Here are some of the benefits of building your own house:

1. You know everything about it. Well, some things you forget, but most of it remains in the back of your mind. "Didn't I run some extra wire here just in case?"

2. You learn all of the skills that you will need to maintain your home, if you don't already have them. This means you never need a handyman (but your weekends are shot).

3. Just like nobody will watch your money like you, nobody will build your house like you. There are a lot of really crappy houses being built in 2023, and for the last 75 years or so. The reason for the crappiness, of course, is money.Being able to make the decision to use quality building materials instead of collecting 10% more profit, for example, can result in a really big improvement over conventional building.

4. It's really satisfying living in your handiwork. I'm sure there are more reasons - I can't write all day.

Now the pitfalls and reasons it sucks:

1. It's really frustrating living in your handiwork. For me, every time I walk past something that still needs my attention, it's a little stressor. Of course that's not too different from regular homeownership, I think. There are also a lot of times that I wish I would have planned it better.

2. Regulations (and financing) are really, really not in favor of building your own home. Unless you are a professional builder as well. Permits will expire way too soon, you won't understand their processes, they won't understand your processes. Assuming you need to borrow money, the bank won't know what the hell to do. They will literally freak out and nobody will be able to help you. This is too far outside of their routines.

3. It's a lifetime commitment. I mean, I guess it doesn't have to be, but for me it definitely feels that way. I built too big, and now I'm stuck working on it for what feels like forever.

Also, I'm in a temperate climate (Georgia, USA) where I don't have to worry about cold weather too much. I'm back in the woods where people don't ask too many questions. I have the support of my family, which I couldn't have done without. Overall, I'm happy with where I am. I usually enjoy the work, and at this point I don't mind taking time to do other things as well.

Let’s say something that can generate house plans according to some parameters.

Or will you be able to give these plans to a plumber, mason, roofer, ... and have their questions answered?

Building plans are generally pretty simple but there's a designer (engineer or architect) that backs them up (and gets sued if something goes wrong)

https://www.lhba.com/student-homes-gallery

https://www.argentina.gob.ar/habitat/modelos-de-vivienda

I don' know where are you from, but be advised that construction techniques that we use are mostly brick based with reinforced concrete structure.

Here you can find multiple projects for free approved and shared by gov agency.

https://www.thespruce.com/free-tiny-house-plans-1357142

However building any house is about 10 times as much work as you think it will be. Once the main structure is built and roofed in you are about 10-20% done.

For my money this fold-out tiny house on steroids with a base price of $85k is way more cost effective than self-building a house from free plans.

https://podxgo.com/pages/grande-s1

You know what made the biggest difference? Looking at actual houses. Plans on paper, or even the (universally crappy) 3D simulations are nothing like walking into an actual house and seeing what works, and what doesn't.

What "works" is ultimately very subjective: a mix of your personal requirements and your personal taste. Abstract drawings are too dry, to objective, and just don't convey how a house actually feels, when you are inside the structure.

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I built a house in Cape Cod (Massachusetts, United States,) a few years ago. A few things to consider:

When I started working with my GC, he had a whole filing cabinet full of designs. They weren't "open source," (as in copyrighted under GPL/MIT/Apache,) but he scanned the design we started from.

I then used (shockingly) preview on Mac to cut and paste it up to move some walls and rooms around. (Basically, we took some space out of the master bedroom to make one of the other bedrooms larger. The master bedroom still has a lot of extra space.)

He then sent my changes to a professional designer who brought the design up to something that the contractors could follow, and made the garage deeper so we had extra storage and a garage door for a riding lawn mower. In 2017, in Cape Cod, this cost me a little over $1000.

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But, if you really want to get creative, I suggest hiring an architect. They have the experience that you, as an untrained novice, don't have. A good architect should be able to weigh your desires and give you something that'll be better than you could imagine.

Considering that redos are very expensive when building a house, spending a few thousand on an architect will be much cheaper than spending tens of thousands on a "redo" after the fact.

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Furthermore, if there is a house you like, at least in MA, it's easy to find the dimensions online. Just google "[town name] GIS", and you will find the town's database of all homes. Enter the address (or street,) and you will be able to find room layouts (with sizes) used for assessments, and even the assessment of value for the home. These are all publicly available records.

It's also useful to pull the GIS data of any land you're planning on buying (in MA.) This will tell you who paid what for the land going back as far as the records are available. You can use this in negotiations. (I knew that my GC overpaid for the land before the 2008 crash, so I adjusted my negotiation style accordingly.)

All the listings from 1908 to 1940 are at http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/byimage.htm

You'll need him anyway because of the building permit.

Someone already wrote: ads. Go to your house/flat hunting website of choice, use the appropriate filters (house/flat) floors, sqm/sqft, etc. Usually the photos and the layout are there, and if you put a price range you can also see the cheap ones vs the expensive ones.

Any plan (at least in my area) is going to require an licensed Architect stamp and engineering to match local code.

It's also worth it to spend the money up front to get a house designed that fits your lot (terrain, light, elevation, etc) - you'll more than make up for it in final home value.

Why go through the trouble to build something if you’re just going to get a mediocre building plan someone is willing to give away for free?

In other words, you get what you pay for.

The same way an architecture would be wise to converse with software developers to start building a mental model of their industry, so should you in the reverse.

I was shocked when I was looking to have a new home built a few years ago how much you have to spend to actually get into a "custom home" and not a fairly templated house.

I'm definitely looking at the ZIP system and friends, and for those interested I'll drop some links I've been following:

https://www.youtube.com/@StudPack

https://www.northernbuilt.pro

It turns out that a roof built with the basic standard components can handle a large enough snow load for most locations. Even if it can't, the roof it generally engineered separately and placed on top, so you can interchange a different one without changing the house plans.

If you don't have a basement you delete the stairs down and get a closet which is also used for a tornado shelter.

A house in Minnesota is designed to withstand hurricanes and floods - It turns out storms can momentarily get as bad as a hurricane and so houses everywhere need to handle it. Likewise MN gets minor earthquakes - it is rare, but still happens enough that unless it greatly increases costs (it doesn't that much) you take in the earthquake work someone else does.

No California does have major earthquakes that Minnesota houses probably cannot handle. California is on their own code system. However Minnesota shares codes with states that get hurricanes and floods - those states put in a little more insulation than is needed, while they build for hurricanes - and both states get better results for it. Meanwhile those designing building components can scale better (cheaper!) knowing that once their parts work in one state they can sell to others.

Around here every house has a basement. Flooding is an extremely minor concern given the terrain and you want the foundation to be below the frost line. The provincial building code requires a heated basement on clay soil (all nearby soil is clay) to a depth of max(1.2m, frost line).

https://web.archive.org/web/20170505101559/http://archinia.c...

Likely the same in the US.

https://ncma.org/resource/faq-20-14/

Every type has some specific trade name that rarely matters much - your images look like the type that interlock with a specific keying profile.

This should be our home for at least 15 years though since I have a good track record of remote work, family in the area, and young kids. So hopefully the extra expense won't matter as much in the long run

I don't think building is ever cheaper unless you put years of your own labor into it and you are really good at that kind of stuff

I'm sure it varies regionally, but where I'm at (Kansas City market) you have to be in about the $800k range, generally, to be able to work with an actual architect and build something custom - and that's just plain out of reach for most people.

The "then architect" part of the process results in McMansions that are awful to live in, are environmentally disastrous, and contribute to the growing unaffordability of housing for all but the upper classes.

Firstly, only a tiny fraction of people are interested in building a house. And the number that build 2 are a rounding error.

Developers already have architects on staff, already have libraries of plans, why would they pay for this?

Then, every detail of the generated plan would need to be checked. Every. Single. Detail.

Most people who build a house do do because they want to make a mark, or they need something they can't find. They are all literally edge cases. They'll sit with an architect for hours trying to get that dream out of their heads onto paper, adapting to limitations of budget, planning approval, local regulations, budget, site, budget and so on.

There is no market for a product like this.

I'm around Kansas City. The biggest builders here will be in multiple subdivisions at once, with varying topography, and they may or may not have been the ones to plat out the lots.

They will absolutely sell you any house plan in their catalog to go on any lot, so long as it fits. You might get a walkout basement instead of a full in-ground basement, but that's about how much it varies.

The only variability is that smaller plans would be available in nicer subdivisions (that require bigger/expensive houses) and larger plans won't be available in subdivisions where they don't physically fit on the lots.

But you're right that you can basically get a permit for nearly anything if your pockets are deep enough and the restrictions are often arbitrary. That's why I mentioned fast-tracking: the area we built in had fairly strict requirements compared to houses only a few blocks away and any deviation would have required a costly and lengthy approval process (measured in months rather than weeks) so staying within the requirements was primarily a financial decision.

This is one of the reasons why I would believe Lowes or Home Depot or another construction supply place would 52 such a piece of software. They have those zillions of "something" that get installed, and the lumber. They already know what all those people buy.

At least for a construction company: pick a general house, gives you adaptations for common landscapes, choose interior finishing(s) / style(s), gives you plans (with adaptations), already has them approved for your area (with variants), gives you parts list, gives you plumbing/wiring, gives you button to put it all in your "cart," drive to store, pick up house worth of stuff, Lowes/Home Depot make a quick $50k-100k or so.

If you build a development, you say, give me 10 of that. Build it again, say I'd like my old order.

If you tried to accomodate all of these methods now, your looking at much higher costs. But if your open source plans include all these methods, and people can produce kits that are shipped to you (either raw, or partially assembled) because they are identical, the costs would quickly start dropping..

And yet we were able to make Figma.

If the HOA allows it... ;)

That said, the processing time is probably more costly than the direct expenses because having to wait longer means you likely already pay a part of the mortage rate (most banks have start-up costs on these loans and you are generally expected to secure the loan before you have the approval). The entire process is expensive enough for the actual fees not to be a meaningful issue.

If you casually assume everyone lives in the northern hemisphere.

Don't worry, we're already used to it with you all decorating websites with snow-themes in December, and saying "releasing this spring!" when what you actually mean is "April".

Yes they do. Cooling is a large energy cost. Besides, you end up with that much space in your walls anyway just because for material strength reasons you need wide walls.

> sitting on a 8-ft deep basement

A basement is a line item that can be added or deleted at will. If you don't have stairs to the basement you still need that space except it gets a floor and is marked tornado shelter.

> with a steep roof pitch for snow to slide off of

They still build the same roof pitches so rain runs off.

> you want to cut corners, because building to code in New York would be overkill in Texas.

Not really because much of house design that matters is about structural matters where thickness matters. Other parts are about standard parts, you can buy a 2x4 off the self. While 2x3s exists, they cost more than a 2x4 and are generally lower quality.

Like, going by objective measures like "how well it is insulated and how much it costs to cool/heat it", or "how well it uses the space of the plot" most of them fall well within "good", partly because at least on insulation level most countries require them to be at least decent.

But how well that fits the new owners ? Now that's where there would be actual benefit from either customization or doing it from scratch.

"Engineer's Disease" -- the idea that deep domain and problem solving skills easily transfer over to other areas in anything but a superficial sense.

Also Americans assuming their experience matches the experience of the rest of the world, despite being a tiny percentage of it - peak HN.

Wouldn't fly here in Germany, or in Croatia - you need plans signed off by a licensed architect or structural engineer for anything residential.

Haha, yes

Peak self own. I literally asked an architect before posting.

> there was absolutely no architect or engineer stamp on them.

Did you review the copies on file at the planning department? While there are exemptions in some states for simple or stick built homes, larger planned developments or construction financing (which all big builders use) will require it.