If you are looking to improve your construction skills, or are taking the impressive gamble towards building your own home, it’s likely that you’re looking for methods to make this house impressive, will help it last a long time, and will help it stay relevant as a household for even centuries to come. For that reason, we have compiled a list of the most exciting considerations you should consider when it comes to crafting your home. Some are old, some are new, but all are relevant and can be combined.
Planning Permission
Getting planning permission from your local authority should be high on the agenda, but it’s likely you have already done this, so it’s important to go one step further. It’s polite to meet all of your new neighbors and instruct them that this is taking place near their property, and if it does, it’s likely that a clever, comforting word before you begin work will help them stay tolerant of any noise or pollution efforts that construction a house usually brings around.
Planning
Deciding upon the best materials to build your home is your priority. What bricks are you using? Large cement blocks, sandstone bricks or the regular red brick approach? Which roofing felt are you hoping to install in order to secure your installation. Speaking of this, what roofing strategies do you hope to implement? Where are the ventilation blocks and bricks going? How are you going to guarantee the security of your home? Are you going to use standard steel construction or more reliable and lightweight expanded metal solutions? All of these questions should have clear and steadfast answers. Building a home is not an art, it is an exact science, and must be planned to the nth degree.
Solar
How modern would you like your home to be, and how relevant do you wish it to stay? Do you have the money to install already cheap home solar solutions, which now prove to pay for themselves in less than a decade? Taking this initial investment can certainly improve your moral standing as a human being lessening their impact on the environment. What’s more, is that over time, solar is getting more and more cheap, to the point where the renewable energy industry in the US is already growing much faster than standard fossil fuel businesses. By the time you finish all of the other considerations the price might have dropped even farther. It’s worth checking out.
Saving Money
Usually, buying in bulk is much more preferable to purchasing specific and measured materials, especially when it comes to brickwork or wooden blocks required. You’ll never know what will break on a construction site, or what will be the wrong size, and ordering in bulk can save you money by giving you more resources than you need. You can always be sure that selling this excess material afterward can net you a tidy amount of return investment.
Labor
No matter how experienced you believe yourself to be on a construction site, it’s always worth getting a professional to look at your progress in installments of progression so they can let you know you’re either working in the right direction, or have missed out important considerations like the perfect place for a supporting beam or so. At the very least, hiring someone to tutor you how to operate the larger rental machinery you have acquired can help prevent you from falling victim to your own unregulated safety issues.
Safety
Because you’re not technically residing on an official building site, it might be tempting to be lax with security and simply forgo any official method of doing things. This would be unwise. The stringent safety regulations of a standard business are not there accidentally, they are there to protect their employees from difficulties that can arise, especially concerning medical costs. You should wear a high visibility jacket at all times, and work with at least one other person supervising you.
You should NEVER allow children onto the construction site and should wear hard hats and gloves at all times. You should also categorize the places where you store materials, your equipment, and your tools, to prevent inexperienced hands from getting hold of them. You should also make sure you have safe electricity conduits for providing these tools with power, such as a long and waterproof electricity extension power cable/lead recommended and used by construction workers all across the board.
Security
Working on an unsecured property can be a prime target for thieves and even homeless squatters. Even in a rural land mass, this can happen to you if you’re unfortunate enough. In order to work best, you’ll need to focus on your security solutions. This could include fencing of the delicate areas of your worksite, installing cameras that provide your computer systems with a live feed of any difficulties that you can see from afar, as well as providing you with the foresight necessary to identify where the blind spots could be.
Not only will security solutions prevent difficulties from occurring in terms of thieves or squatters, but it will also prevent inexperienced hands from being injured on the building site, and as a result pursuing litigation against you. This is why it’s totally important to place signs all over the fencing that clearly dictates it is private property and that trespassers enter at their own risk. This will stand up in court as ‘clear instruction,’ and will defend you against and people with negative intent.
Tools
Hiring tools from a reputable hiring store will give you not only the expertise necessary to operate them and craft the building, but it will allow you to stay insured while operating them and save you cost long term. This can help you stay secure in your ability to use the tools with less stress, because you know that its operation is being covered, and any difficulties you might experience will be solved by a more authoritative voice than a forum post on the internet you might find otherwise.
These tips should help you build the best house you can, safely and with security. Best of luck with your construction efforts.
Image Source – Flickr
