After 29-year-old Jad Idrissi posted pictures of his self-constructed home on Facebook, he received 60,000 likes in less than 24 hours.
Situated in Abi Kemash area next to Zuwarah in western Libya, the house is near the beach and surrounded by a lush garden designed by Jad himself. This romantic house is not recognizable as the former wooden shack owned by Jad’s family for 36 years
After 29-year-old Jad Idrissi posted pictures of his self-constructed home on Facebook, he received 60,000 likes in less than 24 hours.
Situated in Abi Kemash area next to Zuwarah in western Libya, the house is near the beach and surrounded by a lush garden designed by Jad himself. This romantic house is not recognizable as the former wooden shack owned by Jad’s family for 36 years
The house’s re-creation began when Jad fell in love and decided to get married. But he did not own a house to live in with his wife and he was unable to afford the costs of building a house at the time. In order to fulfill his dream of marrying his fiance, he decided to redesign and expand the wooden shack into a modern home.
Jad’s friends supported his decision and put together some money to give him a head start. “I prepared plans to redesign and construct the shack to turn it into a house with the help of consultants, but I found that I did not have enough money to pay even half of the construction process fees, especially with the increase of labor prices,” Jad recalled.
So Jad decided to build the house himself, relying on previous skills gained from maintenance and repair work. The rest of his expertise he got off the Internet.
“I am like many other young men in Libya. Even though I graduated with a computer engineering degree and studied in Egypt and Italy, I still do not have a stable job and I juggle different jobs to earn a living,” Jad said.
He divided the work into three stages: architecture and restoration, which took him six months of constant work. “Then, I treated the wood with a special substance to protect it from humidity and decay,” he said. “Afterwards, I treated the walls inside and out and wrapped them. Finally, I began the construction and expansion stage where I added a new part to the small house.”
Jad even collect nails from a nearby shack that was completely burnt down. “I used numerous secondhand material that I altered and recycled including wood in order to save expenses.”
Financial resources were sometimes an obstacle to the continuation of Jad’s work. When he wanted to pave the floors of the house with parquet, for example, he discovered that this type of wood is very expensive. Therefore, he paved a couple of meters then he stopped to collect the price of a couple more until one of his friends donated the remaining amount.
Jad created a small workshop at the house where he collected equipment and organized it so he could use it whenever he needed to repair something in the house. “Not one single worker entered the house,” Jad boasted proudly.
Outside of the house, Jad built umbrellas with his own hands and steadied each one of them with only six nails, so people are surprised by their stability despite the heavy wind blowing from the neighboring sea.
He even built some of the furniture. He made a modern kitchen which he fully designed, collected wood and cut them according to the proper sizes and dimensions and then took them to one of the workshops to install the pieces together. He also made the dining table and is currently working on a bedroom.
“My house is painted all over my body,” he said pointing to bruises and cuts all over his arms and legs. “Although I took all safety precautions and checked daily that the first-aid kit was full and available, I suffered several injuries when I fell from the roof in addition to large cuts from some of the equipment,” he explained.
He laughed aloud when he recalled how he had to re-work the water tank after he finished it. He spent long days building the water tank, but when he finished its walls and floor and filled the tank with water, he suddenly found that water was leaking to the ground. Therefore, he completely emptied the tank and was forced to reprocess its walls again.
“I was not upset about it since I was learning from the Internet, which did not prevent me from making some mistakes.”