It’s natural for hobby builders to want to move forward with their project as quickly as possible. There can be great excitement when the initial planning is finished and it is finally time to pick up the tools. As work progresses, a sense of wanting to finish and enjoy the entire house or extension will develop. Unfortunately, these feelings can turn into the attitude that any time not spent with a tool in hand is wasted time. That is a big mistake. There are stages in any large construction project where a few hours spent planning will really save time in the long run. They will also help avoid frustration and stress, and time-wasting mistakes. I will give two examples from my own experience building a 3 bedroom steel frame home.

The first job was to install profile boards to give the floor level and support string lines whose crossing points marked the positions of the thirty stump holes. The block was tilted so the profile boards were not all the same height. It would have been wasteful to put wood around the perimeter of the house floor, so first I needed to find the cheapest way to fit shorter boards that would mark all the holes. He needed enough wood so he wouldn’t have to go back to the mill, but unlike a professional builder, he didn’t have the luxury of buying more than enough and using it on the next job. My solution was to draw some simple scale plans. In the first one, I drew the stump hole positions to scale, then I drew enough profile boards to include all the holes. Working to scale gave me the length of them, which I simply added up to find the amount of wood I needed for the top rails. Below, also to scale, I drew enough profile boards in side view to cover the different heights all around. These drawings gave the lengths and number of the studs (allowing the piece to be driven into the ground) and the lengths and number of the bracing diagonals. The two hours I spent doing this gave me my shopping list. Everything I needed was close at hand and I didn’t have to stop work later to go buy more wood.

I used a knock-down kit for the steel framing of the walls and the ceiling joists. When the floor was finished, it was time to assemble and erect the wall sections. He certainly didn’t want to be coming down from the house floor to bring in hundreds of pieces of steel a few at a time, so they had to be on the floor. However, I could see that if I placed them anywhere, they would get in the way of the wall sections as I assembled them on the floor and then snapped them into place. So I drew up a construction and erection sequence for the wall sections and numbered them on the scale plan (top view) of the walls that had been supplied. Then I marked the places where I could place the groups of steel pieces without getting in the way. Once again, a couple of hours saved me time, extra work, and frustration.

Taking this approach may seem like overkill when work is waiting, but the time invested pays off with interest, and just as valuable is being able to get on with the project efficiently and without unnecessary stress and the mistakes that usually come with it.