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SUMMARY

I have tried to answer these questions:

WHAT is your engineered house?

Your house is a place for your family to meet, love, work, play, wash, dress, greet, eat, and sleep.

To perform these tasks comfortably, your house needs to be warm, dry, light, quiet, clean, useful, spacious, pleasant, and paid for.

Your house is a structure which shelters you, and a machine which works for you. In your lifetime, you will spend more effort and money on your house than on anything else. What you get for this expenditure depends on you, on your ability to decide what you do and do not need.

WHERE shall it be?

If your house is to please you, its location is the most important decision you will have to make. It is a large world. Your house should have plenty of room around it. How much room it takes to make you feel comfortable in your house depends on your tastes and attitudes.

WHEN shall it be built?

Within the time of your life, build early rather than late. Then build again if you are so minded. It helps, but is not necessary, to have a settled job location, and it helps to have some cash in hand. You need time, a year or two, for site selection and for planning. You will benefit by choosing an off-peak time of year for building.

HOW will it be built?

The habit of building a house in a certain way is not proof that the habit should be continued. There are no building habits that cannot be improved. Many of our present building methods are wrong, expensively wrong. I have tried to suggest building techniques which are inexpensively right.

WHY will you build it?

Because only by building your house can it be uniquely yours. Because only by building it can you seize at least the opportunity of saving a lot of money.

WHO are you?

You are a person who wants your house to be the visible expression of yourself. You want your house to tell the world who you are.

These ambitions can be realized with economy. In building your own house, you will question style, you will profit by technology, you will spend your effort for what you want rather than what you think the neighbors want you to have, or what the advertisers say you should have.

You know by experience that most houses are uncomfortable, too small, too expensive. These are not for you.

You can build a comfortable house by learning the technology of heat, light, sound, and movement. This is called human engineering, the human in this case being you.

You can build an inexpensive house by surrounding yourself with handsome structure rather than applied decoration. Avoiding non-structural decoration will cut the cost of your house, however big it may be, in half.

You can build a large house by remembering that some areas in a house are costly, some are not. You will establish your minimum requirements for expensive areas, then create living space in the less expensive rooms out back.

You will engineer your own house. The purpose of engineering is to arrive at an improved result. The method of engineering is to ask why. Why is it the way it is? Why can't it be done better?

While you engineer your house, keep asking why. Why do I need this? Why not spend my money for something I want?

"Why do I want a house?" This is the most important question of all. I hope, when your house is built, that my suggestions will have helped you answer it.

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