I built a house. It took 3 days to frame it up, so it looked like a house, 3 months until all the doors, windows, etc were in and it could be locked up, and I moved into it at the 6 month point. All work done on weekends, and evenings by myself and my wife. A bit of help from some friends. We did all the work except for the pouring of the concrete foundation and the hot tar roof.

It was a good experience, something I had never done before. I learned a lot and it was a set of skills I have used often since then (this was in 1998). The confidence that you get from finishing a large project has been great too.

The real time consumption is all the little things - network cabling, gardening, finishing and trim inside and outside. Just building a structure to live in is quite easy, and does not take that long.

I want to do this as well for a Tiny House (320 sq ft + 160 sq ft loft). I think the physical building part will take six months (assuming I take part-time work with my day job). I estimate I will save hundreds of thousands in the end when compared to the traditional route.

It is the legal, planning and design, all the research, which is the invisible cost that takes at least as long as the physical building activity.

Even non-Tiny Houses have a cost which is mostly paper. I'd like to see a breakdown of costs excluding labour and materials across the world. I don't think people realize how much of a house price is arbitrary. High house prices aren't necessarily a sign of a wealthy neighbourhood, it could be just the opposite e.g. new regulations made it cost prohibitive for new builds, which makes everybody look good on paper. And now the average person can't buy the average house.

> The real time consumption is all the little things

Yes! The impressive part, the framing/sheathing/cladding is instantaneous in comparison.

You should do it! I don't think it will take 6 months if you are only working part time. The house I built was 1600 sq ft, 3 bedroom and I was working 60 hours a week while I built it. I found working all weekend on the house re-charged me for the job during the week.

A tiny house should not cost hundreds of thousands - wood is just not that pricey at Home Depot. You should start pricing it out and give it a shot. It is a tremendous feeling of accomplishment to live in a house you built yourself.

> I don't think it will take 6 months if you are only working part time.

It wouldn't take very long but I have some special features in my Tiny House design nobody else has. Here are three examples:

I am using a spiral staircase of 3 sq ft. Marvelous design! http://www.eestairs.com/en/36_1m2_by_eestairs_%28efficient_s...

Then I am creating a space illusion using a special one way mirror.

I can place two one way mirrors with a terrarium (a small indoor garden) between them. This way two different rooms (bathroom and stairs) can see the terrarium reflected but neither space can see the other. .

Normal one way mirrors require one side to be light and the other dark. With this one way mirror I can have light on both sides. http://www.okaluxna.com/products/viewblock/

I also hope to use natural daylighting with a solar collector and fibre optic cable. This will require some experiments so I am going to do those first.

I'll put all this up online for HN when things get interesting. In particular I'm looking for a cheap way transmit daylight (I have fibre cable but the normal kind is very thin).

> I found working all weekend on the house re-charged me for the job during the week.

I hope that happens to me! ;-)

> A tiny house should not cost hundreds of thousands - wood is just not that pricey at Home Depot. You should start pricing it out and give it a shot.

Looks to be 50k - 75k so far. You can build Tiny Houses really cheaply, even for 5k, but I'm optimizing for longevity (like a custom built stainless steel trailer foundation) and have unusual design features so it will be at the higher end.

Again, there's a lot of work that you just glossed over. There were man-years of work put into making the doors, bolts, screws, boards, and everything else you just had to assemble into a house.

Try building a house from stuff you find in nature, and it will take a lot longer than a few months.

Nobody in the economy works ab initio.

Since the house builder is proceeding from the same point as commerical house builders this is a fair comparison.

If you're interested in ab initio home building I direct you to Primitive Technology on Youtube. That guy really does build from the beginning. No exposition too.

Takes a couple days for habitat for humanity folks to build one. They have a lot of people, but very little skill and poor tools. A single person could feasibly build a house in a few months.

You might find this interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecekondu

It depends, upon your definition of house and on what kind of technology you have access to to build your house with, whether it takes months or years or days or even more or even less than that. See this news [1] regarding the time issue.

So that's not the main big problem, the main problem is the cost of land. Today that has become a very big problem and the concentration of jobs in certain cities (parts) only has exacerbated the problem.

The rich people have already purchased huge swathes of lands in important cities/areas and this has created/added to the problem of inequality in a very important manner. This problem can be solved by taking away the excess land from the rich after allowing them to keep some minimum amount. Another factor is population and its vast growth. The population and its growth should also be checked/controlled in a very big way.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/3d-printed-houses_n_5773...

From a quick search: "The 2012 Survey of Construction (SOC) from the Census Bureau shows that on average it takes about 7 months from obtaining a building permit to completing a new single-family home."

In many places there are rules designed to make housing more expensive, such as requiring houses to be bigger than they need to be. Poor people living near you reduce the value of your house, so there's a strong incentive to make new housing less affordable.

Yes, but it takes something like 30 people working on it (honestly no idea how many are required)? so 7 months * 30 and we are getting close to 18 man years.

For a modest house you wouldn't have much more than 5 people on site at any given time.

You aren't counting the work that went into creating bricks, tiles and two-by-fours. You have to start from trees, clay and marble.

That doesn't negate the parent's point, of course.