I've got several posts planned over the next few weeks, and wanted to start the series by sharing a few numbers from our excavator and builder.
I've posted some of this before, but no matter what you end up building on a rural lot, you're going to have fixed sitework costs, and these can add up fast. Here are ours, in round figures:
Septic: ~$40,000 (3-bedroom)
Well: ~$20,000 (continuous pressure)
Stump Removal: ~$5,000
Fill: ~$25,000
Driveway: ~$10,000
So before there's a foundation, we've got $100K into sitework. Not included in this total is the *hundreds* of hours I've spent clearing the lot — once heavily-wooded — and roughly $10K into brush and tree removal, and hauling logs to the sawmill. Also not included is the ~3K to get power from a nearby pole.
At this point in the post I was planning on line-iteming the rest of the build estimate. But it's just too much effort and there's too much noise in the spreadsheet, so I will simply post the remaining total: $540K.
So the grand total was $640K for 864 square feet (not counting the loft), with no garage. And here's the kicker: it doesn't include a 💩-ton of materials and labor I was going to have to provide/do myself:
Foundation stonework
Siding and trim
Interior and exterior painting
Interior ceiling and wall cladding
Flooring
Final plumbing (setting toilets, hooking up sinks, etc.)
Final electrical (light fixtures and outlets)
Patio
Landscaping
And I am probably forgetting a few things.
And here's Kicker #2: it appraised! We were 1 signature away from starting the project when life changes forced us to pull the plug.
Back in February I had an itchy trigger finger and felled a bunch of trees to beat the wind. Last weekend I worked from can-see to can't-see to clean it all up. Prized timbers were marked for milling, and Tim Bittorf of Bluffside Services (920-495-8482) is taking the rest away, for wood chips and toilet paper.
It may not look like it, but we're getting close to having Nick's team at Lily Bay Sand & Gravel — the winners of the sitework bids — come to scrape the building site and remove all the stumps. They won't be thrilled, but I'll be onsite for that, grabbing as many unearthed stones as possible for our foundation and patio. Lots more to come soon.
I haven't posted in a while because we were in France and Spain visiting the surfer son who is "studying" in Barcelona this semester.
One of the highlights was driving way off the beaten track to Bourbon-l'Archambault to visit the ruins of Château de Bourbon-l'Archambault. For just 7€ — and with *zero* other tourists present — we were allowed to climb to the top of 2 of the 3 towers (one is closed due to safety concerns) of a castle built in the 1300s.
On the second floor of the east tower (the one to the right in the picture below), the duke and duchess quarters had an en suite fireplace and an open-air "toilet" where the 💩 landed two stories below, presumably left for some servants to scoop up.
Even more impressive was the builders' water management on the top floor. Without proper drainage this would quickly turn into a rooftop pool — sans DJ — but multiple drains carried the water to extended carved stone gutters (that looked like gargoyles from a distance) to get the water away from the foundation. Fantastique!
