Anyone can call themselves a professional painter after buying a can of paint and a roller set. Anyone can also build a house without construction training and a degree. However, you may not call yourself a taxi driver, as taking people from one place to another for a fee is a licensed activity and requires official proof of professional qualifications. It's worth taking a moment to think about it - are there greater risks involved in building a house or driving a taxi?
Although so-called shoulder bank construction has decreased in recent decades, the group of do-it-yourself builders and especially renovators is still plentiful. Even the buyer of a semi-finished house package has many opportunities to reduce the amount of work and costs at the expense of the quality of the end result, despite the fact that the drawings, foundations and elements of the house are made by professionals. Although there are no official statistics on construction errors made by private small house builders, practical experience has shown that their number has practically not decreased at all over the years.
The quality of small house construction is something that very often crosses the news thresholds. "The dream house turned out to be a mold bomb". "The detached house became an expensive nightmare". "Marriage on trial because of mold house hell". Every mold house that endangers health is of course too much, but it is worth remembering that the entire construction industry should not be stigmatized because of these mistakes, quite often made by amateur builders.
Fatal mistakes are repeatedly made even during basic repairs. For example, the indoor air of a front-line house can easily be contaminated with unsuitable insulation and surface materials. Typical mistakes made in connection with basic renovations include, for example, moving the sauna facilities from the outbuilding at the back of the yard to the basement of the residential building, the ventilation of which was never designed to be suitable for a wet room. Even such user-oriented mistakes, made over the years of residence, are often generically named "construction mistakes" in public discussion.
It is quite special that there is practically no threshold for getting into construction work. In a nutshell, it can be said that anyone has the opportunity to build a home for another person, without any professional skills, let alone a degree in the field. A professional with a certificate is needed in a few work steps related to building technology, but otherwise there are no qualification requirements. Those applying for a five-year fixed-term taxi license are required, among other things, to have a professional driver's training and an approved final exam, as well as a local knowledge test corresponding to the station.
Which is more attractive: a paid car ride with a driver in the back seat or a house built by a taxi driver? Only the second option is legal.
Juha-Matti Junnonen
Project manager
Tampere University of Technology
Juha-Matti Junnonen has held teaching and research positions at Aalto University and Tampere University of Technology for over 20 years. His field of teaching and research is construction and construction production and economics.
Yes, there are an inordinate amount of those construction errors even in houses built by professionals. It is completely unfathomable what kind of impact construction companies have made in Finland in the last 30 years.
I think the blogger is wrong.
In the examples (=transfer of the sauna room from the courtyard building to the basement), the problem is in the design, and not so much in the quality of the work. Most of the construction jobs are quite simple. A normal wage earner learns to sand walls, lay parquet or brick with a reasonably short orientation. Due to the standards related to construction and the tax wedge in Finnish society, it is often more reasonable to learn how to make a careful impression yourself, than to hire someone else to do it.
Which would you rather buy:
The house that the taxi driver built for himself 40 years ago as his own home
or
A new house built by "professionals". The construction work to be performed was done by the main contractor's Latvian sub-sub-sub-sub-subcontractor. When problems arise, no one is responsible for anything.
As you yourself subtly failed to state, the municipal building control is in no way able to influence the quality of the building, and it actually has nothing to do with the quality of the construction, but the entire municipal building control could be stopped in this way by looking for unnecessary public functions in the austerities.