Affordable Houses: 3 Design Tips to Save

hi guys i know many of you are having a hard time right now finding a home that meets all your needs at the price that you want to pay the supply of homes on the market has improved just slightly in many areas but it still has a ways to go this leaves buyers in a predicament you can either accept a home that's less than what you actually wanted or you could wait on the sidelines and watch home prices just continue to march toward the sky and in many cases this makes things even worse in the long run so today i want to focus on creating affordable houses through good design so i want to start with the idea of building homes up and down instead of out in other words the one story versus the two or three story design the idea of saving money by adding square footage in a second floor or a basement it's not a new concept right but i think people are looking at the costs all wrong and let me quickly say i spent a decade working for a regional home builder looking at house designs to see where we could you know minimize the cost without lowering the quality of the home so i've got a lot of experience in this subject so in this video i'm going to show you how with careful design we can lower the cost of adding square footage to a new home by tens of thousands of dollars so i want to look at two specific design examples and their related costs now here are two house material packages offered through menards for those of you that aren't familiar with menards they are a home improvement retailer similar to home depot only i've found that their pricing for building materials are many times more affordable so i want to start with the daniel's house plan and it's associated material package now this house is a single story ranch plan 1185 square feet it's got a two car garage three bedroom with two two baths and a full basement the material package for this house at the time of this video being created is eighty thousand three hundred and thirteen dollars now this includes the lumber package with two by six exterior walls trusses siding soffit and fascia roof shingles doors windows insulation drywall cabinets countertops trim flooring plumbing including fixtures and electrical including fixtures now this is basically all of the material required to build this home so for you ultimate super diyers out there you could build this house for eighty thousand three hundred and thirteen dollars plus the cost of the foundation if you supply all the labor for the framing all the way through to the final finishes let me just say this discussion is strictly looking at house costs from the footings all the way through to the final finishes in other words the cost to build the structure but most of you aren't probably going to provide all that labor you either don't have the necessary skills or you just don't have the time to do it so in our online owner builder class we talk about how great it is that owner builders can choose you can actually choose what work you physically perform yourself and then you hire the pros to do the rest so for this discussion let's assume we're hiring out all the physical labor to somebody else so after a detailed analysis of labor costs here we determine the additional cost for all the labor is eighty two thousand two hundred dollars so if we add the material package price to the foundation and labor costs we end up with a hundred and ninety five thousand nine hundred and eighty eight dollars to build this home and as i've already mentioned this is for the house alone for the sake of this discussion uh today we're talking about the house design so i'm not including the utility connections the permit the land cost because it really doesn't help with our analysis of affordable house design but just so you know if you choose to build one of these houses you still will have those costs as well so in order to really see how two-story home costs are so much more affordable let's take a look at the cavalieri house material package now this house has 2150 square feet of living space a two-car garage four bedroom three and a half baths so the material package for this two-story is 117 429 dollars at the time of this video so you can already see that we're almost doubling the square footage of the house by building up but the material package doesn't even come close to doubling we've added 82 percent more living space for only a 42 percent increase in materials now some of you are going to say that this is obvious because we don't have the additional roof or foundation when you build up instead of out but it's way more than that so what i want to do is a quick breakdown of the costs saved on a two story versus a one story design now building up instead of out we save on roof shingles and underlayment the roof plywood or osb panels the roof trusses attic insulation footings foundation walls basement floor foundation waterproofing and insulation that's a whole bunch of savings so now let's add the labor into the two-story plan which is 121 364 dollars and then add the cost for labor materials for the foundation of 28 800 and that gives us a total cost of labor materials for this home structure of 267 593 now some of you may be asking why is the foundation less expensive on the two-story well we're able to make the foundation smaller because we added square footage of living space above the garage this is the other design tip for saving money by adding square footage to the attic above the garage we eliminate the cost associated with the basement so now i want to talk about the crazy savings here and the proper way to look at the cost difference of a two level home versus a single level ranch home the correct way to really see what the cost differences are is to compare the additional cost to add more space to the ranch plan versus adding square footage to a second floor above it so comparing our costs we see a massive difference so to add square footage to the ranch house plan designed by really building out or horizontally it costs 165 dollars per square foot of living space in other words if we make the ranch plan bigger this is how much it costs for the labor materials so to add square footage to the ranch designed by adding a second floor it costs just 95 dollars per square foot of living space this is a huge difference so some of you may be saying i don't want the stairs that go with a two-story home my question to you is have you ever considered an elevator i know it sounds like these are only used in high-end custom homes but they really have become much more affordable let's do a simple analysis to see how a two-story with an elevator compares to the cost of the one story without it so going back to the numbers we just used if we increase the size of the ranch plan above to be the same square footage as the two story we end up with a cost of 356 000 for labor and materials we just multiplied the additional square footage by 165. then if we go back to the two-story plan and add 20 000 to add the elevator to it we come up with about 288 000 now keep in mind the two-story house plan would need some modifications to fit an elevator but this analysis gives you a good idea of how much you can potentially save by building up instead of out with a two story with an elevator so one more really important design consideration that is the most affordable way to add square footage to either of these homes is with a finished basement at current prices you're looking at forty to fifty dollars per square foot to add living space to the basement now this is less than a third of the cost to add square footage to the main level of the one story living space and this doesn't even take into account that a lot of people do diy on their basement because there's plenty of time you can do it whenever you have time to do it and it's not as difficult as building a house physically by yourself so again you're back to 165 to add square footage to the first floor of a ranch plan one story plan to add square footage to the basement you're at 40 to 50 or less if you actually do some of the work yourself so to save on your new dream home you might want to first go with the two-story house design next add living space above the garage and finally finish the basement to maximize the square footage with least cost so we have one last thing to mention here all of these costs are without builder or general contractor markup so if you want to achieve these types of costs you really need to become an owner builder taking on the role of the general contractor yourself so here you basically hire out the labor to do the work and you manage the build so stop by and see me at ownerbuilderclass.com if you want more information

Channel: Armchair Builder

Views: 511,177

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Id: T9W2XqzNlJs

Length: 7min 58sec (478 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021