Here are a few hard-learned tips about how to deal with the procedural aspects of working with your general contractor when building a house.

• Let your builder pick his own subs. You might think that it’s a good idea to have that good friend of your good friend pave the driveway, or your aunt’s neighbor build the cabinets, or whatever. This is a bad idea. If you’ve never had any professional interaction with these people, you have no idea if they’re any good. And if the builder agrees to work with them, despite having no experience with them, then neither of you know who you’re getting into business with. We specified that a family friend do our septic work, and he turned out to be wildly unreliable, in ways that were really problematic. You’re working with a builder in part because you’d be in way over your head if you tried to do your own subcontracting. Stick with that instinct.
• There’s no hurry. If you’re doing it right, it doesn’t matter if it takes five months, six months, or seven months to build your house. Otherwise you’ll worry yourself sick about something over which you basically have no control. That might mean negotiating a higher month-to-month rent at your current place or other similar inconveniences, but it’s a worthy tradeoff. Plus, hurrying to finish a house isn’t cheap—it may well cost you more than just being patient.
• Go limp. Learned helplessness is the only way to get through the process with your sanity intact. Find a few aspects of the house that you’re not willing to compromise on—there have to be wood floors downstairs, no hollow doors, whatever—and stick to your guns on those. But try and be all Buddhist about everything else: practice non-attachment. Stuff is going to change for reasons that are nobody’s fault (or everybody’s), and you can’t go getting upset every time that happens.
• Working with good people is important, but working with good businesses is more important. So you found an architect / a carpenter / a foreman who you really like, so you want to contract or subcontract with their employer. But people leave jobs. Life happens. You can’t expect your friend to put his life on hold for months because he was supposed to lay some tile for you next June. If you pick a vendor because there’s somebody there who you really like, you’d best make sure that you still want to work with that vendor in the absence of that guy. Our architect of choice left the design/build firm we were working with, to go back to school. So we went with another firm to build the house—for that reason among others—because I had an old friend working there who would be our job supervisor. We signed the contract, got started, and two months later he left to strike out on his own.

This is what the insulation in the walls of our new house looks like:

It’s euphemistically referred to as “blown cellulose,” but it’s really just shredded newspaper. If we look closely, we can read some words on it. The amount of newspaper used to insulate our house is as much as we’d go through in twenty years. (If, y’know, we read printed newspapers.) It’s a great insulator, but it uses a stunningly small amount of energy to create, when compared to fiberglass and other forms of insulation commonly used in contemporary houses. It’s sprayed with borate, so insects don’t want it, it’s fireproof, and it won’t mold. (Because it’s packed more tightly, preventing the flow of air within walls, it’s actually more fire resistant than fiberglass.) For you energy geeks out there, it’s an R value of 4.0, compared to fiberglass batts’ 3.2.

It’s a small thing, but it’s one of dozens of such touches that I really like about our new house. The drywall went up this week so, with any luck, we’ll never see our newspaper insulation again.

The great majority of my time in the past couple of years—and certainly the past six months—has been spent on the design and construction of our new house, which is slated for completion by the end of winter. The process has been enormously educational, and I’ve been intending to share some of what I’ve learned in this process.

Chief among the lessons from this process is the importance of properly siting a structure. Our house, as designed, would be an engineering failure if it were built 50 feet in any direction of where we’ve placed it, and an engineering disaster if built 500 feet away. That’s because it was designed for the very spot that we selected.

The bulk of our land is the side of a mountain. The logical place to have built our house would be towards the base. It’s flat, it’s relatively close to the main road, and there are neighboring houses (indicating that others believe it’s a good spot). But, being familiar with the area, we knew that it would be a poor location, for reasons that have apparently evaded some of our neighbors. Every decade or two, heavy rains wash down gullies along the mountainside, flooding the road and the land around it. That’s not just trouble for a house, but a minor ecological disaster for a septic system. There’s also the problem of sun. Being at the base of a narrow valley means limited access to the sun, what with the mountains. That means dark, depressing winters, significantly more need for auxiliary heat, and limited gardening possibilities.

Instead, we tromped around our land over the course of months, trying to find the best spot. There were a few criteria that we were using, which we ended up selecting a site on the basis of. We wanted a relatively flat spot. That would be easier to build on and it would give us the best access to the sun. We wanted to have deciduous trees on the south side of the house. That would provide us with shade in the summer, but open up to admit sun in the winter, saving us untold thousands in heating and air conditioning bills. We wanted to have trees between us and the road, because we figure that people shouldn’t have to look up and see our house. We needed a viable route to run a driveway. And we wanted to have enough relatively flat land nearby that we’d have space for pasture and gardens.

We eventually found the appropriate site, selecting a spot beneath the spreading bows of an enormous deciduous tree.

The next step was designing the house for that site. Working with an architect at Artisan Construction, we started by considering the natural grade of the land and the direction of the sun, and we aligned the house so that one of the long sides faced south. We covered the south-facing wall with windows, and clad the roof with unpainted aluminum, to reflect the sun’s rays. The overhangs were designed to be deep enough to shade much of the south face of the house from the high summer sun, but to also be shallow enough to allow the face to be bathed in the winter sun. Finally, we considered outdoor living space, making the south face of the house—the warmest, sunniest side—open up to a deck and patio, allowing us to expand significantly the functional size of our house for six months out of the year.

The resulting house is perfectly suited to its environs. If we moved it forward fifty feet, it would be exposed to full sun in the winter. If we moved it to one side fifty feet, it would be down in a gully, in the shade. And so on.

The three simplest steps that we took—steps that anybody ought to take when building a structure—were sizing our overhangs properly, maximizing window coverage on the south face, and having deciduous trees on the south face. Two of these things are free—there’s no reason not to do them. We’ll save a fortune in energy costs, and have a generally nicer home as a result.