Building a House (or Making a Movie) November 22, 2013

Recently, I’ve been involved in discussions about making movies on a tiny budget. While I’m aware that you can recruit friends who will work for free, doing so has ramifications.

Building a House with your Friends

While it’s true that you can build a small shelter with virtually no planning, very rarely do larger structures survive under their own weight without some kind of plan (formal or informal). Why?

Imagine that you’ve got a friend who’s a carpenter, who likes you and would enjoy working with you. Imagine that you have another friend who is an electrician, who feels similarly magnanimous toward you. Add to that a guy who took a plumbing class in vocational school and someone who knows how to mix up instant concrete. We now have a team!

“Let’s build a house!”

First things first… How much money do you have? What? The other guys don’t want to chip in? Why don’t they want to help you build a house? Don’t they realize that it will look good on their resume? (This is especially true of the “plumber” and your “concrete man.”) Don’t they realize how much fun it would be to come over and party?

Well, in that case, your only option is to put up the necessary funds yourself. So now you check the bank balance. You’ve got $5000 that you can spend without your wife sending you off to the looney farm. You say to yourself, “$5000 is a LOT of money! Surely I can build a house for that!”

At this point, anyone with even modest experience working with modern building materials will know that we can’t build a house for $5000. The raw materials alone would cost more than that.

So now let’s assume that we have $30,000, and have estimated that this is enough to buy the windows, wood, concrete, pipe, and electrical wire necessary to build a small house. You’re all set. Right?

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