Do you have any experience building a house? Everything you can do yourself will save you a lot of money, but only if you do it right and it doesn't have to be redone. I have a client who is very tight with her money. Single mom and a hard worker, but she tends to cut corners and goes with the cheapest of everything. Right now she has a slab poured for her retirement, dream house, but the plumber she hired didn't run any vent lines through the slab before it was poured and when I looked at the blueprint she bought online for cheap, it didn't have enough room in the master bedroom for a bed in it and still be able to get into the master bathroom. Everything needs to be changed, and it's going to cost her a couple of grand just to get to where she can start building on it.
I've built my last two homes for cash. I got the shell done as quickly as I could, and then took my time finishing out each room. Bathroom first, then a bedroom and the kitchen. The rest got done rather slowly and painfully. I've read in the trade magazines for home builders that on average, 1/3 of the cost to build the house is materials, the rest is labor and fees. Depending on how fancy you go on your finish details, I think that's pretty accurate.
The first house I moved into before having a toilet. I had power and cold water, but went outdoors to go to the bathroom for about a week. It was like camping without having any fun.
I'd do it again, but wouldn't start construction until I had enough money to get it sealed in. Utilities, foundation, framing, exterior walls and roof weather tight. You can use Zip Sytem for your exterior walls until you can do the brick and be fine for quite awhile. Then you can finish off a bathroom, a bedroom and sort of set up a worksite kitchen to get you by as you work on it. Microwave, free standing stove and a refrigerator all work find without cabinets or anything else. A folding table and a plastic tub for a sink also work fine until you are ready for a real kitchen. The question is how long will you have to live like that and how long will it take you to finish the house?
I've met people who have lived in unfinished houses for decades. They just get used to it and lose interest in doing the work. Burned out of the never ending project. I've been hired to finish off parts of those hoses, and I've been hired to redo some of their mistakes. They never hire me to do all the house, just get it going again because somebody is tired of nothing happening. Usually the wife. LOL
There is a guy on Pondboss who is doing something very similar to what you want to do. He and his wife have been working on building a barn, workshop with a small apartment over the top of it for probably five years now. It's weekend work and I'm pretty sure it's all out of pocket. They go there most weekends to work on it, they get a little done, then go home and do it all over again the next weekend. It's a great read, and it's an interesting place that they are building, but it doesn't sound like much of a life and I doubt they have saved any money by doing it all themselves when factoring all the time it's taking them to get anything done.
What is your budget like? I wouldn't start anything until I had at least $20 a square foot for the entire building in cash. You should be able to seal it in for that. Starting out smaller and doing it for less is going to cost you more in the long run. Undoing things that you have already spent money on, and leaving parts of it exposed to the elements over time will cost you money.
You will need a place to store materials and tools. You will need space to be able to work. Building a barn or shed first makes a lot of sense. It will let you know where you are at in your building skills, and maybe if this is even something you want to tackle. Framing walls is easy, can you build a roof? I'm not being rude, it's something I see on here all the time. A member posts pictures of his barn or shed and sometimes he gets the framing of the walls right, sometimes he makes a few rookie mistakes that are alright because it's just a shed. But almost always the roof is a fail. Since it's a shed, and they usually post pics after it's done, there isn't much to be done about it, but if it was a house, it would be tragic to have done it that way. Building without code is nice, but code does guarantee that the house is built to a minimum standard. Anything less is just creating problems down the road, sometimes tragic, always costly.
Eddie