How many bathrooms are you planning on?

What is the air conditioned or heated size of the home you owner-built?

by Mark A. Smith

For starters, we did this ourselves. We had many experiences, some painful, many joyful, that prompted us to write. We only owner-built one time, but managed to save 43% on the cost of a custom home on the first try. That made us think that many ordinary people could succeed at owner-building if they had the tools.

Our book makes the somewhat groundbreaking discovery that the major savings on your project are not from trade work but from management work. We call this "cold sweat equity." In our case we knocked ourselves out saving $20,000 in trade work but spent much less time saving $125,000 as the general contractors on our new home.

Since this equity savings constitutes pure untaxed wealth, we show how an average person can make much more money building equity than they can in their employment.

Many of the books on our subject bypass planning and go right to the juicy part - breaking ground for your new house or addition. We show that two thirds of your management effort should be spent on planning, and only a third on actual construction.

The real management tools of your project are a budget, a schedule, and a written list of house features. We provide these tools along with worksheets and note pages that are easy to customize. We even offer software templates to equip you for the job.

What makes our book good reading is that we conducted over 300 interviews for the third edition of people who have been through the process: tradesmen, contractors, suppliers, inspectors, lenders - and provide their often pithy observations to save you time and trouble.

The book is very realistic, but it is encouraging. We really help you see the steps to completion and how to do them. We've filled it with useful items not available in other books in the category, like over 200 colorful sidebars with comments from readers and quotations from other books.

Everything we saw a need for we tried to produce. We offer extensive support materials including this web site with more than 5,000 pages of information, a toll-free phone line, more than 60 additional books and reports, MP3's (coming), DVDs and software. We want you to succeed.