And yet there are people who have built cabins in Alaska with nothing but some metal and a lot of ingenuity and muscle.

I think that if you have to build a cabin that conforms to certain building guidelines, bank standards, codes, mainstream retail expectations.... then for sure you are going to encounter expenses and risk.

But I really hate this notion of "just pay someone to do it correctly", because this proposition also has a ton of risk and expense associated with it as well. Not every contractor who takes a job is Bob the Builder.

For me, if I was serious about building a home for myself so that it's customized to my taste and an extremely good value, I would throw all of the rules out of the window and build it exactly like the real cabins out there in Alaska and Siberia whose style has been perfected over hundreds of years.