Week 17

Some of the problem with the cost estimate being so out of line, as I mentioned last week, was that I was not considering the 1100 sqft of space of the pool room. When you take this into account the "heated space" is around 4100 sqft. In my calcs I had factored out the pool, so am basing my analysis on a 3000 sqft home but I did not fully factor out the structure cost associated with the extra 4100 sqft. UBuildIt generated a new OPC for me that does remove these structure and related costs. The new Dev & Structure costs are $811,579 which includes their fee and state sales tax. When you add land you get $1,111,579, and this divided by 3000 sqft gives a value of $371/sqft which is $93/sqft over average or $278,092 over average. We continue to fine tune the analysis.

One area that sticks out to me is the nearly $100K in excavation costs that UBuildIt thinks it will cost to do things like cut down the trees, bulldoze the stumps, dig the utility and drainage trenches, and construct the retaining walls. I thinks this is high, by about double. The only way to get an accurate estimate is to have excavators come and quote the job. This is what I'm working on now - get in a position so that quotes can be made. My friend Ray Lyle and I have cut a path through the brush along the driveway route and up in the building site area. This makes it easy now to walk the land and see the exact topography. Until now we've only relied on the county topography maps for the area. They are in 5' intervals, but turn out to be way off. According to the county topo maps the property gains 100' elevation as you move east to west on the property. But I now know it's more around 50'. And where I want to place the building site it's around 35'. Fortunately the building site is fairly flat up in the area I want to place the house. I don't think we'll need any retaining walls - in the OPC that UBuildIt created, they estimate we'd have to excavate out a 100' x 100' building pad which would require a 4' H x 100' L retaining wall at the western edge and another one that size at the eastern edge. Hopefully I'm right, and we can now avoid the major part of that expense.

In general, I think the UBuildIt estimates are about 20% high - we'll fine tune this in the weeks ahead.

Unless we can get the Development and Structure costs down to around $650K I won't be able to build - can't afford it. At this point it seems likely that the pool and spa will have to go because that's over $100K alone. That would be a shame, it was going to be a central component of the home.