How Much Did the Practice House Cost to Build?

Short answer: $74,767. 

Long answer: that comes out to $178 per square foot, which is based on a floor area of 420 s.f., which needs a little explaining.  When measuring the area of loft space, my protocol is to count square footage wherever there is 3’ of headroom or more (since I need 3’ to sit up straight).  In the practice house, the loft measures 132 s.f., but that leaves 66 s.f. of uncounted space near the knee walls that is finished and heated/cooled.

Also, these costs and the $178 per s.f. don’t account for the value of my time.  If I was employed as a semi-skilled construction contractor and I made $20 per hour, my time would be worth $31,440 and the cost becomes $105,207 or $253 per s.f.  If I paid professionals to do what I did (let's assume they would take 3/4 as long to do the same amount of work), the cost works out to something like $129,000 or $307 per s.f.

It’s difficult to compare my cost to build to other homes, but here are a few relevant thoughts;

·       Professionally built tiny homes on wheels seem to run $75,000 to $80,000 for 350 s.f. with loft

·       I saw a premanufactured tiny home for sale in 2017 discounted to $60,000 not including transport and foundation

·       Conventional homes in MD seem to run about $150 per s.f. (or $63,000 for 420 s.f.) , but that is a tough comparison because the more expensive kitchen and bath areas make up a larger percentage of costs in a tiny home.  Also, my house has a high performance shell, with a higher up-front cost versus lower operating costs.

·       Two internet sources listed custom natural homes as costing roughly anywhere from $75 to $300 per s.f., so I guess I fall near the high end of that range.

There are of course, a few particular choices I made that drove up my costs as compared to the conventional construction that runs $150 per s.f..  The idea is that money spent upfront would save time and hassle over the long term, and my goal was to never have to touch the exterior for 50 years except to refresh the trim paint and recoat the shingles.  Collectively, these items probably added about $10,000  or 15% to the cost:

·       Metal roof rather than asphalt shingles

·       Cedar shake siding rather than cement board

·       Spray foam insulation rather than rockwool bats

·       TrueExterior trim rather than PVC (http://truexterior.com/)

·       Professionals to help with siding and light straw clay when I was time-constrained

Of course, none of the costs in this analysis include the price of land or utility extensions to the house, since those vary considerably by location.  And similar to what I noted in my “Time to Build” post, there will be a little more money spent when I enclose the porch.  I acted as my own architect and civil engineer, which probably saved me $6,000 or so.  I also spend about $1,800 on tools and equipment to supplement my existing arsenal so that I could do my own work.  

Overall, I was anticipating the costs to come in lower than they did, but I had zero prior experience with any sort of home-building, let alone natural home-building.  But on the flip side, I ended up with a better home than I expected, and it is by far the most comfortable and best suited to my lifestyle of anyplace I have ever lived.  As I try to answer the age-old question, “was it worth it?” I think the answer is yes, provided that the place turns out to be as low-maintenance as I expect it to be.

How Much Time Did I Spend building?

By one measure, it took me 2 years plus a week to build the house from breaking ground (July 8, 2015) to moving in July 15, 2017.  Of course, the house wasn’t 100% done when I moved in, and I have been picking away at interior trim, shelving, coat hooks, etc. in between work, travel, and other projects. 

In any case, I wanted to tally up the amount of time I spent working on the house thus far.  Sure, it’s not the complete picture, so I suppose I’ll have to come back to this discussion when I’ve completed all the major tasks.  So the big number is… 

1,572 hours!  

If I’d been working 40 hours a week, that comes out to 39.3 weeks or 9.4 months.  That’s also about 70% of the total time spent building the house if you total up all the time I paid for contractors to do their thing (694.5 person-hours). 

 

If you’re interested in drilling down into those numbers, check out the table for a breakdown of that time by task, and I’ll try to put these into context:

·       I would consider myself to be semi-skilled labor.  I accomplished most tasks to a contractor-level of quality, without many mistakes, but I am certainly much slower than a professional.

·       I was not able to work a “full day” most of the time.  That leads to inefficiencies because it’s harder to maintain an efficient rhythm, and if you have the same setup/cleanup time whether you work 4 hours or 9, you get less accomplished working a partial day.

·       On average, I worked 5 hours on the days I made it to the house, but that varied from half an hour to 14.5 hours on the longest day.  During the build, I was working between ½ and ¾ time at my “real” job of civil engineering, so that limited and broke up the time I spent at the Practice House.  For better or worse, civil engineering was the #1 priority and the Practice House was #2.

·       The percentage of time listed in the chart is based on the combination of my time and the contractors’.  You can get a sense that I did most of the natural building tasks, and the contractors did most of the conventional construction tasks.

·       There is a hefty dose of my learning curve involved in my numbers.  In particular, I spent way more time than I should have fixing cracks in the first two layers of adobe floor because I didn’t get my clay/sand ratio right.

·       I also wasn’t sure of what level of finish I would be comfortable with.  For example, I spent considerable time on the finish coats of plaster, making them as flat and uniform as my patience would allow. At the time, I was a little frustrated that they still seemed wavy and rough.  But after stepping back and now living in the place, I think they look fantastic!  I probably could have cut my time in half on the final layers in retrospect if I’d known that the material is so forgiving of a rustic look and that I would enjoy the result.

One major caveat is that I’m still not “done”.  The biggest pending project is to enclose the front porch with screened panels in summer, and clear acrylic panels in the winter.  This will be a significant improvement to the use and functionality of the house, so I plan to revisit these numbers once the porch is finished.

Electric Expenses

I thought you all might enjoy knowing what I’ve spent on electricity in a passive solar, highly insulated, and thermally massive compact home.   On average, it’s been $37.80 per month over the 18 months I’ve lived in the Practice House:

 

That covers heating, cooling, cooking, and hot water—the house uses no fossil fuels (and nothing that is explosive). These figures even include small projects and lighting in my shop.

As an aside, I looked into adding a solar array on my new garage to go net-zero, but a shading issue makes that payback time relatively unattractive.  For the short term, I have signed up with a community based solar program, so I am buying power that is being generated by solar panels located on a farm located nearby in Queen Anne’s County.  Once I build the main house on the property (the Practice House is the guest house), I will re-evaluate building my own solar array.

Snow Glacier on My Roof

One cool product on the Practice House that I really love are the Rainhandlers, which take the place of traditional gutters.  I’ll give you a technical discussion of rain handlers below, but first I wanted to share pics of last night’s snow sheeting off my metal roof, curving around the Rainhandlers, and freezing in place.  Fun stuff!

There are so many downsides to gutters, but top of the list for me is the PIA factor to clean them out, and the fact that they can hide or exacerbate rot and other problems relating to the fascia trim at the edge of a roof.  On a new structure, if you’re willing to install them yourself (which is easy if your roof is easily accessible), they are more affordable than traditional gutters as well.

With Rainhandlers, in a nutshell, rain that sheets off the roof, hits a series of curved blades (similar to venetian blinds) and sprays out in a fan pattern rather than dripping down in a straight line.  This avoids creating a washout under the edge of a roof that has no gutter, and it avoids concentrating flow from a traditional gutter/downspout that may lead to erosion around your foundation.  Spreading out roof runoff is an important principle of low impact development, so in jurisdictions where houses are subject to stormwater management regulations, this may reduce or eliminate the need to build treatment practices like rain gardens.  For more info, check out rainhandler.com

(Incidentally, the closeup shot also shows off the fabulous job the carpenters did with the trim under the roof overhangs.)