The well-built house

What Hacker News says

1. sarcherJul 2020
   As someone who works in residential construction, this is one of the better looks at what a 'good' process looks like from the homeowner side of the equation. The only places where my advice would differ:

   - They finished the floors instead of having a subcontractor do it. Everyone's comfort for various home improvements tasks differs, but this is one that I typically see farmed out. The people who do it everyday are very fast and competent - as a first timer it's hard to avoid making mistakes. I also advise people to avoid floor stains. One advantage to a real wood floor is it's easy to repair and refinish in the future, but this gets a lot harder when you start needing to stain match. Floor stain also kind of violates the tenants of 'honest materials' that the author discusses.

   - To build on their point about veneer plaster walls, cost really comes down to subcontractor comfort with that detail. It's only 'slightly more expensive' if you have a contractor that does it all the time. If you live in an area with a lot of plaster homes, you'll have more luck finding someone who can do this work affordably. For example, I once had an architect specify a particular plaster finish ('venetian plaster') where we could not find someone comfortable doing the work within a two hour drive.

   - They discuss the slow drying of the floor finish they used as a negative (true). A good place to use slow-drying finishing techniques is the exterior, as you can leave it alone for a lot longer as compared to a floor you want to walk on immediately. For example, pine tar exterior finishing materials take weeks to dry, but you don't NEED to touch the siding during that period.

   - In the second part they show a north and south elevation of the finished home. The north elevation really doesn't reflect the historic character they succeeded so hard to emulate and/or build from in other aspects of their home. Comparing these two elevations is very instructive.

   I hope their next published section addresses energy efficiency and adjacent topics (like window selection). It's a huge part of building a modern home that doesn't always get the attention it should. I did appreciate the time spent discussing air flow in part 2.

   Building on their reading list, if you like older/vernacular homes start with:

   "House" by Tracy Kidder

   "A Field Guide to American Houses" by Virginia Savage McAlester

   "American Shelter" by Lester Walker

   "The American House" by Mary Mix Foley

   And maybe move on to:

   "A Concise History of American Architecture" by Leland Roth

   "American Vernacular: Buildings and Interiors, 1870-1960" by Herbert Gottfried

   "Norwegian Wood: The Thoughtful Architecture of Wenche Selmer" by Elisabeth Tostrup

   "Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn" by Thomas Hubka

   And then maybe:

   "The Well-Built House" by Jim Locke

   "The colonial House Then and Now" by Francis Underwood

   "Little House on a Small Planet" by Shay Salomon

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2. skybrianFeb 2019
   You might want to read House by Tracy Kidder to get an idea of how crazy building a house can be, even on a good project.

   One of the builders in that book wrote a book of his own, The Well-Built House by Jim Locke, which I bought and found to be interesting reading.

   In his obituary it says: "The revised edition is still in print although Jim dismissed it in recent years as technically out-of-date."

   Which is to say that things do apparently change in building industry too. (I think this is another case of the grass being greener.)

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