Book of the Week: The Complete Visual Guide to Building a House

27 Aug 2016

This week I read The Complete Visual Guide to Building a House, because if you have a tear down, you need to build a new house from scratch. It is useful to know what your contractor and subcontractors are doing and what needs to be done. The book is fully illustrated, enabling a person like me easily understand things. The book goes over laying the foundation, framing the floors, walls and ceiling, roofing, windows, drywalling, tiling, flooring, stairs, doors and trim. It doesn’t go over electrical or plumbing, so you’ll have to rely on your subcontractors on that. What I did learn is that there are a lot of places to cut corners. Ideally, you get a pallet of construction grade lumber and sort out the straight pieces from the bent pieces. Use the straight pieces where straightness is important and find some other place to stick the not as straight pieces. If I was lazy, I wouldn’t bother sorting the wood and use whatever was quickly accessible. There are a lot of details to get right. The book provides a good general outline of how things are done, but different regions have different building codes. There are a lot of specific details in each part of the construction process. Don’t expect to take your pickup truck to Home Depot (HD) for materials and amigos and be able to build a house after reading this book.