>>23684795550% of the cost is usually labour, including labour to transport the goods to your place. Unless you have a way of pouring a billion gallons of concrete yourself, you need to hire a pump truck to do all the footings and form work for you. Your best bet is to just have a slab-on-grade home, just hire a basic concrete truck to back up and dump a big slab. You don't need a basement, they're just a source of problems most of the time. You can dig a small cold-cellar if you need to, it can be done without form work.
The reason you pay so much for labour is because unions artificially inflated the value of all trades' work. Plumbers never used to make $100k/year but they can now, everything is standardized and you pay through the nose for it.
You're correct in that all of that stuff is relatively simple, if you build a simple house. It gets difficult when people build these complex mcmansions with 5,000SF and they have to run 800 miles of copper through it.
If you can drive nails, screw and glue ABS pipe, and twist marrettes to wire up your house, you can do it yourself or with a few helping hands.
If you're really hardcore, you can be like this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxM9FYSs8V4People are afraid to try new things, they're led to believe they have to hire an "expert" for everything. You can do the majority of the maintenance on your own vehicle with relative ease - it's not hard with a basic tool kit. People would rather be lazy, uneducated, and then pay a fuckton of money for someone with below-average intelligence to do the work for them.
Stop cucking yourself, you have the power.
