House Plans

So I got my price sheet for the house plans on Friday. Yeesh! It came in quite a bit higher than I was anticipating. I was expecting to see it around 180k-190k, and it was estimated at 240k! LoL, a wee bit off. ;-)

I spent part of my weekend working on revising my house plan, and I think I've got it at a manageable state, so it's going to head back to the draftsman on Monday and then off to the estimators again. Here's the rundown:

1. Screw the FHA mortgage. It's stopping me from doing my own general contracting. Keeping the FHA loan means I'd save about 10% on my mortgage, but doing my own general contracting will save me 20% on the cost of the house itself. For those of you who don't know what general contracting is: it means that I'm in charge of coordinating the building of the house. I have to schedule when the contractors show up to do which jobs, take bids, etc. Since dad is the office manager at Lumber One, we already know which subs the jobs are going to and we've got the experience with GC'ing, so it's a good deal for us to do this. It'll save about $40,000
2. Cutting out about 150 sq feet on the house by moving the laundry room downstairs and cutting off 1 ft the entire length of the house on the left side. Overall, it means my living room gets 2 feet shorter, and the secondary bedroom gets 1 foot shorter (so I don't lose much of anything). At around 100$/sq ft, that should save me about $13,000 - $15,000
3. I will be doing some of the labor on certain parts of the house. I've got enough years of experience with doing things like laying tile, painting and sheetrocking that I can do a large part of the house myself. Actually, when it boils down to it, between dad and I, we can build the entire house (aside from digging and pouring the foundation) ourselves. Obviously we don't have the time to do that. But, if I do some of the work myself, I save the cost of the labor. So I'll end up doing the easier but labor intensive jobs on my weekends. Laying my own tile saves about $2,500. Priming, painting and texturing myself will save around $1,200. Doing my own sheetrocking will save about $3,500.

So, the way I see it, doing the above things should save me around $71,000 and put the house at a comfortable $169,000, which is much more in line with what I am looking for in terms of costs. Keep in mind, I'm getting a lot of good stuff out of this because I am keeping the important selling features of the house:

• Steel siding instead of vinyl
• Andersen windows instead of cheaper vinyl ones
• 1300 sq ft per floor (it's a split-level, so the total footage would be 2600 sq ft)
• wood + tile flooring instead of laminate in the kitchen and dining room areas
• Upgraded moulding, trimming, cabinetry, shingles and carpet

So it's not like I'm to the point where I'm skimming on materials. If I really need to cut the price down even more, there's still fat that I can trim in those areas. But the way I see it -- I'd rather keep the quality of the house really good since that will increase the resale value of it over the long run.