Building Costs

Phone: 828.295.7760 Fax: 828.295.9323

BUILDING COSTS

Important Factors to Consider When Designing Your Mountain Dream Home

Site preparation in the mountains can be very costly. Consideration to slope of lot, the amount of rock and number of trees to be cleared and hauled, well, septic, roads, drives and utilities must all be considered.

Some additional building code requirements may be required due to site elevation and wind factors.

Weather, weather, weather. Please remember, winter building can move at a much slower pace than desired by both the home owner and your preferred builder.

Foundation type: Basement, Crawl Space or Slab.

Vaulted / Cathedral Ceilings.

Style of Timber Framing.

Style of Log.

Type / Brand and quantity of windows and doors.

Siding and roofing choices.

Shape of your home. Just a box, or does it have numerous corners, dormers, roof valleys and other features?

Design costs with ®. There is a $4,000.00 design deposit when working with the ® design team on your ® home. This fee is credited to your package order with your final invoice upon purchasing your ® home package. If you compare this design deposit with the cost of other architectural / designer fees, you will find it is a great deal!

House plans and blueprints. You may find an existing house plan that is exactly what you want and decide to purchase them. Most homes are custom or modified from other plans or from scratch. Purchasing house plans or having design concept drawings and plans printed is another required expense. Some designers charge around $1.25/Sq. Ft. for doing drawings. This usually does not include concept drawings.

Important Things to Consider Prior to Choosing a House Design

Affordability

Size

Style

Quality and Grade of Finish

Financing

WHAT IS A SQUARE FOOT ?

Almost everyone that is considering building a custom home asks the question:

“How much per square foot does it cost to build around here?”

Most custom homebuilders prefer not to describe their houses on a price per square foot basis. Each home is unique and the eventual cost is determined by a combination of size, design, features, specifications and intangibles.

Yet, from a design standpoint, we all need to know roughly how much it costs per square foot so that a design can be created that fits the owner’s budget. How else can a homebuyer know what their budget will buy?

With the help of Architects and other design/builders, we have established a method that helps compare buildings with different components. Using a system of fractional multipliers, we can more accurately describe a project’s actual square footage. We call it FACTORED or RATED square feet. The project’s factored square feet is a far better measure of what it will actually cost than the project’s finished or heated square feet.

THE MULTIPLIERS:

Gross heated sq. feet measured from the outside of the building: Multiplier = 1
Vaulted, cathedral, or 2 story space: Multiplier = 0.5
10’ and taller flat ceilings (we assume 9’ ceilings are standard): Multiplier = 0.15
Basement area, unfinished, with walk-out : Multiplier = 0.2
Garage attached or detached: Multiplier = 0.4
Garage in basement: Multiplier = 0.3
Attic area unfinished with stairs up and plywood floor: Multiplier = 0.2
Covered porches or open roof deck over finished areas: Multiplier = 0.4
Open wood decks or hard surface terraces or patios: Multiplier = 0.25

AN EXAMPLE:

Imagine a one-story home that has 2,000 finished square feet. It is built on a slab or over a crawl space, and has 8’ flat ceilings, no garage, no porches, and no unfinished attic. Compare this home to another that also has 2,000 finished square feet. But, the second home has a full walk-out unfinished basement, a Timber frame great room vaulted to the roofline, a wrap-around porch, an attached two car garage, and a large unfinished attic that’s ready to become a spare bedroom in the future. Both homes have 2,000 square feet finished, but they are very different construction projects.

Remember that this is not intended to be an exact science. The purpose of this exercise is to try to get a handle on what a project might cost, and to better describe what a square foot of work area is.

COST PER SQUARE FOOT:

In the North Carolina High Country areas of Boone, Blowing Rock and Banner Elk, we have found that a quality custom home starts at about $150 per factored square foot. And, it can easily go up to $200 per factored square foot….or even more! These cost per factored square foot estimates were derived from Comparative Market Analysis of new construction in the High Country market.

Although every project has both site development and utility costs, these are deducted from the final project cost in establishing cost per square foot estimates. This is done to level the playing field, since each project has very different costs for site development and utilities, and there is no reasonable multiplier to use.