By one measure, it took me 2 years plus a week to build the
house from breaking ground (July 8, 2015) to moving in July 15, 2017. Of course, the house wasn’t 100% done when I
moved in, and I have been picking away at interior trim, shelving, coat hooks,
etc. in between work, travel, and other projects.
In any case, I wanted to tally up the amount of time I spent
working on the house thus far. Sure, it’s
not the complete picture, so I suppose I’ll have to come back to this
discussion when I’ve completed all the major tasks. So the big number is…
1,572 hours!
If I’d been
working 40 hours a week, that comes out to 39.3 weeks or 9.4 months. That’s also about 70% of the total time spent
building the house if you total up all the time I paid for contractors to do
their thing (694.5 person-hours). 
If you’re interested in drilling down into those numbers, check
out the table for a breakdown of that time by task, and I’ll try to put these
into context:
·
I would consider
myself to be semi-skilled labor. I accomplished
most tasks to a contractor-level of quality, without many mistakes, but I am certainly
much slower than a professional.
·
I was not able to work
a “full day” most of the time. That
leads to inefficiencies because it’s harder to maintain an efficient rhythm,
and if you have the same setup/cleanup time whether you work 4 hours or 9, you
get less accomplished working a partial day.
·
On average, I worked 5
hours on the days I made it to the house, but that varied from half an hour to
14.5 hours on the longest day. During
the build, I was working between ½ and ¾ time at my “real” job of civil
engineering, so that limited and broke up the time I spent at the Practice House. For better or worse, civil engineering was
the #1 priority and the Practice House was #2.
·
The percentage of time listed in the chart is based on the combination of my time and the contractors’. You can get a sense that I did most of the
natural building tasks, and the contractors did most of the conventional
construction tasks.
·
There is a hefty dose
of my learning curve involved in my numbers.
In particular, I spent way more time than I should have fixing cracks in
the first two layers of adobe floor because I didn’t get my clay/sand ratio
right.
·
I also wasn’t sure of
what level of finish I would be comfortable with. For example, I spent considerable time on the
finish coats of plaster, making them as flat and uniform as my patience would allow.
At the time, I was a little frustrated that they still seemed wavy and rough. But after stepping back and now living in the
place, I think they look fantastic! I probably
could have cut my time in half on the final layers in retrospect if I’d known that
the material is so forgiving of a rustic look and that I would enjoy the result.
One major caveat is that I’m still not “done”. The biggest pending project is to enclose the
front porch with screened panels in summer, and clear acrylic panels in the
winter. This will be a significant improvement to the use and
functionality of the house, so I plan to revisit these numbers once the porch
is finished.
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