Do-It-Yourself Dream Houses : Construction: You need patience, obsession and lots of money to build a home. A few have what it takes.

Jim Wardel, 51, of Chatsworth stopped to take in his handiwork: an unfinished English Tudor--3,500 square feet plus a turret--that rises behind a tower of scaffolding. A free-form pool and spa, still unfilled and waiting for tile, sprawl across his vast back yard.

And next to the pool, welcoming and warm in the sun, is an outdoor lounge chair. “You’ve got to be nuts!” he said with a laugh, turning away from the chair, back to the blocks of brick and piles of rock he’s been hauling to pave his driveway. “Or else have an ego that’s just incredible.”

Wardel, an appliance repairman, is one of the San Fernando Valley mavericks who are building their own houses. Nail by nail, 2-by-4 by 2-by-4. Tourists in a land of complicated city codes, they find that they must not only be nuts but supremely patient, tortuously perfectionist, physically fit, emotionally strong and focused--no, better yet, obsessed.

“I have all this energy I have to put somewhere,” Wardel said. “Building my own house just seemed like a good, clean place to put it.”

To the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, which oversees all construction, the do-it-yourself builder is “almost unknown, a thing of the past,” said Lloyd Emery, assistant manager of the department’s Van Nuys office.

Of the 2,021 building permits for single-family houses that were issued in the city of Los Angeles in 1988 (1,200 of those in the Valley), the number not being built by professionals was “in the Valley, maybe 10,” Emery said. “In the city of Los Angeles, you cannot go out into the forest and build a log cabin and sit it on the earth. You cannot. It is more complicated than that.”

Complication No. 1 is the sheer expense. “Housing is at an absolute premium,” said Art Johnson, assistant chief of the building department’s Bureau of Community Safety in Los Angeles. “Just look at the high value of land and the prices and rents of dwellings, which have escalated tremendously in the last five years. There’s no more room to spread out.”

In 1979, the city issued 2,258 building permits for single-family homes, whose total value after construction was $189,332,023, or an average of $83,849 per house. In 1988, the median value of a newly built house rose to $214,159.

“It’s so expensive to build that you can’t afford the luxury of mistakes,” said Johnson. What’s more, he added, the city’s particularly complex building codes, which take into account the area’s high vulnerability to fire and earthquake, mean that the pitfalls awaiting the inexperienced non-professional are enormous.

Said one building inspector: “They’re a strange and very brave breed--the guys who try to do it all themselves. They’re really up against it.”

In the 1960s, J. Austin Ivey, now 72--nicknamed Awesome at the Simi Valley stereo manufacturing company where he works in the wood shop--cut his teeth on a 1,040-square-foot “flat-on-a-slab job” he built in Woodland Hills.

His father, then 73, was his only helper. “There was nothing to it,” said Austin, a former Granada Hills High School wood shop teacher. Today, he and his wife, Katharina, 51, stand on the 180-degree deck of their 2,500-square-foot home atop a Malibu mountain.

It is this second do-it-yourself effort, which is complete with soaring cathedral ceilings, that Austin calls his swan song. “A house being built by one man is about endurance,” said Katharina of their second project, begun in 1980 and not quite finished. “Tremendous, tremendous endurance. It’s about slow-and-steady, and precision. As I learned on this project. Austin’s got to be precise down to the 1/32nd. He’ll keep at it until he is.”

Austin, who says that his own age group is “just too tired” to relate to, said building his own house has been a fitting metaphor for who he is. “A rebel,” his wife said.

Austin said he should have been born 200 years ago, when “there was more of the challenge of providing things for yourself. I don’t like to let others do things for me because they’re not as fussy. It’s a damned old-maid attitude, but I’ll go to great ends to see something done right.”

And, to the Iveys, their dream house is done right. Built on land they bought in 1980 for $62,500, the house and property today are worth at least $700,000, they say. Flawless redwood outside, impeccable oak inside (Austin handpicked each board), there are double-paned wood windows, masterfully crafted kitchen cabinets and details throughout that are reflective of Austin’s lifelong hobby of woodworking.

Katharina recalls that when the building inspector came to approve Austin’s work, he said, “I’ve never seen a house as well-built this side of Sepulveda.”

“What about the other side?” said Austin, always fond of a joke.

“The biggest problem with these one-man operations is that they’re really, really slow,” Johnson said. “The romance of doing it yourself wears off quick after, in the back-breaking work, you’ve chopped off a finger, sawed off a leg; the one-day trench turns into three weeks, the neighbors are howling at the mess, and the checks get written and written and written.”

Professional contractors are generally in and out of a project in six months or less. Do-it-yourselfers, who generally pay as they go, often are slowed by a lack of cash, design miscalculations and building mistakes that entangle them in the building department’s approval process, Johnson said.

To get a building permit, all building plans (drawn to scale in blueprint-like form) first must be approved by city structural engineers, who check that codes are met for property grading, foundations, framing, heating, wiring, plumbing--the virtually thousands of requirements that ensure home occupants’ health and safety. Houses built on hillsides (here many do-it-yourselfers build; in the Valley, the northwest and far west areas are particularly popular), complicate the process further because they require soil analyses, erosion studies, geological surveys and more. If all goes smoothly, a plan approval takes 20 days to two months.

But for an inexperienced builder, it can be a veritable agony of plan revision and delay, say building department workers.

“When cold reality hits the dream, there’s quite a reckoning,” said John Hasselbrink, senior inspector with the building department’s Van Nuys office. “These guys come in knowing nothing more than what they picked up reading the Time-Life series on building, and we have to say, ‘That parapet on your castle? Gotta go. That moat? It’s gotta have a pool enclosure.’ We say no, no, no to their big plans and send them away with three pages of corrections to be made. It isn’t pretty.”

After a building permit finally is issued, the do-it-yourselfer still is not out of the woods. For instance, said Dominic Rescineto, a 30-year inspector with the department’s Los Angeles office, “A guy will spend months doing something like the concrete and stand back pleased. Then the inspector, whose job is to follow the project making sure all city codes are met, will waltz over and say, ‘Nope, gotta tear it all out.’ The guy’s not generally too receptive to this kind of rejection.”

In 1986, actors Richard and Aza McKenzie, in their 50s, had just finished remodeling their North Hollywood home--with professional help--when friends presented an unusual challenge. “They said, ‘Why don’t you build your own house?’ ” Aza recalled.

“We just looked at each other, and that was it. We always were crazy.” They sit in the loft bedroom of their 2,200-square-foot home, nestled in the forest of Topanga Canyon. It is cozy, charming and spacious, since one huge room downstairs contains the kitchen, dining area and living room. An original McKenzie design, it is a variation on a New England saltbox.

“Doing it all yourself,” said Richard, “means you get anything your wild imagination dares. You’re free from anyone’s tract ideas.” An enormous arched window, salvaged from a demolished Spanish mansion, and the front door, a Brentwood home’s castoff with stained-glass inlay, are only two of the couple’s finds that make their house unique. Both were found through the Recycler--the Los Angeles paper crammed with classified ads for used merchandise.

“We have had a great time!” Aza said with a laugh. They acquired their lot for $44,000. For the 2 1/2 years it took Richard to erect their romantic dream house, the McKenzies got a kick out of living in a small trailer next to the project. “It felt like we were on a trip, a quite adventurous one at that,” Aza said. At one time, the couple lived on a boat when they both were working in East Coast theater. She added, “Of course, we’re a particular type. Very, very flexible.” Her husband said, “To do this (build your own house), you have to be. And let’s face it, most people aren’t.”

If a do-it-yourselfer estimates his cost and then triples it, only then will he “be able to relax,” Richard said.

Solo builders tend to lose out on the discounts on lumber and materials given such high-volume buyers as shopping center developers. And any money they might save on labor usually is chewed up by their fierce insistence on quality, according to building department observers. Said one do-it-yourselfer: “Because my house was my baby, completely, I put in all the best stuff--central vacuum, central intercom, master bathroom spa. What I saved doing it myself covered the extras.

“Of course,” he added, “it also covered all my mistakes, the things I had to tear out and redo.”

Indeed, building a house is “like buying a bag of groceries,” said Arthur Dorn of A & D Builders in Tarzana. “If you fill it with bread, you’re going to go cheap. But fill it with filet mignon. . . .”

Before the mid-1970s, when California building codes were restrictive and a 1,200-square-foot, one-story, one-bath house was all people wanted, the do-it-yourselfer was everywhere, said Bill King, chief building mechanical inspector at the building department in Van Nuys, who built his own Valencia home. “But in this day and age of simple room additions that go on for 15 years because people don’t have the time or interest to master all the crafts involved, to actually build a house yourself, you usually have to be in a unique circumstance.

“Like if it’s your retirement home and you’ve got forever to piddle with the endless, endless details,” he continued. “Or if building is like therapy for you.” Or maybe, he said, with a laugh, “you’ve just got to love problems.”

There are irate neighbors, for example. Katharina Ivey recalled the beautiful spring day when Austin was swinging a hammer on his Woodland Hills house. “This man next door couldn’t take it anymore and yelled, ‘I’ve heard of Rome not being built in a day, but this is ridiculous!’ ”

There is near-death fatigue. “It’s so tough,” King said. “So, so tough. Every day, get off work, change clothes, go out there, pound nails until dark. Every weekend, push, push, push to get it finished. You could drop dead. There’s no break.”

And there are long-suffering wives. “Oh, I was really depressed when he started this,” Katharina Ivey said of Austin’s mountaintop Shangri-La. “He hauls me up here to live in unfinished business, in these sticks of lumber, dust and nails. The house is so consuming, there were times I thought I’d never see the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion again.”

Yet, say the lone-wolf builders, nothing is as difficult to deal with in the do-it-yourself house project as their own perfectionism.

“If your wall is an eighth off and you’ve got a good eye, you see all the shadows,” Wardel said. “And you’re crazy because the shadows aren’t right. You can put wallpaper on it, but you know, underneath, it’s . . . well, it’s not right.”

In his zealous insistence on such perfection, Wardel fired most of the occasional subcontractors or laborers he hired to help.

Richard McKenzie understands such fanaticism. “It’s a fight every inch of the way,” he said, “to be willing to leave a job alone, to force yourself to say, ‘Oh well, the trim will cover that up.’ ”

He added, “There comes a time when you’re just trying to get through. Forget art!”

Such an “emotionally consuming project is definitely not for everyone,” said King. “You have to be unique. You have to be patient. You have to have a high frustration level. You have to be physically and emotionally stable, and have a real objective perspective of your relationships and abilities. Because building a house yourself is the ultimate test. Of everything.

“And if you can’t be obsessed,” he added, “or you have other things in your life, like children or boating on weekends, then it’s probably better to go hire someone and say, ‘Call me when it’s done.’ ”

When the Iveys’ house was done, after Austin had finished fussing with the finish work in their new bedroom and Katharina could spend her first night there listening to the silence high above the Valley lights, she was overwhelmed with her husband’s accomplishment. “I just lay in this beautiful room, where every detail was Austin’s pride, and I was saying over and over, ‘I can’t believe you did this. I can’t believe you actually did it,’ ” she said. “My respect for his drive, his tenacity . . . well, I’ve never been happier in my life!”