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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (21210)	4/10/1999 3:16:00 PM
From: Gauguin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Oh dear. Oh dear. I am making a little cross with my fingers, to ward you off. I count seven question marks in your second paragraph. Big ones, about 18 times the size they look. You need someone locally to hep you out. A person familiar with construction and costs. Seriously. Books will be useless for one's locale. You can get a slight underestimation of your costs by going to look at new houses for sale. See what 250K buys. 350K. 450K. 550K. Yet there is no way you can do it as cheaply as a builder building a house to sell. "Clients" complicate a house. Dash and I looked at a "client" house in the desert. It was a 500K house that already had a million in it. That's extreme, but it's the condition. "Conversation", "implementations", selections, the dreaded "small changes", even the initial specification, are additive and must be modeled into the builders time and cost. This is standard operating procedure for some builders and locales; very expensive in others. Then the question arises of "design", or "architected." I don't know if I've ever met a person (often myself included), who can build a simple box of what they want. If such were a goal from the start, that in itself would be an interesting project. BTW, brick is very expensive.

To: Ilaine who wrote (21210)	4/10/1999 7:13:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

To estimate the cost of building a house, just figure out what you can afford and double it. Find an architect. The fee you pay him to plan and supervise the project (5% or so) will be repaid many times. Get recommendations from your local friends and associates. Someone who has actually built a house in the jurisdiction you will build in. Once the plans are done (most architects use software now) and you have seen the virtual house (you can virtually walk through the virtual rooms, try out different colors, etc. You can bid the job with at least two contractors. Use your architects advice. If he or she's the right guy, he'll know the contractor who is best and may be able to help get the best deal. The programs generate a bill of materials that everyone can estimate. Listen to your architect's advice. Have him supervise and make the working decisions. Enough you are a lawyer, but that should make them behave pretty well. By the way, you get this advice from one who has never built a house but one who studied very briefly under Frank Lloyd Wright. Consider yourself fortunate that FLW is no longer taking on new work. The buzz is that after you approve the plans you should take a world cruise and stay away from the site. Building a house is a perilous adventure. It ruined Jefferson but he got a really nice house out of it. Start off searching the web. Try something on Infoseek like "build a house" One good place to start is this page: infoseek.go.com