Want to avoid the grind? Want to skip straight to building your own house? Lost your save game and want to get back to where you were as fast as possible? This speedrun guide shows you how to pay off your mortgage in just 3 days, and be retired in 4.
If you are not too familiar with the game yet, you may need to follow these instructions at a more relaxed pace. There is no need to cram everything into 4 days, but If you want the "not paid for overtime" achievement, you need to manage it in 30 days, which is very easy to do.
Before you start, you will need to refer to this map to find everything mentioned in the guide.

First pick up the post and get your keys, then go outside and chase Jimmy off. Head into town to the job centre and pick up both jobs, and sign on. Talk to Winston and give him the driving job. Go across the street and talk to Reggie. He will tell you he has dropped off a skip. Go to Mitchell and take his deal. Go to the derelict house and talk to Jimmy, load his wheelbarrow for him.

Next find a broken TV and weigh it in at the scrapyard. You need at least £5.48 to buy a claw hammer at Ronnie's tool shop. Don't waste too much time searching for scrap, but if you do get lucky, buy the right angled torch. If you want to do a real speed run, this will help you a lot in the dark.

Go find the ladder propped up below the "grafting ain't working" billboard. Nick it and take it home. Talk to Winston and send him on his way. Put your ladder up against the wall of the house and get up onto the roof. Don't place it too close or it can damage the wall. Take the tarp off by undoing the ropes at each corner, pick it up and toss it in a corner. That is everything you need to do to "fix" the roof.

Have a nosy around in the field behind the bap van. Behind some bushes you will find a nice shiny cooker. Grab it and haul it home. Next, take the fridge out of your caravan. Dump the fridge in the skip, and stick the cooker on top. This ensures you will have at least £60 coming your way tomorrow.

Before it gets dark, it's time to go fetching some furniture. Go to the canal towpath, and collect the wardrobe, chair, mattress, and toilet. Leave the sink, it is heavy and slow to move. You don't need the wheelbarrow to move furniture, in fact it is preferable not to. At best you cant see where you are going, at worst you destroy what you are trying to carry. Just sprint back and forth until you have everything.

To complete the house, you need to plasterboard all the interior wall frames. However, you don't need to do that if there aren't any internal walls. Not to mention, those wooden frames are worth a fiver each! This is where we get most of the cash we need for the rest of the house. So your job for the evening is to use the claw hammer to rip these out, and dump them in the skip. Use a long left click on the nails to remove them, pick the frame up, then a long right click brings up the hotbar. re-configure them to the door frame type, this is easiest to stack into the skip. Once you are near the skip, right clicking will rotate the orientation of the wood, so you can stack them more neatly. You don't need to get all of them in the skip, you can always put the rest in tomorrow. If you can get at least 8 in there, you will have all the money you need for tomorrow. Unfortunately there is a bug with the skip, you are unlikely to get paid for all of the frames, but there is nothing you can do about this.

Make sure you don't stay up past midnight! if you do, then when you sleep you will skip a whole extra day. This is not a big deal if you are not aiming for a speed record, but in that case, why bother grubbing around in the dark when you can just go to bed and do it tomorrow?

When you get up on day 2, take a look at your post. You should have your dole money (a whopping £3.57) and a rather more substantial sum from the rag and bone man. Hopefully you now have at least £85 which will enable you to buy everything you need today. You will also have Jimmy's wheelbarrow.

Go straight to the phone, and order one lot of foundation stakes, one lot of aggregate, and a pallet of bricks. If you want nice matching bricks, get the "carlyle clay" ones. Whilst you wait for that to arrive, take the wheelbarrow down to the coal mine. Grab the 2 bags of sand and 2 bags of cement. Ignore the breeze blocks, you don't need them. Nip back home, and unload Winston's wagon by hand. This is a little time consuming, but there is no realistic alternative at this point. You can pick up bricks 10 at a time, and throw them a fair distance. Just try to avoid getting stuff stuck under the lorry's wheels. This may get in the way of future deliveries, so remember to move things later if they are too far out into the road.

By now you are down to half energy, so grab some breakfast from the bap van. Now you have a decent amount of money, take the bus to save time. Nip into town and buy some tools. In addition to your claw hammer, you need a pointing trowel, flathead screwdriver, a bolster, and the hand cement mixer. You might also want to buy a bucket if you want to do a decent job of the cement work, and the right angled torch if you haven't already got that, and have plenty of cash. You can take the cement mixer home on the bus, saving a lot of time. Just push it right into the bus stop until you can interact with it.

Now it is time to do some serious building work. You can do this nice and precisely if you want, or just wing it. colour matching everything is quite a complicated affair, mostly due to game bugs. To make things worse, the colour of your newly laid mortar and concrete changes somewhat after re-loading the game.

*Proper Way*
Measure out 20l aggregate, 10l sand, 4l water, 6l cement, and mix it up. This makes up 40 litres of prime concrete. Put your stakes out and pour the foundation from the mixer. Make sure to empty out the leftovers from the mixer before mixing anything else.
Measure out 90l aggregate, 45l water, 15l cement for 150l of prime no fines. This should come out as a brown colour that matches the existing no fines. If it comes out white, this is a common bug. You can fix it by nipping into town for a tin of "junior morris" paint and tipping it into the mixer. This gives an almost perfect match. Use your trowel to apply the no fines to the walls. Make sure your notebook updates when this is done. If it doesn't, go round with your trowel and find the panel which highlights when you mouse over, this is the one that isn't quite full. Once you are done with the no-fines, dump out any remaining mix.
Measure out 30l sand, 6l cement, 4l water. This makes 40l of prime mortar. This isn't a colour match for the existing mortar however, it is a bit too brown, unless of course it comes out white due to the mixer bug. However that isn't any guarantee it wont go brown when you load the game later. Mixing in some "bone" paint gets a decent match.

*Pikey Way*
Mix up 6 bags of aggregate, a bag of cement, and take a fairly long piss in the mixer. Use whatever results to repair the no fines walls, then dump in a whole bag of sand, mix it up again, and voila, you have some sort of concrete. Once you have poured the concrete foundation, dump the rest of the mix out, and mix up some mortar, with one bag of sand, some cement, and a short piss.

Now at this point, you are probably very short on energy again. Take the bus into town and get some dinner at the pub. Whilst you are there, buy 4 packs of crisps and stick them in your toolbelt for tomorrow.

The last thing for day 2 is to lay your bricks. Use the torch if it gets dark, and keep at it. You won't be able to lay bricks over the newly laid concrete yet, so ignore that bit for now. Again, make sure you don't stay up past midnight. If you have any interior wall frames you haven't got rid of yet, load those into the skip too.

First thing in the morning, you will get your dole money and your skip money. At this point, make sure you have at least £58.

Get an order in, one front door, one back door, one large tall window, one large short window.
Finish off your brickwork whilst you wait for the delivery. You don't need to finish off the vertical gaps between the bricks, just get them all placed. You will see your notebook update when this is done. Open your notebook and click the last page, "property". This will tell you anything that is wrong with the house. You will see it is missing various items of furniture. Look on the roof of your caravan, there is a table up there. Grab that and put it inside.

Now its time for some screwdriver work! remove a kitchen cabinet, the cooker, sink, and shower from your caravan, and fit them in the house. Fit your windows and doors, order your remaining 3 medium windows, and fit those too. You may need to eat a bag of crisps at this point to keep yourself going.
If you didn't find the time already, go down to the pit and fetch the sofa, tv, and fridge. Check the map if you don't know where that is.

To be clear, here is where your furniture comes from:

From the canal towpath: toilet, chair, wardrobe, mattress.
From inside the caravan: cooker, kitchen cabinet, sink, shower.
From the pit: sofa, tv, fridge.
From the caravan roof: table

In theory you can remove the toilet from your caravan.. don't. It is an absolute bugger to fit a new one later, it is just too hard to get at the screws in such a confined space. You can also grab the sink from the canal towpath if you have time, but since it is heavy, it is quicker to take the one in the caravan. You can also find 2 kitchen cabinets out in the world too, but again, it is quicker to take one out of your caravan. If you have enough money after buying your windows and doors, you can buy new furniture rather than stripping it out of the caravan if you want.

Now at this point, your house should be "complete". Open up your notebook to the last page, you should see no complaints about anything missing.

Now to flip this dump for a tidy profit! Nip down to Mitchell's, and sell it. Now it meets the minimum build requirements, it should fetch between £13,000 and £13,600. Pay off your loan in full.. All 6 grand of it. Hold down the arrow button to increase the repayment amount then click the tick. This will leave you with about 7 grand in hand, more than sufficient to build your dream house with. At this point you can relax, but if you want the "not paid for overtime" achievement (and even more money) this only takes one more day.

Buy a standard no fines silo and a standard concrete silo. Call in at the tool shop and buy a spade, pallet truck, compressor, mortar gun, and pneumatic screwdriver. Take your pallet truck home on the bus. If you got home in time to put an order in, order one lot of foundation stakes, and 2 lots of external wall frames. Unload these with your pallet truck, and then lay out your foundation stakes in a 2x2 grid, each one at the maximum size of 250l. This is enough for a minimum sized house. Use your pallet truck to fetch a big tub of concrete from the silo, and then use the spade to fill the foundation frames. You need to get this done before going to bed.

On day 4, your foundation is ready for adding walls. Concentrate on ordering your furniture, this will take several deliveries, so get started on that first thing. Use full no fines frames for the walls, with one doorway, and the rest solid. Use your pallet truck to fetch the no fines tub, start the compressor with the big red button, and use the mortar gun to fill the frames quickly.
Fit the furniture as it comes. You will also need a front door. Use the pneumatic screwdriver to fit everything. Just stuff all the furniture in wherever it will fit, it doesn't really matter if it is logical or there is enough room to move around. Use your notebook to check the build requirements to make sure you have everything.

Once your horrible little box house is "complete" get down to Mitchell's, and hit the retire button! This should get your achievement. You can of course immediately un-retire. But just a word of warning.. retiring, un-retiring, and then renting the house out in the same day will cause the game to crash when you try to sleep. So if you un-retire, don't rent the house out until tomorrow.

Once you have got yourself to a nice stopping point with plenty of cash, it is a good idea to back up your save file, incase it throws a wobbly later and breaks your save you have something to go back to. Click "save data" in the main menu and make a backup of the whole "landlords super" folder.

On day 5 you can pick a tenant. Chose somebody with a short stay, and high satisfaction rating. Even this tiny slum will satisfy a lout, since everything is brand new and undamaged. You can sleep through the tenancy, or take a day to buy new furniture for your caravan. You can also paint or wallpaper the walls and fit flooring too. Either way, when the tenancy period is up, you will get your payment in the post, and a nice thank you letter. A satisfied tenant will trigger the "Agoost" achievement if you don't already have it, and the Agoost catalogue will drop through your door.

At this point, you need a much, much bigger house to satisfy a grafter tenant, so there is no point keeping this nasty little box. Pop into town and sell it. It should fetch up to £4800, most of which is pure profit. At this point, you are armed with an Agoost catalogue, and 10 grand. Buy all the silos, and start work on a nice medium sized 2 story house. To satisfy a grafter tenant, you need a house value of 20 grand, 200 square metres of space, and 2 floors. However, it is worth building something big enough to satisfy a yuppie too, for which you will need 300 square metres of space, and a house value of 30 grand. With a large, furnished house it is easy to meet this price requirement, only the size requirement requires any effort to address. Lay your foundations and set up your ground floor walls, then check the last page of your notebook. If the downstairs is at least 150 square metres, then obviously the second story will double that, unless you build the second story smaller for whatever reason. Each foundation frame at full 250l size is 9.5 sqm, so it takes at least 16 to make a 150 sqm ground floor. That is, a 4x4 grid of full sized foundation frames is the minimum to get the size you need.

Take your time making a really nice house. You have more than enough money for even the biggest or most ostentatious project at this point, including changing your mind several times. You may wish to go for the "i'm alright jack" achievement by getting the value up to 40k and retiring. With a house that nice, it is trivial to rent it out to a grafter then a yuppie, and get the achievements for that and the Harolds catalogue for even fancier furniture. If you want to push the boat out even further, you can get the "high rise" achievement by adding even a comparatively small loft. As long as it has a staircase and a loop of no fines or brick walls, it counts, even if you hide it with roof frames, making it look like a dormer window.

Once you have got yourself to a nice stopping point with plenty of cash, it is a good idea to back up your save file, incase it throws a wobbly later and breaks your save you have something to go back to. Click "save data" in the main menu and make a backup of the whole "landlords super" folder.

For other things to do once you have built your big house, try my 100% achievements guide, and go down to Mitchell and take a look at his properties for sale. These derelict houses are in quite a state, but you can flip them for some good profit, or do them up really nicely.