The Owner-Built Home

by Ken Kern

Book Overview

Will ship immediately. Expedited shipping is available. Tracking provided on all orders. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684142236
• ISBN13: 9780684142234
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company
• Length: 374 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Call it "zen and the art of homebuilding"

I purchased my copy of Kern's classic builders' guide in 1979, launched a home-building career with the book in my toolkit and I'm still using it today. As other reviewers have noted, you can't apply everything offered here in every location because building codes often get in the way of building outside the box. But what you will find here is hands-on practical advice about the way construction really functions and a can-do attitude that will infuse any building project you undertake in the future. The best single piece of information I took away from Kern's teaching is to ALWAYS use ring-shank or spiral-shank nails in any structural application (that is, you would use them for framing but not for molding). None of the homes I built from 1979 to 1995 have squeaky floors today. Thanks Ken! These days I'm well into a writing career, but am refurbishing a century-old home into some semblance of "green." Kern's book is in the next room, beside my tool bag. His advice still rocks. One cautionary note: Kern finally, apparently, went too far outside the box and died when an experimental structure he was building collapsed in a wind storm. We lost a good'un.

American Icon

Ken Kern is a must read. I cherish his dedication to his values. A true American philosopher that's on my bookshelf alongside, Thoreau's Walden Emerson's Essays, Ben Franklin's Autobiography, Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Mike Oehler's The Fifty Dollar and Up Underground House Book, John Muir's How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot, Mark Twains Short Stories, Jack London's Alcoholic Memoirs, Steinbeck's Short Stories, and a few by Bukowski and the Nearing's. Schools need a class on Kern and the Kernistas. Most of my other heroes are very political and theoretical, but Kern is just so pragmatic, so American. In a time when charlatans hide behind talk of family values and desecrate democracy, my frustration rises and I need to get grounded. I've just Finished Scott Nearing's The Making of a Radical and I'm all primed to act locally, to act responsibly. My angst and apathy is finally turning back to the constructive, and I'm fortunate to have the inspiration of Ken Kern. Yeah, a lot of things bother me, but I'm going to focus on what I can do to make things a little righter or rather lefter.

This is a great book for people who think outside the lines

This book contains some of the most innovative thinking about homebuilding ever to come out of the back-to-the-land movement of the 70's. Kern's book is filled with practical alternatives to the cookie-cutter mentality of the mass housing business. Anyone who intends to design and build their own home, and wants to make something different, needs to read this book first.