April 19th, 2008 — design, budget
Over the course of this project I have found that there are three elements to true construction costs:
The cost of the material being used.
The quantity of the material being used.
The difficulty or labor involved to build an item.
I have often heard that labor makes up 60%-70% of the cost of any constructed item from cabinets […]
April 15th, 2008 — insulation, HVAC, budget, planning
Since studying the Passive House standard of energy efficient design, we have been trying to determine what we can incorporate into our project without blowing the budget. Below are some of the ideas we have so far to improve the energy efficiency of the home after consulting the Passive House Standard.
Insulation
Increase SIP wall panels to […]
March 21st, 2008 — financing, budget, planning
We all know there are not many federal government incentives for green building right now. Many states have picked up the ball and implemented some decent local incentives of their own. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is not one of those states at the moment. They are working on state legislation to improve this, but for now we […]
March 6th, 2008 — LEED, design, budget, planning
So I just returned from today’s LEED Design Charrette and everything went very well. The bottom line is that we found out that reaching Platinum is possible with our design, but we have a few issues to clarify and iron out. Rob from MaGrann was extremely knowledgeable and taught us all a lot about the […]
February 25th, 2008 — design, budget, planning
I arrived at the topic of this post in a round about way today. It started with a search for the best refrigerator for our project on the energy star website. While we obviously need an energy star model, the range of energy usage ranges from roughly 400 - 700 kWH / year on […]
February 18th, 2008 — insulation, framing, budget
Last week I had a meeting with Scott at Level 5 to discuss using SIPs in detail. We called one of the manufacturers and asked all questions that we had regarding our project. Once we got off the phone Scott quickly said that he was willing to go forward with SIPs or the project and […]
February 7th, 2008 — budget
Quick post to release the first budget spreadsheet for the 100K House. This will be a work in progress over the next few weeks as we make our final design tweaks.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p4D0y9XxZM0uDf8vWkh2Vaw&hl=en
I will also add this to our documents page in the next few days.
February 7th, 2008 — floorplan, insulation, size, framing, budget, design, planning
Yesterday afternoon we had our much anticipated budget review with the entire team for the 100K House. Scott from Level 5 Construction had taken the past two weeks to come up with a comprehensive estimate based on the most recent design of both homes in the project.
I knew we were exceeding our $100K budget with […]
February 5th, 2008 — framing, budget
Recently I’ve received a few recommendations to check out an alternative to SIPs that uses light gauge steel to give insulated panels structural integrity rather than sheets of OSB. The most local company that provides such a product is the ThermaSteel Corporation located in Virginia.
Some of the touted advantages include the following:
Using light gauge steel […]
February 1st, 2008 — insulation, framing, budget, planning
I am heading out the door now for a weekend getaway but have a quick update on SIP quotes for the project. I have received quotes from four of the seven companies I requested bids from. I have agreed not to disclose exact pricing from each vendor at this time so for now I will […]