very strict zoning, building codes, and inspections. These can be challenging to build in, with oversight over many details, but it can be done and people do accomplish building homes all the time in these conditions.
Meanwhile, some other areas have no zoning at all and only the most rudimentary of building codes (rudimentary like "There must be a working sewer connection or septic system" and approximately no other requirements). As a practical matter, in these places a person who owns some land can build what they want and nobody is empowered to tell them not to.
And, of course: There's a myriad of in-between variations.
In my locale, the only thing that matters is passing the code inspection. I have friends who have done major remodels, including additions. The piece of advice I got was to talk with your inspector before starting. In my city, they have office hours and will help people avoid surprises such as finishing the interior walls before having the electricals inspected -- stuff like that.
In my locale, the only people that want to inspect the building is the bank (if you are borrowing to build). They just want to know it is there.
I don't know how difficult the permits would be, but you can order similar kits from Muji:
https://www.muji.net/ie/tatenoie/
>Is it still allowed to build your own house in the US?
Yes, but you're at the mercy of the discretion of and have to pay rent (metaphorically) to potentially a ton more parties than you would have 100yr ago. You're gonna need several (local, but perhaps 1-2 state depending on situation) government inspections all of which may involve having to track down some licensed professional and then pay them a fee for inspecting your work.
I think in a "normal" case you can expect to shell out for electrical, plumbing, sewer/septic, HVAC, plans/engineering, environmental BS depending on distance to regulated stuff (wetlands usually) inspections and sign offs. There's probably one or two things I'm forgetting and perhaps one or two can be omitted on a case by case basis. A bunch of municipalities are gonna add their own BS on top of "the usual" stuff, like permits for tree cutting, permits for a construction dumpster and whatnot.
And keep in mind, some of these parties are likely to go out of their way to try and f you one way or another and/or give you the runaround until you go away because they don't want to deal with homeowners, they want to deal with businesses.
Also worth nothing that some municipalities expect strict goose stepping compliance. Some really DGAF what individuals engaged in noncommercial development (i.e. building your own house with the intent to live in it) and so long as you're not building rickety garbage they would rather you just not call them until it's done (though obviously they can't say that).
In regard to having to have some licensed professionals inspect the work, you'll still often have to do that even if you hire someone to do the job. It is just often baked into the cost to do the job, and the people doing the job will do all the legwork for you.
To add to the sibling comments which have already covered the general idea; in many places in the US you can also do your own work and then have an inspector sign off on it.
Depends on the local building codes. Some rural places have little or no codes, so build whatever you want however you want it.
This may be a small complaint overall but these kits are all ugly as sin, especially compared to the timeless Sears houses.
Seems like this company ships in Arkansas only.
What should I be searching for to find these generally?
Home kits/house kits
Another inexpensive option (depending on location) is a factory-built house. These can be built in warehouses in "slices" narrow enough to fit on a trailer. Some of them are also on the designer side, e.g. https://www.plantprefab.com.
If you live in an area with a Menard's home improvement store, you can buy a home kit there. Everything from barndominums to duplexes.
https://www.menards.com/main/store.html?cid=1474668109497&gr...
Makes me wonder if it would be economically advantageous to buy something like this https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi... and then spend some time (how long?) putting it together, instead of working to earn money to take out a mortgage to buy more-or-less the exact same thing.
Depends on skill.
Where I live it looks like someone lost their home (I guess through job loss etc) before it was finished. Right when framing would've started. The lumber was already delivered including all the roof trusses. The only thing actually standing was the concrete basement walls, I-beams and flooring. Those parts were done quite fast as well.
Then, for a very long time nothing happened. The people I saw there once, looking at everything I never saw again.
But then, couple months later, always in the evenings, a single guy could be seen building walls on the floor and putting them up one by one and soon enough there was Typar looking at us. The only other people I saw there helping was one time when he was putting up the roof trusses. He did all the roofing (plywood and roof tiles) himself. The last roof tiles actually went on literally a day before the first snow.
I bet he worked construction for a living anyway but it shows that it is definitely possible solo. Sure, a framing crew puts up a wall in no time but with a few simple tricks anyone can put up a wall in sections all by themselves.
If you’re not using a loan to finance the construction or land purchase, it’ll definitely be economically advantageous because you’re not paying all the interest on the mortgage. At current interest rates you’d pay over $400k in interest on a $500k 30 year 20% down mortgage. Even at 3% you’d still pay over $200k in interest.
Paying interest is horrible. Unless your investments are expected to do better than the interest rate. No way I would pull money out of the stock market to pay off my 2.25% mortgage.
It doesn’t need to beat the stock market to be a net win.
Edit: Suppose you had a 500k investment paying ~5% you could sell to avoid a 500k mortgage at 6% that seems like a good idea. Unless you’ve got a high paying job so you could get a sweet home mortgage tax deduction.
Similarly, a dividend paying stock may have returns of 5% but if you’re paying capital gains when selling that stock you’re also getting 5% of money that would disappear when sold. IE If you would keep 500k on sale a 550k investment paying 5%, it’s effectively paying you 5.5% of 500k.
The cost of new construction is mostly labor. It would be cheaper to purchase a modular home and take advantage of production line efficiencies. With some forethought you can start small and plan for future expansion.
Build costs are so high that prefab is already pricing that in. Nothing looks attractive these days. Huge capital sink.
This is the same conclusion I came to when I tried to think about creative solutions to reduce costs.
(Things like factory produced or assembled pieces like modular homes and sandwich panels, on-site earth bricks, more glass to reduce assembly time per square meter, etc.)
But indeed, every saving was counterbalanced by an additional cost added somewhere else.
If you click through, they literally say "this is not a kit" and then talk about it being a materials list. I guess these days people would expect a kit to come ready to assemble.
(I only looked at one, maybe I have bad luck)
In Canada, standard house plan catalogues were designed by the gov't during WWII and are often called "Victory houses" or "Strawberry houses" [0]
The current gov't is in the process of designing a new catalogue of pre-permitted homes to help address the housing crisis in Canada [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_box_house
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-home-design-catalogu...
was going to ask if any of the prefab vendors have pre-certification for their models. gov picking designs vs. setting standards firms can build to and pre-certify seems a bit soviet even for canada. I'd be surprised if there weren't a certification fast-track for pre-fab building firms.
Not sure what the objection to the gov't picking designs, but this is the result of consultation with industry and are being designed by private firms. Lots of more details in this article [0]:
> The government has selected two firms to deliver on the first version of low-rise designs: MGA | Michael Green Architecture, which will work on plans for British Columbia, and LGA Architectural Partners Ltd., which will cover designs for Alberta, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, the Atlantic, and the North.
> Though, Fraser will also be launching an open submission process that is soliciting additional designs from industry members who may submit existing prefabricated housing builds. Companies who build modular, 3D printed, or panelized houses have until Nov. 8 to submit to be considered for inclusion in the first iteration of the catalogue.
[0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/politics/first-standardized-ho...
> Not sure what the objection to the gov't picking designs
The ''seems a bit soviet even for canada'' line was a bit of a giveaway. Thanks for the link, giving a good understanding of the proposals.
govt should set environmental engineering safety standards and then people can make their livings building things that meet them. a catalogue of designs that meet environmental standards is great.
my concern was the govt was picking favoured designers to mandate their designs instead of people innovating on what other people want. it sounded like the gov was acting like some kind of national HOA, and I would be surprised if that were the actual case. that case would be creating another generation of le courbusier and brutalist housing estate atrocities, and presumably they've learned.
The goal here is speed, a pre-approval of a specific template means you can attain high velocity in deployment.
Even brutalist monsters keep people off the streets, which is where we are now.
not a crisis, and I have to respond because that whole narrative is BS. I've seen what this "speed" does with ontario greenbelt destruction and new sprawl approval. if it were honest growth, it would be condo towers in the outer burbs to increase their density to meet the need for nearby jobs, but those approved houses are just sprawl with cheap mortages where the few salaries and real estate profits exit the country in the form of remittances back home anyway. it's a massive wealth transfer out of the country in exchange for votes.
the demand is policy driven and not organic to an economy producing demand for homes based on endogenous growth. it's a fake crisis that could end with the stroke of a pen.
Canada had Eatons Homes in the same time period, although historiography of them is quite scant. Eatons Homes were ordered from the T. Eaton catalogue and shipped by rail across Canada. They were very useful on Canada's prairies where sparse local forests were not suited to timber logging for building materials. Ironically, they were also briefly brought into some of British Columbia's lush forested towns for which local mills did not yet exist.
Here's an example of a modernized Eatons Home built in 1907 for the manager of the Imperial Bank Of Canada branch in a small town in British Columbia:
https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/27172855/239-10th-avenue-...
The first house listed gives a price range from $1,553 to $3,242. Taking the higher end, $3,242 in 1920 is worth $51,110.29 today [1].
[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1920?amount=3242
That's only for the materials and plan. You have to build it yourself. See my response to the parent comment. You can still get homes like this today for $15k or less [1].
[1] https://www.americanmadehousekits.com/house_kits
Yes, I found your sibling comment very interesting.
Btw, I didn't want to imply anything with my comment above, just put the price into perspective.
How?! That’s not anywhere near what you pay for a house now. Can the real price (cost to build) really have multiplied by a factor of 10?
I have been researching that same question lately.
Most of it comes down to:
- Modern houses have much more systems installed. Think HVAC, electricity, hot/cold water, sewage, lightning, networking, etc.
- Safety and quality requirements/expectations of houses have improved. Think thermal insulation, sound insulation, fire safety, roof load, wind resistance, etc.
- Material quality and sustainability have improved. Think no more asbestos, less flammable materials, no more lead in paint and pipes, etc. These were all used because they were very cheap, safer alternatives are often more expensive.
- Wages and safety of workers have improved (for them) significantly.
- Material prices (delivered) have gone up significantly. Partially due to better wages and safety of workers in the supply chain, but also due to scarcity (for example: our population grows faster than trees).
All of these are true, but they only cover about $100/sqft (see my sibling message.) Production efficiency and technology have also improved for a lot of stuff, bringing prices down at the same time that they were going up.
When people complain about the cost of housing, they're usually not talking about the first $100/sqft, but about the other $100-$1400.
These houses still had to be built, hooked up to plumbing, wired for electricity, have a lot cleared and excavated, concrete poored... Also you still need to decorate and provide appliances.
Add all that in and you'll see theres a few 100k worth of additional work not in the kit
So that $52k price is really just for building materials and plans, but doesn't include land, permits, building costs.
The 1920 all-included price would not have been tripled. Consider that the median US house price in 1940 was $2938, or $66K in current dollars.
That house looks to be around 2000 sqft, i.e. about $25/sqft in current dollars. There are three effects at play, roughly:
$25 => $50 due to stricter codes and higher scarcity of some materials
$50 => $100 due to higher wages everywhere in the country
$100 => $200 to $1500 due to intentional supply restrictions in specific areas
The last effect includes a whole range of artificial shortage policies (height and volume limits, zoning, red tape, ...) It also includes the "zooming inflation" on local wages due to the housing shortage's effect on the cost of living.
My wife and I live in a Wardway kit home from 1929. It's a Hampden, with upgrades (original enclosed sunroom, extra closets, nicer trimmings). https://everydayoldhouse.com/american-foursquare-kit-homes-w...
The vast majority of homes in our city built between 1900-1940 are kit homes. This is likely true for any residential (non-urban) of that era. If you pay attention today you'll see that even spec houses are built off a standard set of plans from just a few sources. So even where timber and custom builders were more available they probably ended up building off a subset of common plans for the region based on weather and customer preferences. Someday after all the land developers are gone on to the next iteration, we'll have the same revelry about spec houses.
Amazon sells homes. Much less labor!
Can't believe they charge $26 shipping for this. https://a.co/d/dAh8OCf
I love the idea of this but jeez these things are ugly. I wish someone would make a simple kit or prefab that actually had a nice design. I’d consider buying it.
Nothing there that couldn't be fixed with an awning, some trim, a nice porch.
It ain't pretty, sure, but $12,500 for a 400 sq ft studio home isn't too bad.
The podcast "99 percent invisible" has an episode on this which is worth listening to if you're interested in this topic.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-house-that-came-i...
Some of these (like the Wabash and the Osborn) can be seen in suburbs around New Zealand thanks I guess to the common practicalities of building wooden houses and some culture transfer around this time period.
I believe they are of the style known as Californian Bungalow.
The Wabash doesn't even have a bathroom, so it was from the days when an outhouse would be used.
On the other hand, "From the screened porch you can enter direct to the combination dining room and living room without disturbing the women in the kitchen."
I stayed at this B&B in Idaho. Owner said it was a Sears home.
https://imgur.com/a/Njdxacs
https://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1000&y...
Things don’t add up, or I am misunderstanding something
The Sears homes were excellent values driven to a great extent by economies of scale/industrial manufacture.
Also, wood was much cheaper then, even though it was much better quality than is generally available now:
https://searshomes.org/index.php/2011/02/23/virgin-forests-a...
Used to own a 1917-construction house, can confirm the lumber thing. It was wild. The huge framing beams visible around the foundation in the basement were damn near veneer-quality by today’s standards. The diagonally-laid underfloor boards were so flawless that most could have been hardwood floor themselves (aside from their probably being pine, I mean).
We still had good finishing wood into the 80s or so. Lots and lots of blue-collar family homes still being build with solid wood trim and doors. That dropped off over that decade and was just about gone by some time in the ‘90s, and now we put cardboard trim and fake-wood doors in $750,000 houses.
I regularly walk by the Denkmann building at Augustana College.
Frederick Denkmann was one of the founders of Weyerhaeuser, and my hardwood floors were likely sourced from him. He is responsible for a few other things around town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Denkmann
Weyerhaeuser is still a major lumber company today.
https://www.weyerhaeuser.com/
See my parent level comment. These homes still exist at this price (inflation adjusted). You just have to build them yourself.
What doesn’t add up to you? Are you saying it is too low or too high?
The most expensive house in this list is the same as my monthly rent on a 750ft² apartment.
If we had 1915 housing-to-population ratios, that apartment would probably be pretty cheap. Unfortunately, since the 70s and 80s most US cities have made it more and more difficult and expensive to actually build housing in the first place.
I don’t think that was true on a square footage basis: you probably paid much more of your income for less housing than we do today. Also, housing is not a permanent thing: buffalo has a lot less people than it once did but also less housing units, they just don’t stay around for a hundred years without upkeep, if the capital isn’t there to keep them up they disappear.
Do remember though that this does not include land, heavy building materials like bricks, or labor. It is cheaper than a house is now, but not by as much as it may originally seem.
I'm guessing you would expect a longer life out of the offerings from 1920 than today as well. We've gotten really good at making things last just long enough to clear warranty before falling apart to save money, back in 1920 they were mostly using real lumber.
We still use real lumber today. And modern building materials technology is far ahead of whatever was available in the 1920s. Give me the lowest price house built to code in 2024 over the lowest price 1920s house anyday. Especially in neighborhoods with underground utilities (far less chance of power outages in storms).
Plumbing, electrical, insulation, foundation, HVAC, communications, will all perform far better.
In some things, yet, but you wouldn’t want the plumbing, wiring, roof, and foundation from 1920.
In 1920, you could get toilets that flush like a waterfall and showerheads with actually decent flow rates.
In 2024 you can buy showerheads with actually decent flow rates. Just need to adjust them properly or buy decent ones.
And I'll take a good modern toilet over any one I've used from that period. Constantly getting clogged. Sure, it used a lot of water, but they didn't flow well.
Eh a lot of toilets from the period also don’t flush very well, and you have to take care not to clog them.
Yes and no.
These catalog homes are not really adaptable for local climates; for example, many of the Sears Craftsman homes in Seattle have issues with mold due to the constant rain.
This. When we went house shopping in Seattle, we saw alot of craftsman houses with basements and most of them were depressing and expensive, especially the basement, like 1500 sqf on paper but half of that is almost unusable. The newer townhomes were about the same price with no basements but three stories above ground instead, so we wound up in one in Ballard.
I don’t mourn the old houses being torn down to make way for three town homes on the same plot.
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I didn't realize unit seeing this picture that downtown Albuquerque is full of these. My sister in law lives in one, and I didn't know it.
That would be a classic location for Sears Homes, like it was all across the Great Plains where local timber and mills were scarce in that time period.
I think there’s a bunch of these in Miami which is fun to see because they have chimneys that will never get used
Maybe they can double as snorkels.
that's when people used to make $20 a week?
wow. my house is like the melrose. cool!