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That's an excellent point! It also provides a handy analytical framework. I'm going to try apply it to siding. The cost differential between brick and vinyl si
by Kalium 5y ago
That's an excellent point! It also provides a handy analytical framework. I'm going to try apply it to siding.
The cost differential between brick and vinyl siding can easily be a factor of five, and wood vs vinyl a factor of six (stone is more like 25). At this point you're trading 2400-2500 sqft of that 3000 sqft house to use "better" materials, assuming shapes that scale surface area directly with flooring size.
I expect this resulting cottage will be of wonderfully high-quality materials, but you may run into a few limits on how many people you can have comfortably living there compared to the original 3000 sqft building. I imagine you might want to be somewhere in between, at which point your choice of "better" materials may become an extravagance in the eyes of some.
- alkonaut 5y agoNot sure why wood is so expensive, I’m paying under $2/m or for cladding wood for the extension I’m building now. Its around $1 per square foot. It gets slightly more expensive before it’s painted 3 times though (repeat every 15 years as is standard with softwood). I’m fairly sure I couldn’t find a cheaper exterior cladding. And obviously the cladding is a tiny percentage of the total cost of even just the wall, let alone the whole construction. Cladding will be sub $300 and the 150 sq ft extension is north of $50k all together. Insulation is probably 3-5x what the cladding is, and so is the flooring.
- Kalium 5y agoThe numbers I'm using include installation costs too. Wood and brick are more labor than vinyl as I understand it. I think my key lesson here is that even building smaller, using "better" materials is an expensive matter of taste.
- alkonaut 5y agoPainting is a bit of work but just nailing up standard wooden cladding is such a tiny part of the work it hardly even shows up on the total, including labor! Perhaps this is partially because of the high buikding costs to begin with (It’s cold so walls are 3-400mm, a single window is $6-700 (triple glass) and so on. The BOM for my extension was $25k which is half the total. Cladding including labor is a lot less than $1k. I have never seen a vinyl clad house but I doubt I’d pick one to save that little.