Quote:
Originally Posted by Selanne_200
To give you a perspective from a first time home builder, what I noticed is that your interior finishing will cost you the most when determining the cost of your house. All the framing, sheathing, foundation pouring, isn't going to be substanially different from say a 3000sf home and a 5000sf home but a choice between say using laminate flooring vs engineered hardwood flooring alone can easily cost you 10k in difference or more. Also, doing a bunch of research, I personally found that building your house under a cost + base structure would probably give you better flexibility and probably better product in the end than a contractual 150 bucks a sf base. I'm a firm believer in you can what you paid for especially when it comes to hiring tradesman. Sure you can save 10k in framing say between an east indian framer and a high quality framer, but would you really want an uneven floor, wavy walls, walls that are not plumb, and rooms that are out of square? If you got more questions feel free to ask a guy who's still currently building his house in vancouver east right now. ( And no, I'm not building the house to flip but I'm actually going to be living in it)
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You are dead on with most of your points. I hire a quality framer thats around 10-11bucks a sq/ft, where as if I went with a EI framer it would be around 5-7bucks a sq/ft. But in the end you will have less headache with failing city inspections and your structural engineer inspections. Your interior finishing will really take around 25-30% of the whole project. Cabinets, fixtures, flooring, doors, trims and so on.
When I build a spec or custom house, I always go by cost + base like you said. Reason being is that the customer can always choose what they want and they wont be tied to use whatever I give them. In the end, the client will be happy and not be stuck with materials inside their house that they dont want.
But one downside is that, I get a lot of clients walking away from me when they try to pick a builder because I am never the cheapest compared to the builders that charges a lump sump to build the house. They dont seem to understand the you get what you pay for.