House building for nerds - experiences wanted!

Small general contractors could also implement your wishes.
Find an architect. The good, flexible, suitable ones don’t grow on trees.
Look at model homes, bathroom and tile studios. Magazines, professional articles, etc.
Walks in the new housing developments, talks with builders. There are also construction site days from various general contractors.
At first, it’s about gathering information and deciding what you want. Then you can go into more detail.

Well, what do you want to hear? Of course you can do that! We did too. Apparently, we also got through it well, if I look at acquaintances. Sometimes the shell builder delays by 2 months and then the separately contracted carpenter charges a hefty price on top. Companies don’t show up on time or only slowly and everything takes longer than expected. The mood is at rock bottom (it was like that with us sometimes), because every miserable Friday and Saturday you have to go to the construction site instead of sleeping in. I stand at the breakfast table exasperated because the first act of the day is a call to a company to clarify details. And there are many details. By the way, here in the forum we would belong to the faction of many-do-it-yourselfers, our friends would probably call us many-hirers. We sampled little by little. In my experience, whoever loses track of their budgets over time and tends towards "what looks nicer" always ends up spending more than expected. You also have to be aware of how much time construction takes anyway for coordinating, planning and deciding; even without EL. So as I said, it’s doable. However, all the other "more-do-it-yourselfers" extend our construction time by several months, sometimes a year; simply because you were sick once and couldn’t do as much or a company did not deliver as expected...

That's true, it is time-consuming. You have to be able to set priorities.

Then there is the non-builder who tirelessly paints a dubious picture of craftsmen, refuses to believe in good experiences, considers the ability to reach consensus a weakness, and attributes a fat wallet to calm builders. His tip not to take everything so seriously is valuable in this sense.

Hello Hampshire,

you are mistaken... I do believe in the good experiences! Unfortunately, there are far too many negative experiences to ignore them.
Besides, one wouldn't even have to write about good experiences because they are taken for granted! After all, one also pays for them, of course.

Unfortunately, one simply hears and reads far too much about the negative sides of building. Above all, always the same problem!
Botched work and nobody wants to take responsibility for it... It was always the previous trade. This way, the "next" trade can always play the time pressure card and the builder accepts the botched work of the supposedly preceding trade in order not to postpone the next trades and cause corresponding costs. The tactic is very outdated...

It has always been like that. However, at the moment it is extreme. Even the lobbyists of the "pro-expensive-build-now-at-all-costs" faction won't be able to change that.

By the way, I don't have to step in every pile of shit to know that it's shit.

We only commissioned performance phases 1-4 and are building with an acquaintance who coordinates the trades. I plan all the details myself, and he gives advice and refines the planning.

We started in mid-October 2018 and will move in in July 2019.

Would I recommend such an approach? Never! Our conditions regarding the trades are simply different. The tradespeople have known each other since childhood and have been building together for years in the same combination of trades for their own families or for investment properties such as single-family houses, semi-detached houses, or multi-family houses.

We started planning in May 2017 because of the hillside location; since the development took until June 2018, we had plenty of time to pre-plan details.

We have not planned any own contribution. Painting is being done for us, and even the flooring is being laid in the bedrooms.

The only thing we did was lay the insulation for the floor because there were still 2 weeks until the screed was poured.

Why would I not recommend such an approach? Building a house is too complex; there are so many details to consider. Coordinating trades as a layperson is impossible. Unless you are friends with them, so that they make every other customer wait and come when you ask them, of course with enough lead time. Fortunately, this was true for me.

Reading up on it will hardly help you because it will unfortunately only be superficial. I also prepared myself beforehand. But others simply have the experience.

I understand and recommend the desire for individual trade contracts to anyone who has enough budget. I myself would always build this way again in this setup. With trades that only want your money and don’t care that every mistake could cost their economic existence, no. But as a layperson, you cannot filter out such trades and can only hope for luck.

You can also outsource the individual awarding to a site manager who takes over the coordination for you? The expert who knows how everything interlocks and therefore how to schedule the companies? Who might also be able to suggest good companies or even have them directly on hand? You retain maximum freedom and simply delegate the unpleasant details further. Of course, you have to pay him when it comes to saving the amount... that costs you nerves times x. In any case, I am very relieved to have my site manager. If I had called, probably NONE of the companies would have appeared to build at my place (in a timely manner)... But for him, they do come. The best example where I would have gone crazy: applying for the utility connections ([water and co])... endless forms, drawing connection plans... do you want to do that as a layman? He also pushed the municipal utilities; after his intervention, they showed up the following week and not two months later... I probably could have begged for a long time without success... the civil engineer was also there the very next day because trenches still had to be dug... That is the best money spent on my entire project!

Altai, the "problem" is probably that the OP wants to do a lot themselves. In that case, in my opinion, it is really better to do without an external appointment coordinator, because you simply can't get through the time that a company would allocate for it (under the premise that you can't take several months off your own job). The money isn't worth it to have weekly calls with someone about whether or not you can get work x, which has to be finished before company y by day z, done in time.

However, coordinating appointments really took up a lot of time. You mustn't feel ridiculous to be a nuisance to companies and to call daily if necessary to find out what's going on.

We also did almost everything to make the appointment proposals from companies possible, even if it meant extra shifts in the evenings. How often were we asked why we didn’t push back a company’s proposed appointment if it didn’t suit us at the moment. -> Because it suits us even less when we are then put off for months because there are enough other orders and the big developer or more lucrative contract will be done on time and, in case of doubt, we get pushed back again.

Our best decision, however, was definitely to assign the extended shell construction (earthworks, scaffolding, shell construction, carpenter) to a single person who then also coordinated these trades in terms of scheduling. Too much has to mesh here, and the great start to the construction (roof covered within 5-6 weeks, despite Easter holidays and late snowfall) also made many things easier for the follow-up trades.