[quesera]

That's unnecessarily hostile.

House building is not that difficult. And literally zero of the licensed trades (plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc) cannot be learned by a smart and motivated person in 1-2 months at most, instead of the multiple years (each, nonconcurrently) required for apprentice, journeyman, and eventual master licensing.

I've built three houses. I subbed out the work that was required by local regs (this varies by jurisdiction and year), and did the work myself, with inspection where available, wherever possible. Not difficult at all.

[nancyminusone]

Of course it's not hard, licences are not awarded based on how hard something is, they are supposed to be awarded for competence.

Anyone can and should be able to build their own house (I have done so myself), but if you ask for someone else to depend on your work, you had better prove it.

[quesera]

But licenses are not awarded based on competence.

They are awarded based on years of service as an apprentice and a journeyman to a master, who is effectively your pimp until you become a master yourself.

Guess who certifies master tradesmen? They guy who prefers to have you working for him instead of competing with him. It's a racket. There's some logic behind it, but less than you'd think.

Becoming fully competent to plumb or wire a house takes a few weeks of instruction. If that. It's just not difficult to become competent. It takes a bit longer to get fast though!

I would fully support a certification process that allows you to demonstrate your competence in a written and practical exam in front of experts who have no stake in your success or failure. But that is not the way it works.

(Actually, there are a few programs where you can do this for some work that would otherwise require a formal license. Lead paint remediation, of low or medium-risk surfaces, is one of them.)

[ty6853]

In AZ you can get a lot of trades licenses like finish carpenter with just a test. You can also owner/build and self certify then later flip the house which bypasses licensing and sometimes even codes.

[almosthere]

It's called passing inspections. Which you should know if you had actually built your own house.

[ty6853]

Not always required. I recently built a house, I did not get anything but septic inspected.

[quesera]

I'll guess that was in a rural area in the US West?

The further east and urban you go, the more rules you have to follow. This is, ultimately, sensible.

[ty6853]

Yes. Although there are a few urban areas without inspection. You could build in a burrow near a city in Alaska without even a permit, normally. When they finally outlaw me from building in the west maybe that will be my next stop...

[hobs]

I would not want a house wired by a 60 day electrician, that's for sure. I don't think I'd want a flood done by the 60 day plumber either, but those are the only two trades I am familiar enough with to be aghast by this comment.

[quesera]

I'm sure that's true.

And it means that you do not know how to do electrical or plumbing work.

That's fine! But take it from someone who does: it does not take years of training to be excellent at it. Household electric and plumbing is extremely straightforward. Commercial can be much more complicated! And if you run into any semi-complicated stuff, like say a bathroom below grade where you need a toilet to flush uphill ... you learn it from the vast resources available, or you call a plumber for that bit. Simple.

Similarly, if you ever are not 100% certain of your own work, you call a licensed tradesman for the inspection. Note that this is not always allowed -- but where it is, everyone agrees that it makes total sense.

[hondo77]

Household electric doesn't necessarily take years but it takes longer than 60 days of YouTube videos.

[quesera]

I learned it in a few days of work. You could too. I don't recommend YouTube though!

The most complicated thing is knowing the code, which boils down to just a handful of simple rules for residential stuff. Most importantly: look it up, don't guess. There's a right way to do everything, and it's never the hard way. There is very little variance or judgement call involved, the code is quite clear and specific.

Doing it right might take additional materials or time though, and that's fine.

[XorNot]

Just want to say the push back you're getting on this topic is one I've experienced everywhere - the actual work of the trades is basically treated as an unknowable black magic which only it's arcane practitioners can do.

Which I think is partly held up essentially by the "dodgy tradie" stories which are routinely passed around but get re-interpreted as "it's very easy to do <obvious stupid thing>" when the stupid thing is something like "don't do a wire run from 10 short pieces of wire you have lying around" or "PVC pipes need to be glued together to not leak".

[ty6853]

I built my entire house shell from 3 hours of larry haun on youtube in russian and almost nothing else with no experience. Just watched I then copied everything. The hardest part was getting a hold of a 6 ton backhoe for a day to dig the footings, which I also learned to use by pure experimentation about 15 minutes before I dug my foundation.

[s1artibartfast]

I think 60 days is excessive depending on your prior knowledge. If you understand voltage current and resistance, you can read the electrical code book in a day. Most of it will be irrelevant. Home wiring is almost entirely outlets, junction boxes, and running Romex. You can teach someone to do 95% of it in a day.

It's the edge cases that are time consuming to learn. Understanding each case that could come up on different types of builds, in different scenarios, is an important skill to be a proficient electrician that can walk onto a unknown job site, complete it, and leave at the end of the day. It makes sense if you are running commercial job sites where time is money. It makes sense if there is a failure or upgrade needed on an operational structure.

If someone is smart and time is less critical, it is only moderately slower to learn the edge cases as they come up.

I did the gas, electricity, and plumbing install for my Mom's kitchen, and I did it to the State building code. I did it in one week and with no prior training.

In a lot of ways, the certification process for contractors mirrors that of our white collar workers. Someone might spend 4 years getting a computer engineering degree, learn a dozen languages, study English and art, only to code basic tasks in CSS.

Even simpler, barbers don't really need a 1000 hours of certified coursework to do a buzz cut, or even your 50 most common haircuts.

[potato3732842]

New construction is stupid simple. Anyone with a pulse can do it. It's like the difference between greenfield dev and surgical bug fixes.

[hondo77]

So you haven't done bug fixes on something poorly architected initially because the project was started by anyone with a pulse instead of someone experienced?

Same with electrical. Yeah, you can learn the basics but only experience is going to get you to do it right. And two months ain't enough experience to do all the new construction electrical for someone else's house. Doing it for yourself is fine because only you have to deal with what you didn't do completely right when you didn't know any better.

[quesera]

You will sell your house someday, so doing it yourself has more than just personal implications, which is why inspections are required.

But you're wrong about the experience required. Everything you do in a house gets done repeatedly. A modicum of code knowledge, a good reference book, some simple math to calculate loads, some skill with power tools, and a lot of patience. No problem.

There are zero surprises in a house, the requirements are 100% predictable. Get it inspected, of course, because QA is always beneficial. Be careful, but don't be afraid of it, it's not magical or malevolent.

[potato3732842]

What passes inspection is only a tiny subset of what is "right and fine and will never cause problems".

The whole point of codes and inspections is to eliminate thinking and turn the subjective into the qualitative.

[quesera]

I don't know what point you're making here.

You can learn to do competent, inspection-passing, code-compliant, and never-problem-causing electrical work, adequate for wiring a full house, in less than a week.

From your other comments, I think we agree. Apologies if I've misunderstood your points.

[potato3732842]

That's exactly my point. Troubleshooting an intermittent problem on a bathroom fan in a subdivided triple decker with common grounds -> hard.

Doing the wiring in a new house (yours or otherwise) -> easy.

The fact that you're making a mountain out of a mole hill her really just screams that you have no experience with ANY of this. The stuff that's hard to "do right" is the stuff that you get one shot at (like concrete) or stuff where the feedback loop is very long (it may take decades to find out that your poor flashing job is letting water in and ruining your siding). The stuff the internet likes to screech about like plumbing and electrical and framing are way easier to validate the quality of because you can test them or because problems will become obvious quickly.

[quesera]

> Troubleshooting an intermittent problem on a bathroom fan in a subdivided triple decker with common grounds -> hard

I would generalize that to "locating and safely fixing problems inside closed walls or ceilings -> sometimes hard".

Sometimes easy still, but that is where things get complicated, and sometimes dangerous. I've found dead-ended intermittent lines left inside walls without any attempt at proper termination, for example. This is how fires start.

Doing your own electrical work exposes you to the lazy errors made by other people in the past. You learn not to be those people (some of whom were licensed electricians).