The Seven Best Books on Home Building
(and one good Home Design software package)

Topic & cover

Title & Review
(Click the book graphic or title for more information and for ordering through Amazon.com)

Design & Build

Code Check

Click image to order

Code Check
by Redwood Kardon

I wish I'd found this book earlier. It's not really a traditional book, it has tabbed and wire bound flip pages made of cardstock that are well protected with heavy plastic laminate. This thing is meant to be carried on the dashboard of your truck and accessed quickly and often. It's the perfect antidote to the brain deadening national code books it is based on . It condenses down and clarifies the relevant sections of the building, plumbing, mechanical and electrical codes.

Written by an ex-building inspector who kept getting asked for his "cheat sheets". Full of understandable language and very clear diagrams with references back to the full code section (if you need it). Do you build? If so, this book will keep you out of trouble and save you many times its cost in avoided tearouts. Here's a very helpful link to the author's homepage.

Design & Build

Visual Handbook

Click image to order

Visual Handbook of Building and Remodeling
by Charlie Wing

"A guide to choosing the right materials and systems for every part of your home."

Probably the best single reference book for planning a new or remodeled home project. Much information on framing systems, materials choices, electrical, plumbing, insulation, solar, room layouts, heating systems, and on and on. Both design and construction help.

The author is an ex-physicist and teacher turned owner-builder who has much experience making complex home design and building decisions understandable. Broader in scope and less detailed than Rob Thallon's book below, the combination of the two work well together and cover just about any issue or question you might have concerning home construction.

Design & Build

Graphic Guide to Frame Construction

Click image to order

Graphic Guide to Frame Construction
by Rob Thallon

225 pages full of very well drawn details showing how to build just about any part of a standard residential structure. This is nuts and bolts stuff. The drawings are easily incorporated into your own set of working drawings to provide the required level of detail for connections, insulation, flashing & waterproofing, roofs, foundations, floors, walls, and stairs.

This is the "why pay more" version of Architectural Graphic Standards for home building.

Land

Your Place in the Country

Click image to order

Finding and Buying your Place in the Country
by Les and Carol Scher

This book was initially self-published in 1974 by a real estate lawyer who moved to northern California to build a homestead. The book was about what he was learning from his own experience and those of his neighbors. My first edition copy shows a picture of a skinny, hippy-looking fellow and his flower-child girlfriend. The latest (4th edition) shows a picture of a somewhat paunchy lawyer with a matronly wife and their two teenage daughters. Everyone's still smiling and they're still on the homestead.

Scher has continued to learn (now mostly from readers who write in with their stories) and continually update his book. This book will be invaluable in researching and purchasing property in your chosen locale. Like any good lawyer, Scher helps you review the pitfalls and potential problems of land purchase. This is a good resource for working with agents and owners, and a real book about real experience. If you will be buying property, let this be your first investment in the process.

Land

Cheap Land

Click image to order

Country Property, Dirt Cheap
by Ralph C. Turner

Turner is a frugal computer nerd with a love of solitude and tractors. Set in southern Iowa, this first person story tells how he studied plat books looking for odd pieces of land; drove miles and miles of back roads; went to local farm auctions; and learned many new words like quitclaim and warranty deed. Finally, a "land wanted" ad in a local paper brought him to a fine 15 acre parcel of woods, with rural water, power and a small pole barn for $6,000 (1995 dollars). He then bought and moved an old 10'x14' "summer kitchen" onto the land and used this as a sleeping cabin. His rural dream retreat was complete when he bought a 40 year old farm tractor for $300.

A charming quick read, this book is well written and entertaining while being a practical workbook at the same time. Turner's property search methods are well explained and could be used to find comparable properties in almost any rural community.

Design

A Pattern Language

Click image to order

A Pattern Language
by Christopher Alexander and others

It looks like a bible. It reads like a bible. It is a bible!

Almost any architect or designer with any vision at all seems more than a little upset that God didn't turn the whole project over to them in the first place. It may take you more than six days, but here's the outline to show you how to redesign everything from the social structure of Western civilization to the trim around your window.

The book is divided into 253 patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment. It goes on to provide an essential core of a solution to that problem in such a way that you can use the same concept many times over without ever doing it the same way twice.

For example, pattern No. 135 - Tapestry of Light & Dark. The statement of the problem: "In a building with uniform light levels there are few places which function as effective settings for human events. This happens because, to a large extent, the places which make effective settings are defined by light."

This is followed by a discussion of how light affects our use of space. Then the core of the solution: "Create alternating areas of light and dark throughout the building, in such a way that people naturally walk toward the light, whenever they are going to important places: seats, entrances, stairs, passages, places of special beauty. Make other, less important areas, darker to increase the contrast." This is finally related to other patterns with which it shares a relationship: window places (No. 180), warm colors (No. 250), and pools of light (No. 252).

There's something timeless about this book. It seems to distill the humaneness from the designing and building process and give it to us in straight shots. This type of thinking transcends style but can form a foundation for the development of your own natural style. For more information on the very interesting work of this Architect/Philosopher see History & Notes.

Design

American Shelter

Click image to order

American Shelter
by Lester Walker

Les Walker is a great teacher. You'll find you're looking at American history with a fresh viewpoint when you see it through the evolution of what we've built to live in. Through the use of simple but very understandable line drawings this book lets you mentally build and then walk inside most of the house ideas that have been tried on this continent. You start with a Native American wigwam, hogan, or plank house, then move on to the colonial settlers and see them build their first houses with pit-sawn timbers and thatched roofs — techniques they brought with them from the old world.

Later wood frame construction with machine cut lumber allowed greater freedom and led to many great period styles as American wealth increased. The same type of drawings explain the evolution and construction of later house building techniques and styles including sod, strawbale, mobile homes, modular homes, domes, yurts and houseboats.

This book is particularly helpful for understanding the history and evolution of housing shapes — like the way a one-room cottage can evolve into a two-story garrison house with a saltbox addition. Organically expandable house designs such as these are a good model for your New Homestead development and have always been used to control costs and allow owners to build at their own pace.

Design

3D Home Architect

Click image to order

3D Home Architect   Home Design Software
by Broderbund /Mindspring

3D Home Architect is an inexpensive home design program that is fairly easy to learn and use. A Windows only program, it is especially useful for creating and visualizing interior space or viewing a model of the house from the outside. You can quickly layout walls to form the building shape you want, drop in doors, windows, furniture, cabinets, etc., and then put a simple roof on it. It won't have every piece of furniture in your house, but you can  usually resize standard items to stand-in for those that are missing. To see the space you've designed, simply grab the eyeball icon and drag it in the direction you want to look. Let go and the program draws an interior or exterior perspective (depending on where you were standing). You can recolor the walls, floors, etc. Nifty and quite speedy.

On the other hand, the program won't help you figure out how to actually build the building. It has none of the structural information or details necessary for bids, materials ordering and permits. Designing a house without understanding how you will support the floors and roof can get you into real trouble — and you can get committed to a design that can't be built, or will be very expensive to build.

We are developing downloadable plans in this format so you can bring an inexpensively buildable home or addition into the 3DHA program and then change things like windows and doors easily. You can delete or add non-structural walls as well. When you are ready to build, you just order the plan set and tape your modified floor plan or elevation into the final construction drawings. (The program prints these out to scale and can even do electrical plans.) This way, your plans have the necessary structural information that 3DHA leaves out!

There will be more information on the website as this project evolves. In the meantime, you may want to order the program and get comfortable playing around with it. It's great fun!

CountryPlans.com HOME

Click HERE for other books and links to other resources on the web and in print.

Search for other Resources

Use the Amazon.com search box below  to run through other authors, titles and keywords you want information on. Be sure to read any reviews — they can give you a valuable personal perspective.

Search: Enter keywords...

Amazon.com logo