I’d do some volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity. It has taught me a fair amount (like how to hang siding) and you get to learn while doing something meaningful.

As we iterate through buying a house, fixing it up, selling it, and then moving and doing it all over again, we are learning by doing. And we are developing a feel for what tasks we are comfortable doing ourselves and which we intend to contract out. To supplement this, within the limited remaining free time (since my wife and I are both employed full-time and have small kids), I’m looking exclusively for online, self-paced courses.

An online course cannot duplicate hands on experience. You must get the hands on hours (and make all the mistakes) that on the job training provides.

If it is any help, it took me 45 years to get to where I am at today.

While it's not online, you may want to consider the classes offered to contractors to pass state tests. Your best value would be working the room during breaks.

Save your money; your goal is unobtainable online and your jurisdiction may not allow you to build a house without licensed contractors especially for electrical work

And building a house in less than 3 years is a full time task

Save your money, take a side job, etc and hire experienced help

I built a small house myself and after 9 years I sold it unfinished and I was already an architect when I started

Learn about business contracts and state licensing requirements. Put that together with your knowledge that you have already gained, and you will know enough to hire a good GC to build your home. Hopefully, you will also have learned enough to stand back and let them, and their subs, do their job! Even those full time in the trades rarely hands on their own home build. They don't have the time, or the financial ability to have zero income for a couple of years of work.

I think nothing beats hands on with these kinds of skills. However, there can be some online or book learning as well. Wherever you are, look for the local trade schools that offer certs/degrees in the areas you want to learn. Some of the curriculum is likely to be book learning, and you can learn that without hands on time. As example, you can learn how to frame, cut angles, what pitches to do for house building with online or books- but you still need hands on time to practice the theories you learned. I'm not suggesting you only take the book/online parts of certs- just look at the curriculums to see what the book/online parts of the learning are. There is still a lot of that kind of learning to be done, even if you are unwilling to do pratical classes.

Some certs you probably can do all on line is things like learning codes or possibly building inspection, legalities of real estate or real estate license. Those areas of knowledge can be helpful for folks flipping houses every couple years and possibly changing states a lot.

Hi, T.M.,

I applaud you wanting to understand what goes into designing and building a home before beginning either process. I'd like to suggest a brief detour before diving into trade-specific education and recommend two books for you to read. With respect to design, I think Marianne Cusato's book "Get Your House Right Architectural Elements to Use and Avoid" and Katherine Salant's book "The Brand New House Book" are very readable, informative, and great places to start your pre-construction education phase. Once you've read them, you'll have a better sense of what specific areas you'd like to pursue in more detail. If you've got an interest in building science, I recommend reading anything by the good folks at Building Science Corp. and anything published as part of the Building America program, much of which are available on the web at no cost.

Best wishes for a successful project and an enjoyable time bringing it to life.