Depends on the kind of house you want to build. Stone, concrete, wood, brick, log, or something else.
To begin with, you need a foundation and buy construction supplies online. Generally, that requires poured concrete footings. Atop that may be poured concrete walls, or laid concrete block walls.
If you want to build a wood-frame house, popular in the US and many different places, you need loads of wood, in various sizes. You then need something for sheathings, such as plywood. Then you need some external facing, which might be beveled siding boards, aluminum siding, mesh and concrete, cedar shingles, brick, stone, or artificial stone tablets, some sort of paneling, or something else.
You will need plywood or shiplap boards for flooring and roofing. You need windows and doors. You need shingles or something else to cover the roof, and you will need tarpaper or butylene rubber sheeting under it.
You will need something for the interior walls and ceilings; often, drywall is used. But you can make walls of wood, or of metal lath and plaster, or of a substrate and paneling with some surface finish such as a simulated wood pattern. You can get all the required materials from the construction supply online shop.
It takes a lot of stuff to build a house. And a lot of skills, to know how to use those tools and how to cut and shape the materials.
It depends on what type of construction the person is asking for. For building construction, typically the design team selects the building materials. The design team would often consist of architects, interior designers, civil engineers, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and sometimes other consultants. The exact nature of the team depends on the type and scope of the project.
The construction documents, including drawings and specifications, document the building materials desired by the design team to relay that information to the construction manager contractor. You can buy construction supplies online from a construction supply online shop.
There are often acceptable manufacturer alternatives included in the specifications. For example, three or four acceptable manufacturers may be listed in the specifications for insulation, as long as the type of insulation is not changed and the provided product still meets the other requirements of the specifications. When given manufacturer options, the contractor and/or sub-contractors will use the one that provides the best combination of good past experiences, economy, quality, availability, and other factors.
The primary barriers to new building materials can include building codes, contractors and design teams that are slow to accept change, and typical difficulties in selling new items. As with any type of new product, sometimes it can be difficult to get the widespread word out and gain trust over the old ways of doing things. This can be made more challenging by building codes that don’t change overnight.