Ask HN: Have you built a house?

Depending on the reason, I recommend no basement if you can get around it. They leak, mold, dark, humid etc. more economical to get another story up. of course if land is sparse or your in a major city you may need one and it may be worth the hassle regardless.

hire out a reputable builder for the structure. and perhaps polish the floors. get a proper rough in for electrical and plumbing. order cabinets and such for kitchen and 1 full washroom.

things like flooring, paining and other small finishing work are learnable skills. be prepared to take extra time or redo work as part of the learning curve. Keep the design very simple, reduce or remove finishing as possible. if you can get a livable structure built in short order you can spend the months or years building it to your needs and tastes over time.

We rebuilt our house in downtown Reykjavik a couple of years ago. It was first built in 1897 and owned by the same family continuously into the 90’s. There wasn’t much in the way of modern technique or planning back then so when we stripped back the walls we found the frame and roof irreparable. That eventually turned out to be a blessing as rather than an extensive renovation we ended up replanning and building a much nicer version of the same basic footprint. It’s incredibly stressful to basically demolish most of your house before having to make that decision though!

We did a bunch of manual labour and finishing work. But used contractors for everything else. We did that mostly to get things done quickly as we didn’t have a stable place to stay, had a two year old and my wife was pregnant with our second.

Your project sounds quite different but I think the biggest takeaway I can offer is to have a large contingency in your budget. Particularly if you mean autonomous as in building with robots or some new technique. The second is to find good contractors we got very lucky with the people we hired. Reykjavik is going through a construction boom and it’s often the less reputable people that are free to work.

We’re pretty glad we did it now we can look back on the stressful memories. It’s definitely Type 2 fun.

Our next big project is to build a shed-cum-office in our garden for us to work from. Probably next summer. With less time pressure and an easier problem I’ll probably build that myself with help from family.

In 2007, I had an architect design the outside both for aesthetics and to smooth negotiating with the Santa Cruz mafia planning department, but his floor plans were abysmal, and I would have hated life, stubbing my toes daily.

So I took over that task, drove my girlfriend at the time absolutely nuts iterating over it, then one day showed her something she said was bleeping perfect. We built that plan relying on a neighbor who was a general contractor at the top of his game (early 40s). I still live in that house, but the girlfriend and I broke up mid-project, oh well.

General observations:

1. The town will extract maximum value from you for the tiniest changes so get as much as you can in the 1st draft (e.g.: another $5000 to authorize making windows openable at floor level vs not)

2. Get a contractor you trust, things can go non-linear if you don't, and even if you do, you'll get some flakes. Do not be nice to flakes. Flakes suck.

3. Rent a nice place elsewhere during the process. If you don't have the $$$ to do this, you probably shouldn't be doing this at all. It will break you. The movie "The Money Pit" is IMO mostly documentary and only part comedy.

4. I have 10 Gb/s Cat 6 hard-wired Ethernet in my walls. Local contractors didn't even know that was possible in 2007. Do your research. This serves me well when I train DL models in my house.

The next project for me is a solar power system to power all my DL servers. Since they each eat ~1.5 KW, I'm going to need 10 kW overall for all 4 servers plus household requirements (but don't call it a datacenter or NVDA will audit you, call it "A House of Ill Compute"). To that end, I have nicknamed my home as the house of 200 TFLOPs (16 Pascal GPUs across 4 servers). It's about to become the house of 2 PFLOPS (RTX 2080TI GPU upgrade pending).

I built room on the side of the house, I worked with a journey man and everything he taught me as he gave orders, wrote blueprints I could confirm with sources online.

It's a wonderful idea to build something using modern techniques. There is a joke in engineering about the architect that doesn't know how to use a hammer.

I would be happy to generate a plethora of links to resources if you like? What is the climate for the structure? What is the ground like, rock or sand? Concrete molds are available at any mainstream hardware store or supply store. Are you sure you would use concrete above the basement and ground floor? That is heavy and it takes a while to warm and cool it which can be a benefit or a problem.

Autonomous in this context likely means "by myself," as not in automatic but in autocratic.