The part of building no one talks about

this week's video is going to be a little bit more casual and conversational because I have a lot of build videos in the queue for editing none of them are really ready to post yet so I wanted to just get on here and do a video that I've been thinking about for a while and I've wanted to just talk about it on camera to see if everyone else shares the same opinion that I do and it's something in the building world or when you're doing any sort of construction that I feel like doesn't get enough attention and that is material procurement and how difficult it is physically ment financially and I just wanted to do a video talking about this and see if anyone else has similar experiences they can put them in the comments forgive me if it looks like I'm getting tugged in 20 different directions as I'm filming this because George is taking me for a walk but I think material procurement is honestly like 2third of the battle in construction in my opinion it is just such a difficult process to learn what material you need or what's the best material you can buy for a situation what's a good cost effective alternative that doesn't sacrifice too much performance but fits in your budget a little bit better once you've established what you want to buy you need to figure out how much of it you need to buy for your certain situation your project this is a lot easier for some things than others for example if it's tile it's pretty easy to calculate square footages of tile that you need especially if you're working with rectangles then you just add 10% but for other things it's a little bit trickier like how much top soil do we need to coat this whole yard I mean you can figure it out as far as as volume goes but then there's things like compaction and The Yards a really weird shape and top soil is really expensive so you don't want to buy too little or too much maybe that's not a great example but there's just a ton of little material takeoff details that if you don't really have a lot of experience in the task you're doing can be really difficult to get a good accurate material estimate on quantities I feel like this is pretty much Amplified when you are self-building or owner building like we are and you do a lot of the trades yourself where typically a GC is going to hire subcontractors who procure all their own material and they have all of their channels of Supply established well already they know what it's going to cost they know how to build a GC accordingly but when you're doing a lot of that yourself like electrical for example you are starting from scratch figuring all that out like where to get certain items who's got the best price on everything it can get a little bit overwhelming at times especially with how many individual line items go into something like a house using electrical as an example like how many different types of boxes you need how many of each type of those boxes do you need how many feet of wire do you think you're going to need how many wire caps and nuts are you going to need and this extends to tools as well looking ahead to what tools you need for any given trade we're behind on the timeline on YouTube but we just got drywall on the upstairs of the house if you go to our Instagram you can see some details on that but we decided to take on the challenge of painting the whole house so not only do I need to figure out how much paint we need and what type and where to get it who's got the best price on it and is it a good quality paint we also need to figure out what tools do we not have like everyone's got their disheveled old paint box that's full of junk and half of it is like 20 years old and you haven't even used it we have one of those boxes anyway and when you're painting you know thousands of square feet that is really not the tool set that you want we invested in some 18-in roller setups Corner rollers so we don't have to cut in at Corners extension poles we didn't have good quality extension po of different lengths some decent brushes a big bucket for the 18in roller like all that stuff we have to visualize ahead of time then go and find out where you can get it who's got the best price on it order it either go get the thing if it's a local store or wait for it to come in the mail and that is just one of the many tools that you will need for any given trade once we're finished the build and we have a little bit more bandwidth I'm going to start doing more cost breakdown videos of pretty much every trade that we've done ourselves or even if we've hired it out how much things cost just cuz I feel like people really like that information and and want to know for planning their build out and I I totally get it I watched a ton of those when we were planning but one of the videos is going to be on tooling costs like we spent a lot of money on just the tools that we needed I have a whole category in our budget spreadsheet for tooling so it's definitely not a minor cost if you're going to be owner building and just like materials it's another thing to think about when you are procuring things now I have not done much filming at all of the procurement process or even like all of the non-glamorous stuff like going to pick things up or meeting trucks at the end of our driveway for Freight deliveries or unloading stuff with the skid steer and bringing it up the driveway there is a lot of time consumed in that task I'll wrap all that up in material procurement actually physically going to get the thing unloading it if I actually filmed all that you'd be sitting here for hours watching it like seriously it's a lot a lot of time and energy and effort and When contractors mark up their material costs for any given job you know 20 25% it is for very good reason there is so much mental physical energy expended in estimating and procuring materials here's another good example these are our deck footings and deck colums of course I'll be covering this in another video I'm over here drilling holes and breaking my back cleaning these holes out but these are permac colums they're pre-cast concrete columns I wanted to use them because I absolutely hate forming and pouring concrete a few days ago we had the concrete pour from hell and this just seemed like an easier alternative it was all pre-cast but there's like literally only one place in Pennsylvania or at least on our side of Pennsylvania that sells these and it's like an hour and a half drive away well a delivery cost was like $200 I had to go get these things and it was like a 2 and half hour round trip I didn't want that long trip to go to waste and I found out that there was another supplier out there that I need to get something else for for our French drain this is a special double wall eight slot um heavyduty French drain corrugated pipe a lot better than what you're going to get at the big box stores I wanted to use this for our French drain found out that similarly this was only sold in a very close town to where the deck footings were sold and I could combine both of those purchases in the same trip however to do that I needed to know how much of this I needed if there was anything else at that same supplier which I needed which there was and basically have this whole French drain system designed before I go and get those deck footings so I'm sure contractors that do this every day go through the same sort of dilemma too and probably spend a lot of time driving and going to get stuff but it requires so much forethought and planning to like make this happen like to get this pipe to show up on site and make the time to go do that trip amongst everything else we have going on it just is a lot when we're finally settled in and moved into this garage department and not doing construction like literally every day I don't even know what my brain is going to do with all the extra free space that it's going to have for not doing constant material takeoffs estimates figuring out construction sequencing and all the nitty-gritty details that come into building something like this like I think I spent probably an hour and a half this morning counting up all of the light switches that we need for the build deciding what type of light switch we like the best and then going on the task of actually starting to procure all that online and ordering it from various different vendors whoever had the best price on things and this is literally just light switches I've gone through the same process for like every single trade so far I talk about this quite a bit in the framing video too I think I use like 78 different suppliers for all of our framing Lumber because it was in 2022 and the prices were so outrageous but that was a very good primer for what we were in for for all the rest of the build because it really never ends after that it's kind of the same process just for like literally every other trade and just when you think you have all of your material takeoffs and estimates done and it's all on site and ready to go you start the job and then you realize you were wrong and you go need to go get some more that has definitely happened a fair amount of times for us and it probably will continue to happen as long as we keep building stuff however I have spent a lot of time in supply stores for pretty much every trade so far and I will say that we are not alone and that professional Tradesmen do a lot of the same things as far as running short on material or if they don't stock it in their van or their truck they're constantly running to the supply store on like a near daily basis so I don't feel as bad when I see things like that when I'm in the stores speaking of stores people hate on big box stores but honestly it is such a wonderful service that they're able to provide in being open 7 days a week from like 6:00 a.m. to 10: p.m. if you have a full-time job and you're still trying to get things done outside of your job that is such an important feature of those stores as just being open outside of normal business hours I find that a lot of actual supply stores Electrical Plumbing whatever are not and we had our full-time jobs for a full year into the build that was one of the most difficult things was trying to visit specialty stores or get things from them when they were only open Monday through Friday like 7:30 to 4:00 p.m. so the big box stores catch a lot of flak but they provide a fantastic service and that they have such a variety of products most of them are the same exact products that you'll get in the actual supply stores and they are open crazy hours 7 days a week I have definitely spent way more than an average person should of their life inside of either a Home Depot or a Lowe's getting things I think if I break out the binder that I keep all of our receipts in I'm going to do a count at the end of the build but it's got to be well over 150 different home receipts throughout the past 2 or 3 years I have gotten so much from them and it's funny now that you sign up for a pro account it tells you how much money you spend during the entire year at the bottom of every receipt that you get and when we broke ground that first year that was like kind of a sickening number cuz so much our framing Lumber came through them it was all the engineered stuff and some dimensional as well but they have the stuff available and honestly it's very reasonably priced too it's hard to find specialty supply stores that have the same product for a lower price as the big Bo stores now the big box stores don't have a lot of different things like I've used supplyhouse.com a ton for all of our plumbing stuff they have been second to none in customer service and shipping speed and price usually they do beat the big box stores on price because they don't have a storefront to operate so they have been a fantastic supplier for our plumbing and HVAC stuff but those are just a couple of the vendors and resources that we've used to get materials if you have other go-tos I'd be curious to hear about them I know in the midwest what is it it's it's uh oh the green one Menards they're a big I guess competitor to the big box stores out there they are a big box store themselves they Supply some kind of unique stuff though that you don't typically see in like a Home Dep or or low like they do a lot of post frame building stuff and you can get a legit full building package through them which I think is kind of neat we've had several comments talking about Menards and I kind of wish they had them east of I guess it's probably Ohio is the nearest one to us but they do not exist out here hopefully they do someday sorry I'm getting pulled around like crazy by this black horse over here he loves the car he loves the truck the car anything that's a vehicle he will jump in and he will not come out isn't that right big guy mhm yep oh there we go right to the truck now what keeps me motivated to keep doing all of the difficult task of material procurement is of course money and I have realized there is a significant cost Savings in doing most of the material procurement yourself even if you're hiring the labor out if if you can get your own materials on site and you're just hiring the r labor you're not paying them to figure out the materials you're not paying them to go get the stuff where they're going to put their markup on so you're saving that money and because it's coming out of your bank account you're generally more careful in where you're finding the source of supply and who's got the best price where if it's someone who's been doing this trade every day they have a relationship with their supplier it may not necessarily be the best price we found that actually with drywall we bought all of the drywall ourselves eles and even though the drywall contractor said they didn't even put a markup on their estimate for the material it was a $2,000 difference so we ended up saving that $2,000 just by ordering the material ourselves and we did get that delivered thank goodness it was like 250 sheets of drywall but that $2,000 can then go towards the labor bill so it was definitely helpful in that case to procure material ourselves however there is a flip side to that coin and there are just some times where you do not want to be dealing with every little bit and piece of what it takes to get aask on I think of weld drilling when I think of this I don't know why my mind goes to that but they had this 6in diameter bell end schedule 40 PVC 20 foot long sections I don't even know where we would begin to get that I'd have to probably go to some specialty Pipe Supply like I had to go for the French drain then when it came time to do the hookup to the well pump the company that we brought in to help do that had all the stainless parts needed for the pitless adapter the right type of tape to go down in the well that held the wire to the drop pipe the right tool to set the pitless adapter again I'm not even sure where I would get a lot of this stuff so it was worth it to have them bring that in because it is so specialty anyway that about concludes everything that I had on my mind for material procurement if you have something to share I'd love to hear it in the comments if you have different experiences or any tips or tricks on how you stay organized and sane when it comes to figuring out what you need how much of it you need where's the best price especially if you're doing tons of different trades cuz that's what my head really starts to spin when I'm figuring out like wiring stuff in the morning and then like trim and doors in the afternoon and you can just really get overwhelming at times and I'm sure others sympathize with that anyway more building content to come next week thanks for listening if you made it this far as always thanks for watching from George and yours truly

Channel: Mason Dixon Acres

Views: 13,397

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Id: FHuJYuZTa7o

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024