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I think this is overly complicating the process. If you want an open source DIY method of building a home, just learn basic framing and construction. It's not h

I think this is overly complicating the process. If you want an open source DIY method of building a home, just learn basic framing and construction. It's not hard, lots of people have built their own homes, you just need some common sense and a willingness to learn. If you want to go all in on modular, wood based, zero carbon housing then learn how to build a timber frame house. If you really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools and harvest your own trees. Wikihouse seems more for people who want to buy something off the shelf, pretty much a kit house. That's not a bad thing since it takes a lot of effort to build something as big as a house and lots of people don't want to do that. But I don't think this should be sold as a solution for DIYers since the existing methods already satisfy the listed requirements.

wizofaus 4y ago
> If you really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools and harvest your own trees. Why on earth can't power tools run off renewables? And even hand tools/nails/ bolts etc. have embedded CO2 emissions.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  They can but can you guarantee it? Hand tools have a much smaller footprint compared to the mix of metals and plastic that go into power tools. You can buy 100 year old hand tools that work just as well as new ones too so they've got the whole recycle thing going for them.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    It's too nitpick. If I think too deep, your body needs more energy if you don't use electric tools, so you need more foods to feed energy but perhaps every foods aren't carbon neutral for farming tools, fertilizer, and transportation.
simmanian 4y ago
any resource you'd recommend for learning framing and construction?
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  There's tons of material out there, you can buy a book from Amazon[0] or watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials[1]. It's best to learn by doing though so you could always volunteer[2] or take a local course. [0] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=house+framing&crid=ZT0KPA5JG1EY&sprefix=house+framing%2Caps%2C72&ref=nb_sb_noss_1 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=house+framing&crid=ZT0KPA5JG1EY&s... [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=house+framing https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=house+framing [2] https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you
  - throw0101c 4y ago
    There are also lots of folks: building their own places (search "homesteading"), commercial builders documenting/advertising their build process (Perkins Builder Brothers is decent), and pointing out small details that are easy to miss (Matt Risinger, who has a building science lean to things).
- aaronax 4y ago
  https://www.shelterinstitute.com/ https://www.shelterinstitute.com/ (timber framing especially) is one that I am aware of from a few sources over time--perhaps most notably from YouTube channel Pure Living For Life, who failed to finish building their house.
- haroldp 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4IwyNn1ABhJWmBPeX1hGhyLi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4...
- hpkuarg 4y ago
  Larry Haun's book The Very Efficient Carpenter. Comes with companion videos that you can find on YouTube, as well.
mavhc 4y ago
The existing methods of building houses are terrible though. It's stupidly expensive to edit a house, they're designed and built as if it's still 1800. Why does adding a socket into a wall cost more than $50? Should be able to just open the wall panel, plug in an extra cable, close panel, done.
- benj111 4y ago
  Because people want nice plastered, painted and wallpapered walls? Adding a socket is the easy bit. It's the putting everything back to how it was that's hard. If you want plain panelled walls you could install that now. And have your $50 socket. Most people probably don't like that tradeoff.
  - kderbyma 4y ago
    well if they had more easily removable wall panels you could still decorate and access the inner wall
    - hpkuarg 4y ago
      Seems strange that we'd optimize for making modifications easier, when such modifications are much fewer and farther between than the everyday living that fills the time between, during which people value a solid wall with no gaps or seams. Of course, not everyone values the same things to the same degree, and a homeowner could cut a 4x8 piece of drywall into smaller pieces and have more easily removable panels like you're imagining.
- sigstoat 4y ago
  > Why does adding a socket into a wall cost more than $50? Should be able to just open the wall panel, plug in an extra cable, close panel, done. what are you envisioning? using cheap consumer power cables inside of walls, and paying extra to have unused sockets hidden away inside of walls for years/decades, just so that it's fast to add an outlet? we use screw terminals inside of the wall because they're cheaper and more reliable than the socketed connections. and we use heavy gauge cable with thick jackets for safety.
ArtemZ 4y ago
I moved to U.S from a country where there are barely any construction regulations and brought log cabin construction skills with me. They are useless though because no municipality would allow me to do it myself without a contractor and a log house won't pass any modern construction codes.
- ClassicOrgin 4y ago
  Very true. Where I live you need a building permit and an certified engineer to sign off plans for something as basic as a pergola.
- kderbyma 4y ago
  land of the free.....:/
  - andirk 4y ago
    Free is subjective, and since there are variations of the regulations by municipality, you can choose from the spectrum of lax laws + dangerous to strict laws + safe. Your preferred location, however, may not align with your preferred regulations. Or you can do like we do here in Berkeley and build whatever you want because your neighbors also have illegal additions so they're not gonna squeal.
  - _carbyau_ 4y ago
    It's one of those things of life. "Land of the free" doesn't mean the land is free of dickheads or immoral people who endanger others in their attempts to "get ahead". And so laws are born... Whether there are too many is totally a question though.
- t-3 4y ago
  Many areas will have relaxed codes for cabins that are only used part-time. The hard thing is that all this stuff is state-by-state and locality-by-locality, so you have to dig to find lax areas. Louisiana is particularly open for residential construction IIRC.
- jaegerpicker 4y ago
kashkhan 4y ago
For envelope (floor, walls roof) key metric is $ per sq ft. Its possible to do <$10 per sq ft in most of USA. So for a 100 sq ft room it works out to 6 sq ft envelope per sq ft of floor so $60 per sq ft of floor area. for a 500 sq ft studio that works out to $30k.
- bombcar 4y ago
  You can work out the estimates but it's often the finish stuff that drives the cost per square way up. Build a post-frame "barn" and get a massive space with no interior walls and get it for quite cheap. In a 2000 sq foot house, a $2k tub costs a dollar a square. That's a significant part of the total price!
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  This is accurate, I've built something that size and it came out to about that.
albrewer 4y ago
I used to work as a framer during the summer when I was going to college. What you're glossing over here is that about 10-15% of the timber you buy to frame a site-built house is wasted (ad-hoc cuts, bracing, jigs, etc.) and thrown into a dumpster. If a house is pre-planned, you can use a machine that cuts each board to length, and join the ends of each board using basic joinery processes that aren't practical when building a site-built home. You can pre-fabricate things like trusses and wall segments so you (or your workers) aren't driving 100k fasteners to fabricate something a robot could build in 1/10th the time.
- sigstoat 4y ago
  > If a house is pre-planned, you can use a machine that cuts each board to length, and join the ends of each board using basic joinery processes that aren't practical when building a site-built home. You can pre-fabricate things like trusses and wall segments aren't prefab trusses readily available these days? i feel like i've seen plenty of trailers hauling stacks of 10 timber trusses down the road. we've also got prefab homes (not mobile/trailer/whatever homes), with modules assembled in factories and brought together at the site. unfortunately they seem to carry class connotations here in the US.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    They exist and they can be designed to take advantage of things like making sure each room is designed to use full board lengths, no cuts (8 foot stud walls, for example).
  - monknomo 4y ago
    yeah, prefrab trusses, prefab sip panels, modular houses, trailers and prefab houses divided up into rooms that can be trailered and joined onsite all exist
  - kristov 4y ago
    A mate of mine used to work in a place that manufactured segments of regular wood framed houses. They had painted outlines on the floor, so they could cut and assemble 2x4 frames at great speed. I think you would need to make a truly massive number of these before a robot would be more cost effective. I also think that 2x4 construction would create less waste than parts CNC cut from ply sheet.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
I mostly agree with you, but I like the idea of being able to give reasonably smart but unskilled people a bunch of these boxes and an Ikea-style "how to assemble this house" and telling them to get to work. Seems like it'd scale very well for situations where you have a bunch of volunteers and need to build several houses but maybe don't have many experienced builders around.
calvinmorrison 4y ago
If you want to see a cool DIY property - the guy behind woodgears.ca lived on the property while his dad built a retreat/summer camp. https://woodgears.ca/cottage/index.html https://woodgears.ca/cottage/index.html
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  Thank you for posting this, it's amazing. The woodshop tour really took me back to a different era.
ars 4y ago
> If you really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools and harvest your own trees. How is that zero carbon? That's actually higher carbon than the regular way with power tools. Human power is very inefficient, you'll emit far more carbon because you'll need to eat more. And hand harvesting a tree is also far more wasteful of CO2.

wizofaus 4y ago

> If you really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools and harvest your own trees. Why on earth can't power tools run off renewables? And even hand tools/nails/ bolts etc. have embedded CO2 emissions.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
They can but can you guarantee it? Hand tools have a much smaller footprint compared to the mix of metals and plastic that go into power tools. You can buy 100 year old hand tools that work just as well as new ones too so they've got the whole recycle thing going for them.
- fomine3 4y ago
  It's too nitpick. If I think too deep, your body needs more energy if you don't use electric tools, so you need more foods to feed energy but perhaps every foods aren't carbon neutral for farming tools, fertilizer, and transportation.

simmanian 4y ago

any resource you'd recommend for learning framing and construction?

throwaway4aday 4y ago
There's tons of material out there, you can buy a book from Amazon[0] or watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials[1]. It's best to learn by doing though so you could always volunteer[2] or take a local course. [0] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=house+framing&crid=ZT0KPA5JG1EY&sprefix=house+framing%2Caps%2C72&ref=nb_sb_noss_1 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=house+framing&crid=ZT0KPA5JG1EY&s... [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=house+framing https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=house+framing [2] https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you
- throw0101c 4y ago
  There are also lots of folks: building their own places (search "homesteading"), commercial builders documenting/advertising their build process (Perkins Builder Brothers is decent), and pointing out small details that are easy to miss (Matt Risinger, who has a building science lean to things).
aaronax 4y ago
https://www.shelterinstitute.com/ https://www.shelterinstitute.com/ (timber framing especially) is one that I am aware of from a few sources over time--perhaps most notably from YouTube channel Pure Living For Life, who failed to finish building their house.
haroldp 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4IwyNn1ABhJWmBPeX1hGhyLi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4...
hpkuarg 4y ago
Larry Haun's book The Very Efficient Carpenter. Comes with companion videos that you can find on YouTube, as well.

mavhc 4y ago

The existing methods of building houses are terrible though. It's stupidly expensive to edit a house, they're designed and built as if it's still 1800. Why does adding a socket into a wall cost more than $50? Should be able to just open the wall panel, plug in an extra cable, close panel, done.

benj111 4y ago
Because people want nice plastered, painted and wallpapered walls? Adding a socket is the easy bit. It's the putting everything back to how it was that's hard. If you want plain panelled walls you could install that now. And have your $50 socket. Most people probably don't like that tradeoff.
- kderbyma 4y ago
  well if they had more easily removable wall panels you could still decorate and access the inner wall
  - hpkuarg 4y ago
    Seems strange that we'd optimize for making modifications easier, when such modifications are much fewer and farther between than the everyday living that fills the time between, during which people value a solid wall with no gaps or seams. Of course, not everyone values the same things to the same degree, and a homeowner could cut a 4x8 piece of drywall into smaller pieces and have more easily removable panels like you're imagining.
sigstoat 4y ago
> Why does adding a socket into a wall cost more than $50? Should be able to just open the wall panel, plug in an extra cable, close panel, done. what are you envisioning? using cheap consumer power cables inside of walls, and paying extra to have unused sockets hidden away inside of walls for years/decades, just so that it's fast to add an outlet? we use screw terminals inside of the wall because they're cheaper and more reliable than the socketed connections. and we use heavy gauge cable with thick jackets for safety.

ArtemZ 4y ago

I moved to U.S from a country where there are barely any construction regulations and brought log cabin construction skills with me. They are useless though because no municipality would allow me to do it myself without a contractor and a log house won't pass any modern construction codes.

ClassicOrgin 4y ago
Very true. Where I live you need a building permit and an certified engineer to sign off plans for something as basic as a pergola.
kderbyma 4y ago
land of the free.....:/
- andirk 4y ago
  Free is subjective, and since there are variations of the regulations by municipality, you can choose from the spectrum of lax laws + dangerous to strict laws + safe. Your preferred location, however, may not align with your preferred regulations. Or you can do like we do here in Berkeley and build whatever you want because your neighbors also have illegal additions so they're not gonna squeal.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  It's one of those things of life. "Land of the free" doesn't mean the land is free of dickheads or immoral people who endanger others in their attempts to "get ahead". And so laws are born... Whether there are too many is totally a question though.
t-3 4y ago
Many areas will have relaxed codes for cabins that are only used part-time. The hard thing is that all this stuff is state-by-state and locality-by-locality, so you have to dig to find lax areas. Louisiana is particularly open for residential construction IIRC.
jaegerpicker 4y ago

kashkhan 4y ago

For envelope (floor, walls roof) key metric is $ per sq ft. Its possible to do <$10 per sq ft in most of USA. So for a 100 sq ft room it works out to 6 sq ft envelope per sq ft of floor so $60 per sq ft of floor area. for a 500 sq ft studio that works out to $30k.

bombcar 4y ago
You can work out the estimates but it's often the finish stuff that drives the cost per square way up. Build a post-frame "barn" and get a massive space with no interior walls and get it for quite cheap. In a 2000 sq foot house, a $2k tub costs a dollar a square. That's a significant part of the total price!
throwaway4aday 4y ago
This is accurate, I've built something that size and it came out to about that.

albrewer 4y ago

I used to work as a framer during the summer when I was going to college. What you're glossing over here is that about 10-15% of the timber you buy to frame a site-built house is wasted (ad-hoc cuts, bracing, jigs, etc.) and thrown into a dumpster. If a house is pre-planned, you can use a machine that cuts each board to length, and join the ends of each board using basic joinery processes that aren't practical when building a site-built home. You can pre-fabricate things like trusses and wall segments so you (or your workers) aren't driving 100k fasteners to fabricate something a robot could build in 1/10th the time.

sigstoat 4y ago
> If a house is pre-planned, you can use a machine that cuts each board to length, and join the ends of each board using basic joinery processes that aren't practical when building a site-built home. You can pre-fabricate things like trusses and wall segments aren't prefab trusses readily available these days? i feel like i've seen plenty of trailers hauling stacks of 10 timber trusses down the road. we've also got prefab homes (not mobile/trailer/whatever homes), with modules assembled in factories and brought together at the site. unfortunately they seem to carry class connotations here in the US.
- bombcar 4y ago
  They exist and they can be designed to take advantage of things like making sure each room is designed to use full board lengths, no cuts (8 foot stud walls, for example).
- monknomo 4y ago
  yeah, prefrab trusses, prefab sip panels, modular houses, trailers and prefab houses divided up into rooms that can be trailered and joined onsite all exist
- kristov 4y ago
  A mate of mine used to work in a place that manufactured segments of regular wood framed houses. They had painted outlines on the floor, so they could cut and assemble 2x4 frames at great speed. I think you would need to make a truly massive number of these before a robot would be more cost effective. I also think that 2x4 construction would create less waste than parts CNC cut from ply sheet.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

I mostly agree with you, but I like the idea of being able to give reasonably smart but unskilled people a bunch of these boxes and an Ikea-style "how to assemble this house" and telling them to get to work. Seems like it'd scale very well for situations where you have a bunch of volunteers and need to build several houses but maybe don't have many experienced builders around.

calvinmorrison 4y ago

If you want to see a cool DIY property - the guy behind woodgears.ca lived on the property while his dad built a retreat/summer camp. https://woodgears.ca/cottage/index.html https://woodgears.ca/cottage/index.html

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Thank you for posting this, it's amazing. The woodshop tour really took me back to a different era.

ars 4y ago

> If you really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools and harvest your own trees. How is that zero carbon? That's actually higher carbon than the regular way with power tools. Human power is very inefficient, you'll emit far more carbon because you'll need to eat more. And hand harvesting a tree is also far more wasteful of CO2.