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If I had a lot of money and my budget was pretty large:Things I would include:Foam-concrete-form walls with 10″ concrete core. This wall system is simply one of the best conventional-construction methods for regulating interior temperatures of a residence.3″ Rigid foam insulation above roof trusses, R-30 wired to bottom side of roof deck, and R-38 insulation on ceiling deck (attic stays super cool, HVAC ducts and equipment are now in an insulated space.Standing-seam metal roof. By far the longest lasting, most secure roofing out there. Looks nice too.Single story above ground - 2nd story in basement (again… temperature regulation & comfort).Full wrap-around porch (Keeps sun off the walls - I live in a HOT climate).Solar panels (more than I need) & battery storage, like a Power-wall.Radiant floor heating… the electric mat kind… to supplement the high-efficiency heat pump (see: solar panels). Very few things in life are as awesome as walking on a warm floor in the chill of winter.Whole-house vacuum system with “toe-kick” openings so instead of needing a dust pan all the time, you just kick open the little jack and sweep your dirt/dust right into the hole as it sucks it up.Large induction range (stove + oven) with a separate built-in oven. Double ovens are awesome… but this way if one fries you still have the other to use.Large pantry with an extra, upright freezer inside.Large Pot & Pan drawers instead of double doors with shelves behind them… or pullout shelves behind them. Why have pullout shelves which require you to open the doors first if you can just have drawers that have the same amount of room?Large, butcher-block, IslandLarge laundry room on BEDROOM side of house, not the kitchen/garage side. Laundry in basement because that’s where the bedrooms are.Kids play room RIGHT NEXT to the living room. If you install a “remote” playroom, little kids will not use it because they want to be in the living room by you, and then as they get older you won’t be able to monitor their media/online presence as easily when they DO want to use it. Put it right next to the living room.Separate toilet room in Master Bathroom. My wife and I are comfortable with each other… but even that has limits.A node to the master bedroom that has a separate door to the bedroom, closet, and bathroom. That way if one spouse wakes up early, they can leave the bedroom area and shut the door once, and then travel between the closet and bathroom while they get ready without having to disturb their partner another time by opening the bedroom door again. All the while, the a door between the node and the hallway allows it to remain private.A kitchen/dining room/living room arrangement that allows me to see both out the front and the back of my house at the same time. To some this may not seem private enough, but I would love the open feeling.A living room that is not a walkway to somewhere else. Walk by? Sure… just not through.A mudroom that leads to the backyard or attached garage. It must have a deep sink, some cupboards, and a bench seat with shoe storage below and coat hooks above.A hose spigot on the outside of the house near the mudroom and garage that has both hot and cold water. Sometimes husbands/kids/pets are too dirty for even the mudroom to handle. Sometimes it’s just nice to have hot water for cleaning something outside… maybe even a car in the winter time. If you need a water softener… make that spigot be connected through the water softener system (for car cleaning).A whole house fan for cooling the house down on hot days with cool night times.4″ thick filters on HVAC returns. The flimsy, 1″ thick filters are referred to as “rock catchers” by our AC guys and have to be replaced 4x as often. The 4″ thick filter has 4x the surface area and yet does a better job at filtering without restricting the flow.Large back patio (covered and rain proof). As a remodeling contractor this has to be one of our most common projects… making back patios larger. Even a lot of custom homes underestimate the size of a back patio and end up adding to it later on. Lattice type patios that aren’t 100% coverage may look nice, but are useless in the rain and drip a lot, even on medium cold mornings due to condensation.Electric water heater (tank-style) with hot water loop (see: only if I had solar panels). If you have enough solar electricity so that the increase in usage isn’t as big a deal, having the convenience of a hot water loop is amazing. 2-seconds to get hot water at any faucet in your house. An electric water heater is by far the easiest and cheapest type to maintain, repair, and replace. Sure, tankless units take up less space and can produce infinite hot water, but after 10+ years of installing them, they are not as reliable, require strict, yearly maintenance, have extremely picky warranty coverage, and are not ideal with a loop. They are horrible when using with a kitchen because the constant short bursts of the hot water valve are often not long enough to activate it.Things I would eliminate:Formal dining room: We have remodeled countless homes where people had formal dining rooms they never used. Instead, have one larger dining room right next to the kitchen.Front entry that never gets used. Plan the house so that when guests drive up, the natural place to go knock on the door is the front door, not the side door by the garage.Fireplace in master bedroom. No one has one has ever told me “Oh, I love it SO much and use it all the time!” I have heard, however “yeah, it looks OK, but I never use it and I wish I could put the bed there.”Humongous spa-tub & platform. If you want to sit in a hot tub, get a hot tub. Again, I have, in 15+ years as a home designer and 43 years growing up in construction, never heard someone say “I’m so glad I installed a tub the size of a hot tub that takes 45 minutes to fill!” I have heard, however, that customers that actually take a bath every day prefer a more narrow, smaller sized tub. Besides, the whole 80s-90s style spa-tub & platform take up ridiculous amounts of room.Sunken anything. Establishing a sunken living area means not allowing for any future rearranging of the layout. We’ve filled in numerous sunken living rooms, and not once has a customer that had one said “Man, this sunken room is great!”Lighting that is mounted in “innovated and unique” ways. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use trendy light fixtures. Just that you should use fixtures that have standard mounting methods so that future generations (or even the future you) can replace any fixtures they find repulsively outdated with new ones that are more up to date.Built-in entertainment centers and built-in speakers. With the new onset of flatscreen TVs and wireless everything, the days of huge entertainment equipment is gone. All the equipment you might need can be stored in some sort of movable piece of furniture, like a hutch or a bench type of thing.

I may have some authority to comment on this, since I have actually built my own house.To be completely honest, I bought a small chalet, completely unfinished, just with a foundation, outer walls, roof, and some sub flooring in place. Thereafter, I did all the wiring, plumbing, heating, masonry, ceilings, insulation, interior walls, floors, tiling, trim, appliances, painting, deck, and everything else.Then a few years later I expanded the house, more than doubling it and adding a basement. For that I did the design and architecture, framing, roofing, and rebuilding the original house (obliterating and reconstructing a good part of it), plus all of the foregoing -- plumbing, wiring, etc.Virtually all of this was done on weekends, plus a few vacation weeks, over a period of years. I had some help from my children and from a few friends, from time to time; but I would say 85 or 90 percent was my own labor.Because all of this started long ago, I paid $28,000 for the land and the original shell. Materials and appliances for the initial project were around $25,000. Then when I did the expansion, I kept track of purchases until the new total got past something like $106,000. I lost interest in keeping track after that, but I daresay that I put more than ten thousand additional into it after that; maybe 20 or so.To me, that is serious money; to you, it may be trivial, or perhaps impossibly large. The important point is, that it was under my control. I could buy as cheaply, or as good, materials as I wanted. Top-grade shingles, for instance. Plumbing pipes of 3/4" copper, instead of 1/2", and copper instead of galvanized. (Now, of course, plastic tubing is an option.) Wooden interior walls, instead of drywall. Big, stylish windows and sliding French doors. Skylights. There are all sorts of options that make a better house, which will add -- maybe considerably -- to the cost.I wanted a huge, heroic fireplace in my main recreation room, which of course gets much more use than the living room in the original part of the house (and which has a dinky, but serviceable, fireplace). The masonry for this -- concrete blocks down to basement floor level, and up beyond the second floor gable roof) -- aren't all that expensive; couple or three thousand. Flue pipes and other hardware add something. But the labor, all that masonry work and carrying the blocks and mortar upward or downward, laying the bricks and the blocks and making everything level and perpendicular ... that was a lot of work. Plus carrying and lifting 40 tons or so, piece by piece.And I also wanted a fireplace in the new master bedroom, upstairs. Actually, that is something I had ordered in a house that was built for us in Indiana, about 15 years earlier. When I showed it in the plans to my builder, he said "... zat is a Very big lugzury ..." (he was a European immigrant, with a heavy accent). And of course he was right, but it is a luxury that we enjoyed enormously. And so for the house I then built myself. More materials, an additional chimney, lots of additional work -- but it sure has been nice to have.The point is, you can spend relatively little in building your own home, or quite a lot depending on the quality and luxuries you want in the home. We put in some huge, custom-cut beams, just for appearance. We got some upscale plumbing fixtures. We put a total of four bathrooms in the house, so that the upstairs bedrooms have private full baths. We installed a huge hot tub in the rec. room, and even a small very personal hot tub in the master bedroom bath. We built a seven-foot-long two-person shower in the MBR bath; someone told me "That's just for newlyweds" -- which was correct, as I married for a second time, not long after moving into the new addition. But you don't Need such things.Spreading the construction out over a long (actually, very long) period allowed me to hunt for, or wait for, bargains on a great deal of what I bought. At showroom prices for everything in the house, I could have spent tens of thousands more. And doing my own building allowed using some items which I got at a bargain, because I could adjust the size of a room or a nook so that they would fit just right.Your cost will be greatly affected by how much work you have to hire other people to do. I had to hire someone to excavate for my new basement, which was costly; but maybe you have your own backhoe, and a place to dump the excavated material. I built out in a rural area, so I could do my own plumbing and wiring. If you are in a town or city, you may be required to have those done by a licensed plumber and electrician; and those contractors are very costly.Learning how to lay bricks and concrete blocks does not come from a book; and unless you are trained, a novice can botch things pretty badly. Same for laying concrete -- you have to do it rapidly, and you have to do it right the first time. If you mess up concrete work too badly, it will cost you a bundle to have it jackhammered out and hauled away. So I hired a guy to pour and finish the basement floor. Fortunately, my son had a friend whose father is a stone mason, and the guy was himself learning to be a mason. So he came over a few times, and taught me the rudiments of laying bricks and laying blocks. Unless you know how now, you had better either find such a friend, or else plan on hiring a (costly) masonry contractor. (In the end, I laid the basement walls and built a 40' chimney, 6' wide, without a twist or a lean or a leak.)We bought a furnace and an oil tank, and ran the heating pipes throughout the new addition and the original house also, replacing the prior electric heat. A combined plumbing and carpentry job. Again, you have to design the heating system correctly, and install it without error, or you will have to hire a professional to do (or redo) it, at some considerable cost.Where you build your house, relative to where you are now, can have a considerable impact on costs. We built about 200 miles from our main home, which entailed driving and paying tolls every weekend. Because we began with a shell, we were able to camp out in the original house while working on it, saving a lot on motel bills. And we were willing to eat from a camp stove until the kitchen got built; but otherwise we could have had some considerable restaurant bills.So if you plan to build your new house within reach of your present home, and stay in your present house until you can move into the new one, your costs will be much lower than if you have to travel, or if you have to move out of your current home, and rely on motels and restaurants. I didn't include any travel or meals costs in the price of my home, but over time that amounted to lots of tanks of gas and tolls, food checks and tips.Of course, when we did the addition we could stay in the original house, and after moving into the addition we could tear apart and rebuild the original house.It is pretty easy to figure out the lumber, drywall, insulation, and so on needed for your basic house, then to price that out. You can either get estimates for the plumbing, heating, electrical, masonry, and so on; or compute the materials needed, and price those out. You can estimate the amount you will need for nails and fittings and paint and insulation and all of the other stuff, and come up with a cost. Then you can decide how fancy you want to go with interior finishing, kitchen appliances, bath fixtures, and additions such as fireplaces, porches, hot tubs, garages, and other such stuff. It's kind of interesting to think your way through all of that, and see just how much it will actually cost to build a house.But before you get started, be sure you have the patience and endurance to stay with it until the end. Construction work is hard effort, and very tiring. And there are lots, and lots, and lots of jobs to do. You make progress bit by bit, piece by piece, with thousands and thousands of bits and pieces. Most of those bits and pieces you have to make by yourself, measuring and drawing lines, cutting and fitting, nailing and screwing and drilling, planing and piecing and pouring. When you are shingling, whether on a roof or putting up cedar siding shingles, you can cut pieces and pound nails over and over, thinking that it is never going to end.Of course, it is doable. It is satisfying while you are doing it, and it is satisfying when you see it done. If you do something conspicuously well, you earn bragging rights. Each job you do leaves money in your pocket, compared with having had to hire someone else to do it. There is, in the end, justifiable pride in having tackled something large, complex, and difficult -- and in having conquered it. There is an absolutely incomparable feeling in knowing that your new house is your own -- not just in a legal sense of having purchased and paid for it, but having conceived it of your own mind, formed it with your own hands, raised it with your own back. assembled it with your own skill.Good luck in your endeavor.

It’s not easy.It will take you a great deal of time, and enormous effort. The process will seem to drag on forever. Probably the most important personal quality required will be perseverance; and most people don’t have enough of that to see the job though to the end. In the end, if you lack the necessary patience and persistence, you will probably lose everything you have invested and all the work you have done.For openers, you had better have a permanent place to live during the building cycle. You could not possibly live in a partly-built house while you are doing the work.With those warnings, here’s what you would do.Start with a piece of land, which you own outright. You will have plenty of things to pay for later, and you don’t want periodic payments on the land to limit what you can spend as you go.Draw up some careful plans. Know exactly what you are going to build, so that you can calculate the things you will need, right down to the last nail and 2x4. Make some careful calculations of everything that will go into the house, and cost it out. Make sure you will have that amount of money available, from your earnings and savings, and from a line of credit.Put some stakes in the ground to mark the exact location of your house. Hire a guy with an excavator to dig your basement. Don’t just build on a slab; you will need the basement, and it is the cheapest space you can have.After digging the hole, pay the guy a few thousand dollars and build some forms or the footings. Hire another guy to bring out a truckload of ready-mix concrete and to pour the footings. Be sure to pour a center pad(s) if your will need a support post(s) in the middle of the basement. Order all the concrete blocks you will need, and have them delivered. Hire someone to hump the blocks down to you, and to mix mortar, while you lay up the basement walls.Lay some foundation drains around the footings, and run the drains down the trench which you had the excavator guy dig, out to a ditch or gulley.Install basement windows as needed, having left spaces while laying the block walls. Cap the basement walls with aluminum flashing and fiberglass insulation. Place pressure-treated sill boards over these, with holes drilled to accommodate the foundation bolts you will have installed when laying the last layer of blocks. Bolt the sills down tight.Hire some guy to dump a few loads of gravel or pea stone where the basement floor will be. Smooth that, and put in a sump hole and perforated drain. Erect the support post(s). Hire some other guy to pour a concrete floor, and to finish it with a power trowel. Build a stairway to get up and down into the basement. Get your furnace delivered and installed, while the cellar is still open. Plus any needed water and sewer connections.Go outside and waterproof your basement walls. Place blueboard insulation all around. Call the excavator guy back, to backfill around the basement walls.After you pay those guys for the concrete work, get your lumber delivered. Install your central support beam, and cut and nail into place your floor joists. Make sure everything is nice and level. Install X bracing to keep the floor joists vertical.Then lay down 5/8″ CDX sub flooring over the entire area of the floor joists, of course leaving an opening for the basement stairs.Now you have a start on building your house. Lots of work left to do, lots more tools and materials to buy. You are going to have to do extensive carpentry, sheathing, and roofing. Put up all the interior walls, and a stairway to the second floor if you will have one. The roof needs tarpaper and shingling, along with ridge vents or vents in the end walls.You also have to put up gutters and drains, but that has to wait until you sheath the outside walls, put on wind protection, and apply whatever kind of siding you are going to use.Then you will install electrical wiring throughout, including junction boxes for all the outlets, light switches, wall and ceiling fixtures, and appliances. Have to drill through many, many studs. Next you will put plumbing throughout the house, including a water heater, piping, drains, and vents. More drilling out studs.Then you will install windows and doors, and insulate the place thoroughly. Next, you will drywall the interior walls and ceilings, and do the rough taping and compounding. You will then have to install kitchen cabinets and counters, sink, and bathroom fixtures. Including shower floor and stall and necessary wall tiling. Or a tub, or both.Still working, you will lay the ceramic tile in kitchen and bath(s), and perhaps the entryway. You will need to build outside steps, with footings, and whatever deck you might choose to have. (Your deck will require putting down some post footings.)By this point, your place will begin to resemble a house. You will need to lay interior floors over the sub flooring, and install your heating units — radiators or whatever. Next you do the finish compounding on the drywall, sand it all nice and smooth, and paint or paper the interior walls. Two coats. This is followed by installing electrical outlets, light switches, light fixtures, electrical panel, and having the meter installed and connected. You will have to install interior trim, and paint all of the doors, window frames and trim. Probably three coats will be needed.You’re getting there. Finish and final plumbing and heating connections, and test all the systems for leaks. Install the stove and wall oven and maybe a built-in microwave and/or dishwasher and/or garbage disposal. Install your TV set, using the cable hookup you put in along with the electrical wiring.Have any wall-to-wall and stairway carpeting installed. Put in closet poles. Put up draperies or shades or blinds or curtains.You will of course have lots of energy left after all this, so now you can move in your furniture — couch, chairs, kitchen set, bedroom furniture, end tables, lamps, refrigerator, dishes, pots and pans, utensils, bedding, pictures, bric-a-brac, and everything else. And you will have to put away all your tools, of which you will have quite a collection by this time.See? Now you will have built your own house. Really nothing to it. Not too much to learn, other than design, carpentry, installing windows and doors, roofing, rough and finish wiring, plumbing and soldering and PVC hookup, drywalling, taping, painting, appliance installation, laying flooring and tile, and a few other things.Doing it yourself, with occasional helpers, should not take you more than a year of full time work. Or maybe three years of weekends, holidays, and vacations.Still want to do it? Well, I did it and now have a five-bedroom house, with four baths, three fireplaces which I built entirely, two hot tubs, two decks (one including a loading dock), storage sheds, and some miscellaneous stuff. But I will say, one of those in a lifetime is enough.I’m glad mine is finished — although in fact, such a project is never really complete. You keep adding and changing and improving for years and decades thereafter. Now the I have told you how, it’s time for you to get started with yours.