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eo3x0 | 3 years ago

I’ve recently started research construction costs due to a desire to build a custom house. Not sure what it’s like in other areas of the country, but in California, everything is negligible compared to labor costs. You would figure that means we get to use all sorts of cool materials and techniques here because the costs of materials are marginal, but no, in fact it’s the other way around. Unless you’re willing to put up with the cheapest and lowest common denominator combination of materials and techniques, people look at you funny and assume you’re okay with your costs blowing up by 10x because now the labor involved is not standard. With the million dollar (and easily higher) house construction costs, instead of the best, we get the absolute worst. That includes using the bare minimum amount of concrete in our shallow foundations that would be a laughing stock anywhere else in the world.

It would be like if every programmer only does 90s style PHP because software developers are expensive enough already and you asking for the latest Python or JavaScript is a desire to pay space rocket numbers.

discuss

order

l1tany11|3 years ago

I'm a custom builder in SoCal and I can say a lot about what you are talking about. There are a few main issues with construction of a house that pop up all the time:

1) Most people just want the cheapest possible. So most contractors are used to dealing with that. Even if it's not really the cheapest long term, and makes no sense.

2) Perspective and incentive. Does your framer know, or care how much money/time engineered lumber can save when it comes time to drywall/tile/etc? Not really, because his material cost in the bid will go up, and he doesn't want to be noncompetitive.

3) Most people think the code is very rigid. There is a section of code that is prescriptive, but there's also a section that is engineered/calculated which is what makes the code very flexible. You can do pretty much whatever you want if you can show it will perform.

4) Guys are afraid of callbacks/lawsuits. So they tend to want to do the same thing, the same way. Keep doing what has been working. There is a lot of resistance to trying new materials, methods, etc. Even if they aren't new, they may be new to that contractor. And they are (rightfully) wary of the training time, and increased likelihood of making a mistake doing something for the first time. So they will send bids with the "fuck you" price.

5) If you want to use some material/method that is not super common, sometimes you are best off asking for references at the suppliers. That way you can try and get a competitive bid instead of asking a guy to do something he doesn't want to do.

6) IDK what you are talking about regarding the foundation. Usually a contractor is just going to follow the plan, and do what the structural engineer says to do, as the structural engineer has to sign off and do inspections. So it makes bidding and executing quite simple. I've spoken to engineers about different foundation strategies. If you want a big, thick, mat foundation I don't see why the engineer wouldn't be open to that. They are very simple...no contractor will care or bat an eye.

KirillPanov|3 years ago

> there's also a section that is engineered/calculated which is what makes the code very flexible

That section of the code requires a PE stamp.

PEs don't work on residential houses unless it's a mansion or a cookie-cutter subdivision.

cq493|3 years ago

Are you open to new clients? I'm nearing the stage of building a custom home in LA and would love to work with a builder that frequents these boards.

worik|3 years ago

Yes.

I have been doing quite a bit of building over the last decade at my house and will do more in the coming decade.

Definitely using as many prefabricated materials from Western Europe as I can.

There have been so many advances in manufacturing in the last two decades and so little sign of them on building sites.

I wish I could use locally manufacturers but where I live (Aotearoa) the building industry has become obsessed with using the lowest quality wood available, (tannalised pinus radiata) and plastic whatsits up the whazo and then supplying the parts unfinished. Meaning weeks of painting and finishing.

In Western Europe they have much better timber and an appreciation of quality we do not have.

Building sites should be places where things are assembled, not constructed. The construction should happen in a factory mostly automated with modern machinery.

idiotsecant|3 years ago

Dumping the carbon to ship a panelized structure from western Europe is a huge use of resources, even if you aren't forced to actually shoulder the burden of externalities like carbon emission and irresponsible old growth harvest.

Building with pine actually works really, really well - pine is both cheap and plentiful, and depending on exact geography it's generally a reasonably small carbon footprint. We've spent a long time figuring out how to build well with less than ideal materials and the techniques to do so are well understood, if not always implemented properly. The difference between a well constructed pine framed structure and a poorly constructed one is in the details. Find someone who is paying the proper attention to those details and you'll have a superior product without the massive supply chain and all that entails.

majormajor|3 years ago

I don't think your attempt to show a difference between that and software makes your point.

The bulk of software project costs is labor. And there are certainly a lot of business folks who say "ok, the bulk of the cost is labor, so labor is a commodity, so I should be able to hire any programmer to do any type of software" and hire cheap devs and see things go sideways if they don't stick to fairly simple, rote, lowest-common-denominator technologies that are much closer to 90s-style-PHP than they are to "the latest Python or Javascript."

If you've spent your whole career in coastal California startups or FANG you may never have seen these people at all, they don't really live in the same job posting/hiring/skill set universe. But it strikes me as very similar to "labor is the most expensive part, concrete vs lumber isn't gonna be that different in parts, so I should be able to pay the same for labor for the unusual things."