Congratulations! Looks great. We have similar tastes...I used Whole Wheat and your pic looks better than my room. I also have the same 1/2 round iron piece that's above your cooktop:) Enjoy your new home.

Amazing! Do you have any pictures of the floorplan?

persnickety: it's looking fabulous! you've done such a wonderful job, it's really a joy to see. wishing you a wonderful new year with many happy and healthy years in your new home!

Persnick!! Oh my GOODNESS, it's gorgeous!! I am so thrilled for you, and so TERRIBLY encouraged for myself!! I've started out exactly the same way you did -- pricing things and then buying on eBay, Craigslist, deep sales, and so on. I have a barnful of (mostly salvaged or reclaimed) flooring, tiles, doors, pex, fixtures, sinks, appliances, and so on that are just waiting for the house to go up so they can be installed. Your success is completely inspiring, and completely heartwarming too. Many MANY congratulations to you and to your family. I know you will LOVE your beautiful home for many years to come!


----------- Trilby (truly in awe!!)

Congratulations on the new beautiful home and the swift sale of your previous home!

How did you find time to put together such a perfect home and also make time to be so helpful to all of us here? Well done and thanks for the info and willingness to be of assistance.

One more thing, where did you get your mudroom hooks? Very fun.

Thank you so much, everyone! You have no idea how much your kind words mean to me. :o)

Liptonjl...Here's the layout for the main floor. The kids game room is above the garage. Behind that is my sewing room/office/future bedroom. We also added in a full bath above the laundry room. There's a walk-in attic over the kitchen & breakfast room that can be accessed from either the game room or office (full size doors). There's another attic that's over the kids' bedrooms. That one is accessed through pull-down stairs in the hall. :o)

Crazyhouse...The hooks came from eBay. The seller's name is omalleyshd. They were only $2.89 each!!! Here's a link

Here is a link that might be useful: Cast Iron Hooks

persnickety- The only way I'll keep my cost down is to do it all myself, except the foundation and septic system. Many 'premium' materials, such as fiber cement siding and metal roofing are only expensive due to the labor. A friend of mine had to go with vinyl siding, because the Hardi siding was an $18K upcharge! Our house will be very basic and cottage-like. I wish I could get started today, but we're probably at least a year away. We have to sell our FL home first, and this is a particularly bad time for that, so we will have to be patient. Depending on how much money we have to work with, I may have the basic shell built, then take it from there. I haven't been able to accurately add up costs yet, as I haven't gotten quotes on floor and roof trusses.

It's a great house but if it were mine I wouldn't be bragging about how much I saved by getting people to work for free especially if they are friends. I understand that it is a big thrill to get something for nothing but I don't understand why you would need to share that with others who don't have that opportunity or who would not take advantage of it. I am demanding of contractors but I always make sure they are paid for acceptable work.

Would you mind sharing the paint colors/brands for the greens you have in your mudroom, kitchen, and powder room (and any other lime-y greens in your house?) Thanks, and what a wonderful house!

MA...I don't really think that it was bragging. There were questions about how we kept the costs so low and I answered them. I never asked anyone to work for free and we paid our subs the contracted amounts that they set. Sure, our friends came by to help us out and worked for free, but we do the same for them. That's what friends do for each other. :o)

lkplatow..Believe it or not, there are only two shades of green in the house. We used SW Sassy Green in the sunroom and all the rest of the green rooms are done in SW Hearts of Palm. That color looks completely different in each room and changes dramatically throughout the day. I love it!

The purpose of calculating the cost per s.f. of a project is to use it as a comparative guide to aid yourself and others in current and future projects. If any part of that calculation is based on free materials or labor or contractors working at cost, the calculation is meaningless.

Fair enough. I did not intend for others to use our costs as a guide for their own projects. :o)

Your home is gorgeous!!!

I absolutely love the color in your bathroom. Do you mind sharing? I apologize if you've already listed it, I didn't see it.

And that storage center is absolutely LOVELY! Exactly the same type of thing I was looking to have DH build. It's beautiful!

Congratulations on such an awesome home!

ma said: I wouldn't be bragging about how much I saved by getting people to work for free

I used to know a builder who'd brag about how many trades he stiffed and didn't think anything of "borrowing" materials from other sites on Sundays. I'm not recommending either practice!

Mamabird...that's SW Tradewind. We liked it so much in the bathroom that we used it in 2 of the boys' rooms.

Thanks so much for sharing the dining room color - I really appreciate it!

Alas, I'm hoping I can find a BM substitute for it, as there are no SW dealers near me :(

Thanks again,
Dawn

Sorry if this has already been answered Persnickey, but were you basically acting as your own general contractor? If so, can you tell me where you got your information on how to be your own general?
We're considering this but haven't the faintest idea where to start.
Also, how happy are you with your Nichiha siding and what color did you pick (Macadamia?) we're also looking at this product and have color samples ordered. Thanks in advance for your help.
Congrats. I like the idea of having friends help, like a good old fashioned barn raising!

Dawn...Can BM color match it for you?

Begonias...We had originally intended to use a GC. I wanted to be familiar with the procedures & terminology so I started reading books...lots of them. Then I started researching products, so I knew what I was going to be putting in the house. Then I started reading websites & forums. We spoke to as many people as we could who had built before. And most importantly we asked questions...lots and lots of them. The more research we did and the more people we talked to the more we realized that we wanted to be the GCs. It's certainly not for everyone, but our build was as problem free as you could hope for. We thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it.

We LOVE our Nichiha siding. We were the guinea pigs for macadamia in our area. We liked the color on the sample, but there wasn't anyone within a 300 mile radius that had used it. We decided to get it anyway and figured that if we didn't like the color after it was installed it was light enough that we could paint over it. Fortunately, it's beautiful! We've had lots of people stop by and ask about it.

Any book(s) that you would recommend I start with? The link below shows the house we're looking to build (we're going to modify it to reduce the size down quite a bit) I like the shingle siding in the cedar look, but we're in a high fire area in California so cedar shake siding isn't the best idea.
Sadly, permits in this area for a house half that size run 50-60K so being our own GC will help offset that kind of cost.(p.s. please check your spread sheet thread, I posted there for you as well)

Here is a link that might be useful: ePlans house

Where did you find your floor plan? It is planned out so well. We can't build for awhile but I keep searching for the perfect ranch floor plan for our family and we definetly need a mud room and large garage and 4 bedrooms.

Your house is awesome!

Persnickety, I am right there with you on the friends helping friends issue, girlfriend!! Many of the pictures on my photo site show various family and friends helping to install the pex for the radiant heating, and if there had been ANY sun we'd have shots of the same friends slapping a cement stucco basecoat on. What the pictures DON'T show is how many weekends we spent helping one couple install a new living room floor (from the same salvaged heart pine planks I found on eBay), or the hours and the labor we put in getting another friend packed up and moving her 200 miles to a new house.

Friends help friends out. The comparison ELB made to a barn raising is entirely applicable. Certainly, not all of us are fortunate enough to have friends who are willing and able to trade sweat equity for sweat equity, and in that sense, MA's objections are accurate; but we asked Persnick "How did you do it??" and she told us honestly.

We get by with a little help from our friends. :-)


-------------- Trilby

Begonias...Your house plan is beautiful! I think the first book we got was "The Owner-Builder Book" (they have a website too). At the time we weren't even planning on GCing our own project, but it gave the basics. Our library had a bunch of books that we checked out, but some of our favorites were the Tauton books (Fine Homebuilding). They were wonderful.

Our siding is fiber cement made to look like shakes. It's by Nichiha. It may not be the same elsewhere, but here in GA it is rated the same as a brick structure for insurance purposes. :o)

Lily...thank you so much!!! I designed the house on my computer using a Better Homes & Gardens program. I posted the plan here on the board for critique and got some wonderful advice. When I was happy with the result I took it to a local desinger who drafted the plans for me using CAD. He didn't have to change a thing. I take that back...he did move the double ovens, but I asked him to move them back. LOL

Trilby...AMEN! I haven't seen any of your photos for a VERY long time. Didn't you build a round house? I remember thinking that was so cool. Post some pics, pretty please!

Thanks persnickey, I have a few books on order from Amazon.
If you built again, what things stand out as 'must do's' or 'if I had known then what I know now' would you pass along to someone like myself getting started in the process.
What pitfalls would you advise me to be aware of? What areas would you spend more $ and which areas would you have gone cheaper because it wouldn't have mattered in the long run? (if possible, I mean your $64/sf is admirable!)

Thanks Persnickery for all the great advice. Your house is beautiful.
We have just started to build the Frank Betz Summerlake in Georgia.

that house looks great! How are you going to size it down?

sorry - that message was for eye love begonias not persnicketydesign!

Bless you for asking for pictures, Persnickety! :-)

(I sure hope these actually show up, I'm so bad at this!!)

Right now, we're building a big workshop as a kind of "test run". For one thing, Dear Housemate needed to build it first to convince me he has the skills to GC our house himself. Once the shop is done, we'll move in there and hopefully start on the actual house later this year, or early in 2010. A lot the timing will depend on the economy, and on when the IRS decides to release my late father's estate (he passed in Feb 2006!!)

The house is planned (at least for now) to be round, or possibly just to have a round great room. To save on time, Dear Housemate decided to make the workshop octagonal instead of round (simpler to get the measurements right, simpler to get the roof up). So here's where we are on the workshop/soon-to-be-temporary-home:


The most recent milestone -- the basecoat for the stucco is on:

Here's a shot of the interior, with the pex sticking up everywhere. The floor is cement and we're going to acid-stain it eventually:



And just for fun, here's the plumbing for the sink, shower, etc; and the manifold for the radiant heating (three zones):



It's about 1400 SF -- huge for a workshop, but half of it will be DH's office once we move out, and maybe even an overflow guest room. And since we're going to be living there at least a couple of years, we're wanting to make it as homelike as possible without wasting $$$$.

Thanks again, Persnickety -- I am SO proud of what you've accomplished, and so very thrilled to see proof positive that it really CAN be done so beautifully on a tight budget!

---------- Trilby

Here is a link that might be useful: In case anyone is interested, here's a link to the workshop gallery from the foundation on!

Begonias...We really had as smooth a build as we could have ever hoped for. I asked DH the questions that you posted and neither of us could come up with anything that we would have done differently. For us the most important thing was the planning. We spent nearly two years looking for our lot and then planned the house for 18 months after that. We spent just as much time finding our subs as we did building the house. We can't complain about a single one.

We spent the money where we felt it was neccessary...in the bones. DH did say that if we wanted to save more $$$ we could have foregone BluWood, but I think that any added protection against mold, mildew, termites, and rot is a good investment. I guess time will tell. :o)

Trilby...that is AWESOME!!!

wow! looks great. its funny, we are so close to your numbers persnickety but we are at 90$/sq foot bc we are putting in geothermal, nu wool insulation, and stucco/stone instead of siding. i guess i am on the right track. great job!

Thank you again persnickety. To WillWorkForRoses, the ePlans rep said that they can rework the plans to our specs and 'shrink' the whole footprint to what % we need. There are revision fees but still cheaper than an architect and since I've had the design laid our for nearly 15 years and have numerous sketches and plans on napkins to trace paper etc., I really only needed to adjust a ready-made plan to fit our site and add/subtract some things (for example that plan shows 6-1/2 bathrooms and I only need 3-1/2, but want a larger mud room and screened porch)
I have four 4" thick binders with magazine tear outs that I've saved over the last 20 years. Ideas that I loved (some I still love others I can see now were fads that have gone bye bye!) We own the land already (a 40 acre parcel with the building site cleared) and already have power to the site as well as the septic system installed and complete. We've put off building so long that our kids are either grown and gone or soon to be. So that size house shown is just way too large for empty nesters. We still want 3 bedrooms as we host exchange students and the parcel is an hour away from most of our friends so we'll encourage guests to stay over after visits. (the land is located in the mountains - 14 miles up a one-lane winding road,so after a few bottles of wine, we don't want anyone trying to navigate our road!!!)
DH build a post and beam barn back in 98 and there is a small unit downstairs that we can stay in while building so that we're on-site.
Years ago, he bought a sawmill and milled all the redwood and fir that the barn is built from (see the link below).

Sorry, getting off track.. at any rate it's our hope to do as much of the work ourselves as we can and be the general so that we can afford to build, and do like persnickey did and focus our funds on more interior details but a smaller house.

I'm not familiar with BluWood, must be a regional product. Mold and Mildew are not such a problem in hot dry northern California I suppose.

thanks again persnickey, hope you don't mind my picking your brain and hijacking a bit.

Here is a link that might be useful: Redwood Barn

Hi Persnickety!
Love your house, it is beautiful! I ended up using some of the SW colors you posted for me once, Thank you, :).
I am curious, is the $64 psf based on heated space or total? I was looking at your budget numbers and they seem very close to ours on many things for our home which is a similar size. We had a GC to get us dried in and now we are managing the project ourselves. I think your information is so helpful to many looking to build, alot of us are DIYers and have friends/family who are in the trades or who will help out and every bit of research helps. Thanks for all the info you have shared and Congratulations on a job well done!

Beautiful house, and the porch areas look very inviting! I love outdoor living spaces. Too many new houses don't even have a porch or covered patio. Good for you to find ways to save so much money!

Begonias...that barn is fabulous!

Luckymom...Glad to hear everything is going well with your build! I can't wait to see pics. :o) Are you eBaying most of your supplies too? The $64 is for heated space.

Thank you so much, fathen! We live in the South and are able to enjoy the porches all year long. They were a must have for our family. :o)

Persnickety, Thanks for clarifying. I have been so busy painting and then with all our crazy weather here in Oregon and then with Christmas that I have not shared pictures in a long while, I know...shame on me! What items did you have good luck with on ebay?

Luckymom...we got almost everything needed to "dress" the house on eBay. The light fixtures, faucets, door knobs, drawer pulls, ceiling fans, appliances, towel bars, paper holders. You name it, it probably came from eBay. It took a long time to gather our things, but buying everything online saved us big $$$. :o)

Great looking home. I am impressed.

We are just finishing up our home we built ourselves. We are at almost triple the cost per sqft. Just adding up my soft costs (plans, permits, survey, engineering), utilities, driveway, and foundations (walk-out basement and detached garaged) I am almost at $50/sqft. I guess I either need to move out of Nor Cali or build a bigger home (2025 sqft).
Awesome Job!

Mikeyvon! I haven't "seen" you for a long time. How's the baby?

I don't think we would have ever had a prayer of being able to build if we lived anywhere in Cali. I've seen the permit costs that people post and they're astronomical on their own!

Post some pics for us, please! It's been awhile and I loved watching your progress. :o)

My boys are great!

sneak peak at the floors - everywhere except the bathrooms and laundry room. I was told I would need thresholds going into all the rooms, but me being a skilled rookie, made the floors continuous through-out the entire 44' length. They look good. I have about 5 feet left to do on the loft, the WIC, and the landing on the stairs.

I need to take some new pics of the house. We are still working on doing the finish stuff, such as trim, doors, paint, master bath, master closet. I been spending much time playing and shoveling snow. With 900+ feet of drive, next year I will have some form of mechanized snow removal, money permitting.

OMG, Mikey! They are gorgeous!!! And the floors aren't so bad either. ;o)

That snow is incredible. It's been years since we've had any...and even then it wasn't enough to cover the ground. I'd love to have some for a few days. I sure don't envy your having to clear the driveway, though. You need to invent something for snow dog to pull behind him that will clear the drive. Looks like he loves the snow and would probably work for treats and belly rubs. LOL

We're in the suburbs of Augusta, GA.

thank you for all of this AWESOME information we hope to start building in the near future, fingers crossed, as we are paying for the smaller things as we go so this will be a slow going process for us.
My question to you now that you have lived in the home for sometime is there anything you would change if you could.
I also hope to some how incorporate a sewing/play room some where in the house. did splitting up the area over the garage work out for you..

Thanks again for all of the wonderful pics and information.

Your home is beautiful. I used to have a circle of friends who helped work on each other's houses, and it was much more fun and meaningful than just hanging out. In that circle, some folks were quite skilled and others (like me) just caulked, brought tools, fixed food, and made cold drinks for the ones working. We switched houses, shared tools, got to know each other really well. I see it as very positive and a real way to build community. Of all the pasttimes friends can do together, I think this is great.

Thanks for the great thread. This is very encouraging. Texas costs are low like most of the south is. It is crazy what people in the northeast or other areas pay for their house.

Your prices are very close to what I have found with my total gut and remodel of my existing house. My drywall guy was $3/sqft + $.50/ft more for level 5. Roof was $10k for 40sq. Ended up doing metal roof myself for $3400. Great build and thank you so much for the inspiration. Im hoping to build a new house in the next year or two on our 2.5 acres we have owned for the last year.

Bringing back an OLD thread for reading material as we will begin the journey in somewhat short order and would LOVE to save some money. Our architect was, is and has been a HUGE help to us in this regard. Great reading material and beautiful house.

Impressive! I think this was the price detail that jumped out at me most:

For example the faucets & related plumbing items that I chose priced
out at $9872 locally, but I spent $1817 by price shopping.

Gotta agree with that!

Our Almost Finished $64 PSF House w/ Pics!!!this is amazing. Can you tell me your process?

Hi. This is a beautiful home and I what a great cost! Can you please tell me how you managed to build so cheaply? Is your husband a contractor and did you do a lot to the building yourself? Are the floor plans your own design? Thank-you for any information you can give. My husband and I are hoping to build a new house on our lot.

I don't think for a minute I could copy your example and come out with such a price, but kudos to you! You did a great job -- at a budget price!