Rating: 
Summary: Everything you need to know.
Review: This book contains everything you need to know about building most homes. If you want to be the contractor, I recommend that this book be acccompanied by "The Complete Guide to Contracting Your Home" by McGuerty & Lester. It has sample schedules, contract, etc. But I use this book more for the know-how of building a home. THIS IS THE BOOK TO OWN IF YOU WANT TO TALK INTELLIGENTLY TO YOUR BUILDER AND KNOW WHAT TO LOOK FOR DURING CONSTRUCTION! It will tell you EVERYTHING! I started out with a builder that was planning to be shady and knowing stuff in this book scared him off. I knew too much for him to cut important corners. I asked specific questions and he fled. My current builder and I have good relations and we can intelligently talk specifics of the trade because of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Everything you need to know.
Review: This book contains everything you need to know about building most homes. If you want to be the contractor, I recommend that this book be acccompanied by "The Complete Guide to Contracting Your Home" by McGuerty & Lester. It has sample schedules, contract, etc. But I use this book more for the know-how of building a home. THIS IS THE BOOK TO OWN IF YOU WANT TO TALK INTELLIGENTLY TO YOUR BUILDER AND KNOW WHAT TO LOOK FOR DURING CONSTRUCTION! It will tell you EVERYTHING! I started out with a builder that was planning to be shady and knowing stuff in this book scared him off. I knew too much for him to cut important corners. I asked specific questions and he fled. My current builder and I have good relations and we can intelligently talk specifics of the trade because of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: FULL of details, but clarity often gets lost in them
Review: This book is about BUILDING a conventional stick-built American house. There's scant attention to design issues. This also isn't the book if you want to construct anything other than a standard stick-built house (no domes, concrete houses, log cabins, & c.), or to incorporate elements like solar heating or super-insulated shells. George Nash assumes that you'll follow the road most travelled. Given that limitation, the book is just CHOCK FULL of construction details. Just as an example, the chapter on framing a roof goes on for more than 60 pages. IF you can follow it, there's a lot of meat inside. But if you're like me, even with a fair amount of carpentry experience you'll find yourself getting lost on more than one occasion. There's no list of definitions (lexicon), and carpentry in particular has its own vocabularly. On top of that, Nash freely interchanges synonyms (such as "jack" and "trimmer" -- two terms for the same type of framing stud) in the text. Plus the index refers only to words in the text, and omits those in the MANY illustrations entirely. The end result is that I frequently had to do some time-consuming page flipping to track down a term that had escaped my memory. The illustrations bear particular attention because of their ability to confound. The (black and white) photographs are described by Nash as "my collection of old negatives, prints, and snapshots". Many of them have poor contrast, so they don't clearly delineate the features that are supposed to be of interest. The line drawings are professional product, with strict attention to proportional representation, but nonetheless frequently do a poor job of illustrating what the text is talking about. This is the case for three reasons: (1) they were created independent of the text, and stitched together by an editor, NOT the author OR illustrator; (2) their strict proportional representation means that important but small details can get lost; and (3) each one was reduced in size (by an editor) to squeeze more onto each page and reduce the total book length. The end result is that the text and illustrations do NOT make a unified or even particularly complementary whole. If you know what you're trying to accomplish, and have the time to slog through the details, this book will tell you most of what you need to build your own stick-built house. For less detail, but a FAR superior starting point for creating your own house, buy "The Real Goods INDEPENDENT BUILDER: Designing & Building A House Your Own Way" by Sam Clark. Read Clark's book cover-to-cover, then keep it open to the same subject area as you read "Do-It-Yourself HOUSEBUILDING"; anytime the Nash book confuses you, you can step back and get a clear overview from Clark's excellent work before you dig back into the details of the Nash book. (Even Clark's index is superior. Clark's book is about 500 pages with generouse whitespace; Nash's book is about 700 dense pages. Yet Nash's index is only 3/4 as long as Clark's.) Overall, George Nash has pumped his tome full of almost all the construction details a do-it-yourself housebuilder could hope to find in one place. But this is NOT a book for beginners.
Rating:
Summary: FULL of details, but clarity often gets lost in them
Review: This book is about BUILDING a conventional stick-built American house. There's scant attention to design issues. This also isn't the book if you want to construct anything other than a standard stick-built house (no domes, concrete houses, log cabins, & c.), or to incorporate elements like solar heating or super-insulated shells. George Nash assumes that you'll follow the road most travelled. Given that limitation, the book is just CHOCK FULL of construction details. Just as an example, the chapter on framing a roof goes on for more than 60 pages. IF you can follow it, there's a lot of meat inside. But if you're like me, even with a fair amount of carpentry experience you'll find yourself getting lost on more than one occasion. There's no list of definitions (lexicon), and carpentry in particular has its own vocabularly. On top of that, Nash freely interchanges synonyms (such as "jack" and "trimmer" -- two terms for the same type of framing stud) in the text. Plus the index refers only to words in the text, and omits those in the MANY illustrations entirely. The end result is that I frequently had to do some time-consuming page flipping to track down a term that had escaped my memory. The illustrations bear particular attention because of their ability to confound. The (black and white) photographs are described by Nash as "my collection of old negatives, prints, and snapshots". Many of them have poor contrast, so they don't clearly delineate the features that are supposed to be of interest. The line drawings are professional product, with strict attention to proportional representation, but nonetheless frequently do a poor job of illustrating what the text is talking about. This is the case for three reasons: (1) they were created independent of the text, and stitched together by an editor, NOT the author OR illustrator; (2) their strict proportional representation means that important but small details can get lost; and (3) each one was reduced in size (by an editor) to squeeze more onto each page and reduce the total book length. The end result is that the text and illustrations do NOT make a unified or even particularly complementary whole. If you know what you're trying to accomplish, and have the time to slog through the details, this book will tell you most of what you need to build your own stick-built house. For less detail, but a FAR superior starting point for creating your own house, buy "The Real Goods INDEPENDENT BUILDER: Designing & Building A House Your Own Way" by Sam Clark. Read Clark's book cover-to-cover, then keep it open to the same subject area as you read "Do-It-Yourself HOUSEBUILDING"; anytime the Nash book confuses you, you can step back and get a clear overview from Clark's excellent work before you dig back into the details of the Nash book. (Even Clark's index is superior. Clark's book is about 500 pages with generouse whitespace; Nash's book is about 700 dense pages. Yet Nash's index is only 3/4 as long as Clark's.) Overall, George Nash has pumped his tome full of almost all the construction details a do-it-yourself housebuilder could hope to find in one place. But this is NOT a book for beginners.
Rating:
Summary: This is THE book on building your own house
Review: This book tells would-be house builders everything, from design issues all the way to making sure the cabinet doors latch. The book is full of technical details about how to do anything related to building a house. Mr. Nash's book presents alternatives to everything in such a way that the reader is able to make very educated decisions about construction. The level of detail is comprehensive, but not overwhelming. Anyone who wants to build a house needs to read this book.
Rating:
Summary: the one and only
Review: when we decided to try and takle this home building adventure, we started with selecting several how to books for help. the only one that seems to be in plain english, and a real step by step process is this book. this is the only book we are using out of the 8 we purchased.
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