Some research seems to point to TN allowing for this if the county has chosen to do so https://support.commerce.tn.gov/hc/en-us/articles/208924888-...

That’s a pretty cool rule! I think it’s actually super awesome that this dude did this.

Doubt I'll ever sell the house. I might gift it to an LLC and then sell the LLC though. Or just bulldoze it when I'm done with it, it has already paid for itself and I never built it with an intent to profit off of it.

You need some expertise, but electric and pumbing are not hard to do yourself. If you don't know what you are doing a bad install can kill you (or your family/friends), so you want to do this right. However it isn't hard.

I helped my uncle build his house, the only thing he didn't do himself was dig the holes (foundation and well), pour the concrete, and tape the drywall. Everything was inspected by the county and passed. We could have done those as well, but is made sense to hire someone for those parts considering the experience/tools of family/friends, and how long it would take working only Saturdays.

I miss living where I have lots of family around. There are things I'm forced to hire out that I know how to do just because I can't make a few phone calls and get a dozen people to help next Saturday.

Like the other guy said, electrical and plumbing are not hard to do correctly with a just a little bit of knowledge or experience with modern building practices.

You can't just throw random trash together but there are simple "standard" ways of doing things with standard available wires and pipes and fittings and as long as you follow common practices you will be 95% of the way to a code compliant install. It is only when you want to do something in an unusual or shortcut way that you may run into real compliance problems.

Certainly don't try it if you are completely clueless, but reading a diy book or watching some diy instructional videos will get you pretty far and show you how standardized most residential construction is with hardware store materials.

We should all appreciate that most homes were not done by teams of professionals back in the day. Multiple things can be true here, 1) building your own home will take a lot of time to get right (so time being used in place of money), 2) the skills involved are all completely learnable and do-able for an able-bodied person who again is willing to put the time in, and 3) its not worth it for the vast majority of people who don't want to learn these skills and would rather focus on their own work and pay someone else to be a professional in the space. And yes 4) I've seen quite a bit of DIY work in homes and sometimes its impressive but usually its questionable and sometimes even horrific.

That’s not historically uncommon though. Like the house I grew up in was a rural house built in ~1890 by the brothers who farmed the land. Of course it had the usual quirks of an old house, but it was well maintained over time and I wouldn’t view it as any kind of “monstrosity”.

Anybody remember Groverhaus?

My grandpa built a similar house under similar level of scrutiny roughly at the same point in life as I did, it was still standing and in good order when he died. At this point it's basically already paid for itself vs rent even valued at $0.