Being An Owner-Builder: Lessons Learned

what is going on everybody welcome back to the channel as you can see the house is done well pretty much there's still a ton of little bitty things throughout the house that I've still got yet to do but these are things that we were anticipating that we're gonna be doing after it moved into the house but the bulk of the work is done and we're moving in next week as a matter of fact so let me thinkin is that so big trusses are up if you haven't seen that video then things going up you gotta check that out that was a hell of a couple days anyway so those of you that have watched the original video that it did for being an owner builder and the things that you need to know thanks for watching that it's got a lot it's got a lot of views on I mean I'm not up in the millions or anything but it's definitely the highest view channel today or the highest view video that I have on my channel so thanks for watching that and if it's giving you the motivation to you know start looking into building your own house definitely I say go for it but this video is one that you need to watch as well because this one is a follow up to that and some lessons learned so something I get asked a lot and this is I've got this question from the bank I've got it from help you build I've got it from the mortgage company I've even got it from insurance agents that I'm just getting coats on this house with the topic just happens to come up yes would you do this again and the answer is undoubtedly yes it would I wouldn't do this again however there are a few things that I would definitely do differently so the first thing that bit me in the ass is how you pay your contractors now when it comes to paying the contractors this goes one of two different ways or there's two different types of work being done there's fast work and then there's long work so fast works say like floors paint drywall things like that that a crew of say 3 or 4 guys is gonna knock out in a few days maybe even a week generally you're only gonna pay those guys once the work is done very seldom are you ever gonna pay for materials up front and then labor at the end the only thing I could think of that you would do something like that would be is your material for your framing and your concrete those are big big ticket items that most companies do not want to pay out of pocket at the beginning of a job so they put that on you to get that stuff taken care of but that's a little bit beside the point that's not really the focus of this point the point is don't pay for work that hasn't been done so say for example the foundation these guys came in they started doing the grading now he had already set up with these guys that they're gonna get paid in milestones so what that means is that came out degrading they did the forms once all the forms rep they got a check after that started the bag work and to fill work inside the form walls once all that was done and they get another check this continued with the rebar and then the final finish and pouring of the concrete itself so all in all I think there was four maybe five checks throughout the entire process of the foundation and they're pretty good size checks but you know they got paid after the work was done so then when it came to the framers we had a discussion at the very beginning right before they were gonna start work about how they wanted to get paid and the general contractor running Crewe had said what we'd like to get paid you know weekly and I said okay I'm cool with that I didn't have any issues doing that we had a good rapport had many conversations with the guy that met him several times and he had excellent reviews from people in the area that had used him before and so I didn't have any problems painting weekly these guys were gonna be out here for a very long time you know possibly two to three months framing this house and then they stick it up at these trusses up so the trusses alone was a separate check it was specifically written into their bid so I had a pretty good feeling that everything was gonna go smooth from the get-go so get them paid weekly that's how we win so they get started you know the works being done they're moving along real fast and every Wednesday of every week I would get a get an invoice from the general contractor so hey the guys have done X and X amount of work here's the amount get in a draw so I get that invoice on Wednesday I've put together to draw a request to the bank get it approved get these guys paid you know by a third of the evening or Friday sometime and then the general contractor could pay his crew before that weekend starts so they can have some money for the weekend so everything was going great until it came to the end once we had all the trusses up the roof decking was on and just about everything we're starting to get buttoned up and they were finalizing the last little details of the house I came out here on Monday morning and they're gone there's no tools no we're air lines no extension cords nothing they're gone and I didn't freak me out at first because there were other days that they didn't show up because they got pulled on another big job in the area then they needed extra guys on for a day or half a day and they would scoot over to that and they would come back the next day no big deal so Tuesday comes around they're still nowhere to be found so I try to call them see where the suitor they're at can't get all the framers I called the general contractor he hadn't heard from he tries calling he can't get a hold of him this went on for three weeks so three weeks nothing was being done in this house while mean the general contractor standing there with a thumbs up her butts wondering where did this crude they completely ghosted both of us come to find out I wasn't paying attention to how much money I had paid these guys and I had just about exhausted the funds allocated for Frankie and they knew it so stuck me in a really difficult position stuck the general contractor in a difficult spot because he doesn't have any framers anymore and I can't get any work done so what do you do so we talked back and forth and I decided that you know what I'll just go ahead and finish out the stuff that needs to be done myself it wasn't that much stuff at least I thought it turned out to be a hell of a lot more stuff than I had anticipated some of the biggest ticket items or one of the hardest things to do was the soffits at the front and back of these porches in there I mean there's 30 feet off the ground so I didn't know I was like I'd just get a bucket lift and call it a day well have a bucket lift cost money you know it takes time to put these things up it's setting the project back so what I should have done was told the general contractor amen this isn't my fault you need to find contract or you need to find framers to come out here and it's this job that isn't how it happened and that's what I should have done so the second thing here that was kind of lessons learned is getting very very very detailed about everything that's going into this house and making sure that you have got a line item or a contractor or something that covers all those details case in point baseboards finishing the inside of the house from paint out that's something that I knew that I was gonna do from the beginning and that I wanted to do well I wanted to do it at the beginning not so much at the end but that was something that I wanted to do now I thought okay you know what there's there's just there's a lot of baseboards in the house but I didn't actually even measure how much baseboard was gonna take to do this job it turned out to be like $5,000 worth of trim going into this house that's no labor so if you don't get detailed about how much of these small kind of details are in a room how are you gonna pay for these things right so that's what you need to do at the very beginning so before you even get started with anything and you're still working on getting bins together and getting that proposal together for the bank visualize yourself in every room of the house and go floor to ceiling corner to corner write down every little detail about that room and be very very meticulous about how you do this and do this for every room in the house okay and then group all that stuff together by trade so what stuff to finish carpenter are gonna do what stuff is the flooring I'm gonna do it paint and electrical when you gotta yeah oh yeah when you start getting bids from all of these different things make sure that each one of those contractors bids has no details in it if it doesn't need to ask them hey I think you forgot about something or if you're gonna be doing it yourself make sure you know how you're gonna be paying for these things because at the end of the job if you're doing all the finished work myself they like you want to do floors well okay there's floors there's the material and there's glue then there's sandpaper and then there's nails and there's a lot of little bitty expendable things that if you're doing multiple trips to Home Depot you know a nickel and diming you to death it can add up to thousands of dollars if you're not careful so get detailed about these things and get it written down and have some kind of way of paying for it either as the contractor doing the work or you've gotten funds in your draw and you can as you neither do as a lot out of them or you could add an industry contingency make sure you know how you're paying for all those kind of things alright so the last thing that is really really critical to getting a house finished and keeping it moving without any big hiccups is having a handyman so for example you know apart from my framers not finishing the job there were things that weren't done properly or weren't done at all for framing so say for example this corner right here with his transitions from the ceiling to the wall there's a two-by-four there well that wasn't there when the drywall kurd got here and I didn't know it I wasn't something I was paying attention to I was focused on everything else that I had to finish up in this house so the drywall crew gets going to like hey man this isn't gonna work he needs something to go here if I hadn't have been capable enough to cut up 2x4 and put it in there and keep the drywall crew going they were gonna have to leave and come back on another day when it was done so if they leave now you got to call your framer or somebody else to come out and do that thing and then you got to call your drywall crew to come back out and finish the job so depending on how heavy the work is in your area like say out here there's like 10 subdivisions going up within about three miles of this place so there's all the framing crews and all the other contractors man I just booked up so they could be two or three weeks before you get that drywall crew back out here to finish your house and in the meantime you're getting further and further behind on your timeline so handyman pays their weight and goal for this kind of stuff because it keeps these trades moving now Slover handyman as far as that guy is concerned it could be yourself if you're you know if you're a good DIY person you got a good set of tools are framing a framing hammer a framing nailer is maybe not some that you have to buy but if you're gonna be doing a lot of that kind of thing it's gonna save your bacon as far as our shoulder is concerned but you know if you got a basic set of tools you got a hammer you got nails and you know a little bit about how stuff like this needs to go in yeah you should be good otherwise find somebody you know find your you know you got a good neighbor that you're good friends with and the guy knows how to do this kind of stuff he's got the time to be out here holler at him otherwise hit up the yellow pages you know Google finally hey man that's local in the area that can be out here at the beginning of some of these trades because it's kind of really gonna save you when it comes to these town problems so the very last thing and last piece of advice that I can give anybody that's watching this is you know there's a lot of DIY people out there including myself and you know we think looking at a project that far down the line oh yeah new paint I can do backsplash I can do tile you know all these things you can do sure you may be able to do those things but what I didn't anticipate was how much work it was going to be and it is a ton of work and it took a lot of time hell I mean just doing the floor to like a month and a half it's just not something you think about at the beginning of something like this so I would unless you are in a real Jam for money and you don't mind stretching this project out to a year to a year and a half I would strongly advise against doing a ton of the work yourself pick one maybe two things you want to do paint you can do paint paints actually one of the things that I would recommend doing yourself it costs a lot of money to paint the inside of this house to pay somebody to do it we painted it for a fraction of the cost and it only took us like three or four days to paint everything and this is a really high ceilings in here so you know abajo an airless sprayer and we went out and bought our paint and we got the job done so that's one area that I would recommend that you know do yourself that's a good DIY project and it's not terribly difficult to do so do that the rest of the stuff leave to the professionals please do yourself a favor I've done all this kind of work before but I've never done it in an entire house before so unless you're a professional carpenter or finished carpenter tile guys up on those lines and you have got the tools the know-how more importantly the manpower to get this kind of job done don't do it just pay somebody to do it don't overpay but get paid it'll save the money you spin will pay for the headaches you don't get so with that guys that's the end of the video thanks for watching the previous video - this has been hugely successful on the channel like 5,000 views which I know in the world of YouTube isn't a lot but you know for me just kind of get it starting this thing I'm I'm all giggly about it so thank you so much guys for watching that and like this video give it a thumbs up if you haven't already subscribe please subscribe I do have more videos planned for catching everybody up from the framing and the truss raising to this point of the house and immediately I didn't get to take a whole ton of video for this stuff because I was under the clock trying to get a lot of stuff done so I didn't bring out the camera all the time to videotape a lot of stuff I took out a whole ton of pictures but not a lot of videos so and I didn't even have time to edit anything when I got home and of the day I was done I didn't want to do anything but sit on the couch and just Netflix and chill so so forgive me for not having all that kind of stuff to get it for you guys but content is coming so and in the meantime if you are not if you're not following me on Instagram go check me out there I've got pictures and video little small video clips from start to finish to this whole place and that'll feel a lot of little gaps between the videos and kind of keep the guys going so anyway again guys thanks for watching I will see you guys next time

Channel: Petryfied Woodworks

Views: 42,563

Keywords: Owner/Builder, Owner_Builder, Lessons Learned, Home Builder, DIY Home Construction, Home, Construction

Id: KdlU-sV_IAg

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020