• You’re a Millennial

• You pick up new skills quickly

• You’ve always been good with your hands

• You’re proud of what you’ve made

• You’ve seen something in a shop/store and thought: Well, I could just make it myself

If you’ve got a fist now, well, you’re in good company.

For those of us who Do Things Ourselves, it’s a bit of a religion, or perhaps a compulsion. You can’t really help but believe that you can do just about anything manual, because, let’s be honest, you’ve had a lot of success in the past.

I’ve discovered through this process, that there is a difference between DIY and an Expert doing something for you, however, and it’s not per se the end result!

After the excavation guys dug the hole, we built the boxes for the footing, we poured the concrete (the guy with the truck had us direct the pipe while he controlled the flow), we assembled the ICFs, we tied together all the rebar, we poured more concrete, we did the timber framing (Jay did the shaping, and we assembled it together with our friends)…

We taped around every window box and door frame, we installed the windows, we installed all our plugs and lights after the electric guys laid the wiring, we did our plumbing, we installed our roof, we insulated our roof, we installed our floors and siding… the list goes on and on. Every single, tiny detail, we did ourselves (mostly Jay). So far the only thing we brought in professionals for was the electrical wiring (for safety reasons), and the HVAC guys.

So we’re proof that it can be done!

And now here comes the BUT: there is a big pitfall of being a DIYer, that I think is much more keenly felt when the stakes are this high; not only do you have to teach yourself how to do the thing in the first place, but you also have no idea how to troubleshoot.

When you’re watching a YouTube video on how to install a sink, there’s not a section saying “Put twice as much Loctite as you think you’ll need if your sink is pure brass.” or “When applying mortar, make sure it isn’t raining or it’ll be a different color.” This information may be out there, but the more specific you have to get about troubleshooting situations, the less likely you are to find that information until it’s sort of too late, and you’re in a pickle.

Most construction is relatively straightforward, and if you’re used to working with your hands, and you’re willing to read a couple books or watch some videos, you can definitely Do It Yourself. The thing that really comes with expertise is knowing how to adjust for specific situations, how to fix things when the plan inevitably gangs agley.

Now maybe this is old news to you, but I think it’s a healthy reminder to those of us who are pretty proud of our abilities and are pretty confident; you can (and should!) still do it yourself, but either be prepared for some frustration, or try to get an expert to advise (or better yet, find a way to practice it with an expert first). Even just seeing an expert at work a few times can give you some tips and tricks, and pitfalls to watch out for.

And when things do go wrong, don’t panic: oftentimes there’s a fix (vinegar is great for washing off drippy mortar stains); or you can just redo it, and the second time it’ll be faster and you’ll do it better, because you’ve started to become a little bit of an expert yourself.

We contacted a bunch of local farms to ask if we could house our goats with them in exchange for helping them out; we told ourselves this would also give us more ties to the community we wanted to live in. And it worked! We got one response (out of about 5 emails sent), we met with them, and the next day they told us about some land for sale they heard about through the grapevine. That land is where we now live!

And then we got to work—psych! The pandemic meant construction materials and subcontractor prices skyrocketed as well, so we basically had a two year moratorium on our construction project. And while we did have a lot of extra time, we still put some of these steps off until the last minute…

If you’re like me and you know nothing about construction permits and paperwork, you do have to:

1. Get designs made/approved by an architect or technician. This probably varies by state/province, so check your local regulations! Most architects won’t sign off on a project they haven’t done themselves because they’re liable for anything they approve, so if you make your own plans, try to make friends with technicians, who may be willing to just touch them up for cheaper (we got ours done for around $2k instead of $5-10k an architect charges)

2. Get a permit from your town. We had to pass through a couple different committees to get our permit, which ended up slowing us down by a couple months (the first committee met up later in the month than the second one, so there was this one month delay just because of that).

3. Get a percolation test and septic system design. As far as I know, this is mandatory, so that people won’t do a shitty job (har har har). A common thing people do at this stage (but you might chose not to) is claim certain bedrooms are actually “offices”, so the system can be a little smaller. You can decide if that’s risky or not, but we saved on costs this way!

Also, this might be different depending on where you are, but here, the Inspector is not really there to answer your questions. Perhaps it’s my neurodivergence, but I categorically hate this, because they can absolutely come in and say “This is incorrect, you can’t do this.” But they don’t like it, and sometimes won’t even answer, when you call them and ask “Is this the correct way to do this?” So it’s like, you’re supposed to just figure out on your own what teacher wants from you…

However, something to know in general also about Following Rules: these things above are all steps that could not be skipped, but there are some regulations that can be more flexible. The vast majority of local regulations and laws are put in place so that if there’s a complaint, the local authorities can come in and stop someone. But if no one complains… Well, you can get away with a lot!

For instance, in our local regulations, you technically cannot have be living on your land until the construction is finished. Jay asked the Inspector to get permission to have a trailer on the land during the construction, and they said that was okay, but we were supposed to only do so for six months… we were using the trailer for well over a year. Honestly, we probably didn’t need to get permission in the first place.

I’m sharing this not to try to encourage you to be devious, but we’re people who are used to just strictly following whatever rules are in place, and as new homeowners, we just didn’t understand how local regulations work, so I wanted to share. Local regulations are to stop people who are disruptive; they’re there to promote a harmonious community, so as long as that’s happening, you’re good!

This is also a great excuse to be friendly with your neighbours, even before you start constructing! There’s all kinds of benefits to this, if you can get over that initial awkwardness of befriending people you think you have nothing in common with: it’s so worth it. Our across-the-street neighbour is a farmer, and has helped us so much with his tractor! But in general, it breeds good will, and you’ll be surprised at how much you have in common with some people just based on where you all decided to live.

So tdlr: Make Friends and Get Permits!

The Initial Sketch Ground Floor (2018)

Over the next years, we would occasionally think a bit about it, but it wasn’t until Covid hit, and Jay lost his job, that we decided to really go all-in about learning how to construct ecologically, and started an online course about it called Solution Era. (That really threw us for a loop: Jay got fully into high performance and energy efficiency, while I was still very into natural materials, which can be two very conflicting perspectives).

We tried to take what we were learning and apply it to the interior layout of the house. We consulted with friends who are architects, learned about public and private spaces, loud and quiet spaces, and eventually we put all the rooms we wanted on post it notes, with different color codes for those things, to try different configurations.

You should do this too, if you’re involved in designing your home! You want to make sure people won’t be traipsing through your private space to get to a more public one: a common one for example is having a bathroom attached to a bedroom, so people have to go through your bedroom to use that bathroom (At some point, every available bathroom in a house will probably be used by guests!) You also want to consider the sunlight: are you a morning person who wants an east-facing window in your bedroom?

For a while, we were working on a version of the house where we only have one floor, where there was a bedroom on the ground floor, then a version where we had a second floor, but no basement. We must have made at least a dozen different sketches with possibilities, and in the end, we settled on something we were quite proud of (and got an architect to finalize):

The Final Plans Ground Floor (2022)

And when we looked back at that original, first sketch of the ground floor, it was almost identical. Just goes to show… well, fill in whatever parable you want.

I think the main take away for me is that, even if the answer is right in front of you, you still have to go on the journey to find that answer. Test your hypothesis!

But maybe we could have just trusted our gut instincts, haha. Sometimes you have an intuitive understanding of something, with good reasons, but you just can’t immediately articulate those reasons.

-Pip

The dream began as a desire to build my house with my own hands. I don’t quite remember how old I was, I think maybe in my teens, and I was starting to get better at building things, and I just had this sense that to feel truly connected to the place I live, I would have to build it myself.

And then I met an apprentice timber frame carpenter, and that dream seemed to finally be tenable. And like most processes that take something in our brains and turn it into reality, the reality was far from what I originally dreamed.

In my mind, building my house would be 100% traditional artisanship, with thick, rough hewn timbers, stone or adobe walls, ideally even a thatched roof. It would be the most real house that ever was, made of authentic materials, 100% by hand. I would spend countless hours of heavy labor if need be, and it would be glorious.

Now, I’m not saying that it couldn’t have been glorious–I think it would have been extremely satisfying for me to build a house this way, and I hope to someday build some kind of structure like this, so I can know that satisfaction. But the reality is that it just isn’t possible for my house if I want to 1) construct it legally, and 2) respect my other values of making an ecological home (which can mean different things to different people).

There are many ways to be ecological. Solution Era has a nice breakdown of what they see as the Five Movements in Ecological Building (only available in French), which emphasize different ideals: Simple Homes (like tiny houses), Carbon Neutral/Reduced Carbon Footprint Homes (in both its construction and consumption), Self-Sufficient Homes (aka autonomous and resilient), High Performance Homes (aka Energy Efficient Homes), and finally Natural Material Homes (aka using human-safe, renewable materials).

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My husband and I argue all the time because I want Natural Materials, and he wants High Performance, which are very hard to reconcile (I’ll dive into this more in future posts). And none of these highlight something important to both of us, which is Longevity: it’s more sustainable to have a house that will last, so it doesn’t have to be rebuilt and/or have the materials disposed of. Most people building a house probably hope to either eventually sell it or leave it to their children, because a house is supposed to last longer than our personal use of it.

This was another reality check: An ecological home isn’t just something that’s made for you and your satisfaction, it has to be something that other people will want to use. The reality is that in North America, the likelihood of our children taking this house from us is very slim1. More likely, it will be sold to someone we never meet, even if we do live in it for the rest of our lives. Which means, it has to be convenient for someone else, and honestly, even for me and my husband.

It needs to have modern creature comforts, like a stable temperature, good air circulation, and at least semi-modern aesthetics and tastes. So the building envelope has to be really solid and well–performing, the interior room layout should make sense for our use and potential other uses as well. We don’t want to spend all this time and energy making it look wonderful, only for a corner of the basement to collapse because the footing wasn’t made properly, or for a leak in the roof to destroy the inside of one of the walls. This means we have to use updated methods of construction, rather than only more traditional ones.

My ideals as a young adult were to have this intimate connection with the things I own, but as I grow older–and hopefully wiser–I’m realizing that there’s far more to consider when creating something that will (hopefully) outlive yourself. The dream is to build something that is perfect for you and your needs, but the reality is that a home doesn’t only serve you: it serves the community and future generations.

What are the things you think a good home should have? Things that will outlast you and contribute to the happiness of future generations?

- Pip

Bonjour/Hi! We’re Pip and Jay, the dynamic duo building our home (mostly) ourselves in Moe’s River, just outside of Sherbrooke Quebec. We hope this blog will help inspire you or someone you know to build more sustainably, even if you’re a Millennial on a budget, and haven’t built a house before.

The main topics we’ll keep coming back to are:

Traditional Building with Natural Materials vs. High Performance Building

Beauty on a Budget (where to Save and where to Splurge)

DIY vs. Subcontracting (when to hire a professional)

First up, we want to dive into the beginning, of designing our Green Dream Home, and the search for land.

We’re excited to share our process and our progress!

Thank you so much for reading,

Pip & Jay