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Comment by throwaway4aday | Hacker News Reader

I think this is overly complicating the process. If you want an open source DIY method of building a home, just learn basic framing and construction. It's not hard, lots of people have built their own homes, you just need some common sense and a willingness to learn.

If you want to go all in on modular, wood based, zero carbon housing then learn how to build a timber frame house. If you really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools and harvest your own trees.

Wikihouse seems more for people who want to buy something off the shelf, pretty much a kit house. That's not a bad thing since it takes a lot of effort to build something as big as a house and lots of people don't want to do that. But I don't think this should be sold as a solution for DIYers since the existing methods already satisfy the listed requirements.

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I used to work as a framer during the summer when I was going to college.

What you're glossing over here is that about 10-15% of the timber you buy to frame a site-built house is wasted (ad-hoc cuts, bracing, jigs, etc.) and thrown into a dumpster.

If a house is pre-planned, you can use a machine that cuts each board to length, and join the ends of each board using basic joinery processes that aren't practical when building a site-built home. You can pre-fabricate things like trusses and wall segments so you (or your workers) aren't driving 100k fasteners to fabricate something a robot could build in 1/10th the time.

> If a house is pre-planned, you can use a machine that cuts each board to length, and join the ends of each board using basic joinery processes that aren't practical when building a site-built home. You can pre-fabricate things like trusses and wall segments

aren't prefab trusses readily available these days? i feel like i've seen plenty of trailers hauling stacks of 10 timber trusses down the road.

we've also got prefab homes (not mobile/trailer/whatever homes), with modules assembled in factories and brought together at the site. unfortunately they seem to carry class connotations here in the US.

yeah, prefrab trusses, prefab sip panels, modular houses, trailers and prefab houses divided up into rooms that can be trailered and joined onsite all exist

A mate of mine used to work in a place that manufactured segments of regular wood framed houses. They had painted outlines on the floor, so they could cut and assemble 2x4 frames at great speed. I think you would need to make a truly massive number of these before a robot would be more cost effective. I also think that 2x4 construction would create less waste than parts CNC cut from ply sheet.

They exist and they can be designed to take advantage of things like making sure each room is designed to use full board lengths, no cuts (8 foot stud walls, for example).

I'm not sure recouping some of that wastage is worth the switch. You wouldn't eliminate all waste since there will always be some on site modification. I'd like to see the comparison in time spent assembling all of these individual segments vs framing a wall with an air gun. The segments look a lot more fiddly to me compared to laying out pieces on the deck and banging them together with a gun and then just standing the wall up. From their guide on the site:

> A typical WALL block weighs around 40-60kg and can generally be carried by two people.

They're a little light on detail about how these wall segments join and seal to each other so that could be a bunch more work. All this is considering you'd be able to get pre-manufactured blocks from somewhere, if you had to CNC and assemble them yourself then the labor is off the chart.

I mostly agree with you, but I like the idea of being able to give reasonably smart but unskilled people a bunch of these boxes and an Ikea-style "how to assemble this house" and telling them to get to work. Seems like it'd scale very well for situations where you have a bunch of volunteers and need to build several houses but maybe don't have many experienced builders around.

> If you really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools and harvest your own trees.

Why on earth can't power tools run off renewables? And even hand tools/nails/ bolts etc. have embedded CO2 emissions.

They can but can you guarantee it? Hand tools have a much smaller footprint compared to the mix of metals and plastic that go into power tools. You can buy 100 year old hand tools that work just as well as new ones too so they've got the whole recycle thing going for them.

It's too nitpick. If I think too deep, your body needs more energy if you don't use electric tools, so you need more foods to feed energy but perhaps every foods aren't carbon neutral for farming tools, fertilizer, and transportation.

any resource you'd recommend for learning framing and construction?

There's tons of material out there, you can buy a book from Amazon[0] or watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials[1]. It's best to learn by doing though so you could always volunteer[2] or take a local course.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=house+framing&crid=ZT0KPA5JG1EY&s... [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=house+framing [2] https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/near-you

There are also lots of folks: building their own places (search "homesteading"), commercial builders documenting/advertising their build process (Perkins Builder Brothers is decent), and pointing out small details that are easy to miss (Matt Risinger, who has a building science lean to things).

https://www.shelterinstitute.com/ (timber framing especially) is one that I am aware of from a few sources over time--perhaps most notably from YouTube channel Pure Living For Life, who failed to finish building their house.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4L_aJ1rV4&list=PLRZePj70B4...

Larry Haun's book The Very Efficient Carpenter. Comes with companion videos that you can find on YouTube, as well.

This guys channel is very approachable for amateurs

https://www.youtube.com/c/HouseImprovements/playlists

Canadian I think, but their standards seem on par or higher than the US.

> If you really want zero carbon you can use only hand tools and harvest your own trees.

How is that zero carbon? That's actually higher carbon than the regular way with power tools.

Human power is very inefficient, you'll emit far more carbon because you'll need to eat more. And hand harvesting a tree is also far more wasteful of CO2.

If you want to see a cool DIY property - the guy behind woodgears.ca lived on the property while his dad built a retreat/summer camp.

https://woodgears.ca/cottage/index.html

Thank you for posting this, it's amazing. The woodshop tour really took me back to a different era.

For envelope (floor, walls roof) key metric is $ per sq ft. Its possible to do <$10 per sq ft in most of USA. So for a 100 sq ft room it works out to 6 sq ft envelope per sq ft of floor so $60 per sq ft of floor area.

for a 500 sq ft studio that works out to $30k.

You can work out the estimates but it's often the finish stuff that drives the cost per square way up.

Build a post-frame "barn" and get a massive space with no interior walls and get it for quite cheap.

In a 2000 sq foot house, a $2k tub costs a dollar a square. That's a significant part of the total price!

This is accurate, I've built something that size and it came out to about that.

I moved to U.S from a country where there are barely any construction regulations and brought log cabin construction skills with me. They are useless though because no municipality would allow me to do it myself without a contractor and a log house won't pass any modern construction codes.

Very true. Where I live you need a building permit and an certified engineer to sign off plans for something as basic as a pergola.

land of the free.....:/

Free is subjective, and since there are variations of the regulations by municipality, you can choose from the spectrum of lax laws + dangerous to strict laws + safe. Your preferred location, however, may not align with your preferred regulations. Or you can do like we do here in Berkeley and build whatever you want because your neighbors also have illegal additions so they're not gonna squeal.

It's one of those things of life.

"Land of the free" doesn't mean the land is free of dickheads or immoral people who endanger others in their attempts to "get ahead".

And so laws are born...

Whether there are too many is totally a question though.

Many areas will have relaxed codes for cabins that are only used part-time. The hard thing is that all this stuff is state-by-state and locality-by-locality, so you have to dig to find lax areas. Louisiana is particularly open for residential construction IIRC.

I'm not sure where you are located but in Northern New England this is very untrue. Maine, New Hampsire, and Vermont all have a LARGE number of diy log cabins built. I've stayed in several and I'm in the early planning of building a house (not log cabin, it's a long house with builtin green house/barn sections similar to the long house on the Apple TV show home). There are many places in the US that allow you to DIY your own home, though the majority are very rural which is a MASSIVE benefit IMO.

The existing methods of building houses are terrible though. It's stupidly expensive to edit a house, they're designed and built as if it's still 1800.

Why does adding a socket into a wall cost more than $50? Should be able to just open the wall panel, plug in an extra cable, close panel, done.

Because people want nice plastered, painted and wallpapered walls?

Adding a socket is the easy bit. It's the putting everything back to how it was that's hard.

If you want plain panelled walls you could install that now. And have your $50 socket. Most people probably don't like that tradeoff.

well if they had more easily removable wall panels you could still decorate and access the inner wall

Seems strange that we'd optimize for making modifications easier, when such modifications are much fewer and farther between than the everyday living that fills the time between, during which people value a solid wall with no gaps or seams.

Of course, not everyone values the same things to the same degree, and a homeowner could cut a 4x8 piece of drywall into smaller pieces and have more easily removable panels like you're imagining.

> Why does adding a socket into a wall cost more than $50? Should be able to just open the wall panel, plug in an extra cable, close panel, done.

what are you envisioning? using cheap consumer power cables inside of walls, and paying extra to have unused sockets hidden away inside of walls for years/decades, just so that it's fast to add an outlet?

we use screw terminals inside of the wall because they're cheaper and more reliable than the socketed connections. and we use heavy gauge cable with thick jackets for safety.

2 parts, walls should be easier to open and close, that's the major point

Secondly a minor addition, if there were a standard for junctions of power cables, so they could easily be added to, that would be nice.

Then installing a socket would be: open wall, connect socket you just bought with standard junction connectors, close wall. $50

Rather than: cut a load of holes in walls, connect socket using annoying wiring techniques, fill in holes you made, plaster and repaint so that next time it'll cost all that money again. >>>$50

We see the divergence from aesthetics in wood shops, auto shops, and other building shops. Moveable panels, exposed circuitry/plumbing/gas lines. A home typically hides its utility parts behind solid objects (i.e. a wall) that need invasive cutting to reach. Even still, an electrician adds an outlet in the exact process you mention, but it's a little messier and costs $150.

It still would in this system, the website states that you still need to add "plaster panels" or drywall if you're in the US which means everything will be taped, mudded and painted.

If you want easily accessible utilities then there are ways to build to code where all of that is visible and accessible, it just won't be pretty. Aesthetics or utility, pick one.

Interior ceilings are often built as modular panels for this reason, and sometimes even floors. But walls, especially exterior walls, are engineered to serve multiple functions, such as acting as a moisture, thermal, and acoustic barrier, in addition to carrying utilities and structural loads. All of this is best served by arranging, and sealing different material layers carefully within the enclosure. Within the ruthless logic of cost optimization, incorporating modularity conflicts with building-code-regulated neccessities, and will only be used by some small percent of people, for some small percent of time.

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