After defining your style, you can focus on the home construction technique and construction materials. The most popular technique is conventional construction, which uses vertical studs to create the home’s skeletal system of both exterior and interior walls. The studs in your walls will be either dimensional wood lumber (lumber that has been cut to specific, standard sizes) or steel.
Common Construction Materials
Houses usually use old-fashioned wooden studs — long, thin boards used throughout the framing process. These are very popular for the following reasons:
- Most framers have the necessary tools (hammer, nail gun, saw, and so on) to work with wood.
- Wood is mass-produced and costs up to 30 percent less than steel.
- Most subcontractors and laborers know how to work with wood.
- You can alter wood-framed walls relatively easily in the future.
Steel framing is commonly used for office buildings. However, it is finding its way into more residential construction projects.
Although steel isn’t for everybody, it does have a few advantages over wood:
- Steel offers the greatest strength for the lowest price of any other construction materials.
- Steel is inorganic. Galvanized steel doesn’t burn, warp, rot, split, crack, creep, or get eaten by termites and other creepy crawlers.
- Steel is dimensionally stable. It doesn’t expand or contract due to moisture.
- With steel, you have less scrap and waste (2 percent for steel versus 20 percent for lumber).
The benefits and disadvantages seem about equal for each method, so it comes down to what makes the most sense to you and your contractor, the price, the climate, and other considerations. After you find a contractor you like and who you can afford, ask for references
and check out his work firsthand.
Even more, you might even consider building a log home, as it brings a variety of advantages:
- You have a range of log home styles available to you.
- You’ll end up with a custom home that is distinct and filled with character.
- The thickness (also known as thermal mass) of logs offers good insulation and helps the home retain warmth in the winter and remain cool in the summer.
- Many log home owners say their homes are quieter inside than conventional homes.
- The rugged good looks of a log home make it fit naturally into a variety of settings, from prairie to woods and from lakeside to mountaintop.
As you research log home options, you’ll find two basic types of log producers. Most companies are manufacturers that mill their logs using machinery. The end result is logs that are uniform in shape and dimension. The remaining log companies call themselves handcrafters. As the name implies, these companies employ crew members who use chain saws, or sometimes even hand tools, to shape the logs for homes one at a time.
Most log manufacturers and some handcrafters sell log packages. A log package assembled by a log producer will most likely come with fasteners to hold the logs together, pre-cut notches to interlock the logs at the corners, some kind of insulating material to place between the logs, sealants for weatherproofing, and instructions for your contractor (or you) to put it all together.
Another wood alternative to the log home would be the post-and-beam or timber frame home. A frame of substantial, interlocking timbers supports timber homes. The timbers may be held together with pegged joinery cut out of the timbers themselves or fastened with bolts or metal plates. Unlike log homes, from the outside, timber frame or post-and-beam homes can look like any other home.
If you don’t like the options mentioned above, you might want to consider a system approach, in the form of system-built homes, which are homes produced in a factory. Today’s factory-built or system-built homes come in many forms, but fall into two broad categories:
- Modular home: Built using pre-constructed sections of the house, called modules.
- Panelized home: Built using pre-constructed wall, floor, or roofing units, as well as all other components of the house.
Such homes come with some advantages of their own, including:
- System-built home plans are as flexible as conventional construction homes in that they can have one, two, three, or more levels, gourmet kitchens, finished basements, brick walls, and fireplaces. And, no, they don’t have wheels.
- Pre-building in a factory saves time because workers aren’t delayed by weather or lack of available construction materials.
- The volume of building at the factory means workers can be concentrated in one place — painters can stay busy in a modular home factory shift after shift. They don’t have to travel from job site to job site or wait between jobs.
- Inspectors in the factory ensure that work is done precisely to plan and with closer tolerances than on a job site.
- Best of all, you’ll likely save money by choosing a modular or panelized home.
When choosing the construction materials for your new home, you must consider which of them best suit your style and budget.