We rebuilt our house in downtown Reykjavik a couple of years ago. It was first built in 1897 and owned by the same family continuously into the 90’s. There wasn

We rebuilt our house in downtown Reykjavik a couple of years ago. It was first built in 1897 and owned by the same family continuously into the 90’s. There wasn’t much in the way of modern technique or planning back then so when we stripped back the walls we found the frame and roof irreparable. That eventually turned out to be a blessing as rather than an extensive renovation we ended up replanning and building a much nicer version of the same basic footprint. It’s incredibly stressful to basically demolish most of your house before having to make that decision though! We did a bunch of manual labour and finishing work. But used contractors for everything else. We did that mostly to get things done quickly as we didn’t have a stable place to stay, had a two year old and my wife was pregnant with our second. Your project sounds quite different but I think the biggest takeaway I can offer is to have a large contingency in your budget. Particularly if you mean autonomous as in building with robots or some new technique. The second is to find good contractors we got very lucky with the people we hired. Reykjavik is going through a construction boom and it’s often the less reputable people that are free to work. We’re pretty glad we did it now we can look back on the stressful memories. It’s definitely Type 2 fun. Our next big project is to build a shed-cum-office in our garden for us to work from. Probably next summer. With less time pressure and an easier problem I’ll probably build that myself with help from family.