Homebuilding and the True Nature of Cost
Accurately predicting the cost of building a home can be daunting. But over the years Bensonwood has helped hundreds of clients build their dream home while keeping costs accurate. It's because we've worked hard to develop a design build process that keeps the dream home alive, while basing the cost on reality.
One of the things we've learned at Bensonwood is that when building a timberframe home you have to look at the cost of the whole house, not just the timberframe shell package. Most timberframe companies accurately price the timberframe, shell, and other parts of their "package." What they cannot accurately predict is the local builder's cost for finishing the house, once the shell package is up and the timberframing crew has headed home.
By focusing their design efforts on the package, timberframe companies tend to leave consideration of the rest of the house to the local builder, including such major elements as interior walls, finishes, plumbing, wiring, and other mechanical systems. Since these elements can add up to more than half the cost of the finished home, the lack of careful cost estimating at the beginning of the project can lead to unfortunate surprises when the project gets underway.
With proper planning and the right builder, your dream home can come in at the right price.
Talking Costs
"Cost is something people don't like to talk about," says Randall Walter, a lead architect at Bensonwood. "We want to talk about it, describe it, predict it, and make sure that customers have a good handle on the cost estimate associated with a project."
Bensonwood ensures that estimating the cost of building the entire home is a collaboration between the Bensonwood team, the homeowner, and the local builder.
To more accurately predict costs, Bensonwood began tracking every part of the building process. "We also realized we had to do a more thorough and detailed job of designing the entire house, not just creating the package," Walter says. What Bensonwood developed is a large, digitally-based design system called Open-Built®, which includes an electronic database of build information to help define cost variations around the country. (Learn more about Open-Built®)
Concrete Numbers
Open-Built allows Bensonwood designers and architects to design complete houses with an unprecedented level of detail and accuracy. "You can't estimate whole house costs without designing the whole house," Walter says. "Because our Open-Built design system is rooted in a digitally driven database, we design to a level where we know an awful lot about every part of the house, from the heating and air conditioning, down to the knobs on the cabinets."
When applied to the design and specifications of a home to be built, this database is a powerful estimating tool. Because the database is comprised of costs from around the country, it can be used to help predict costs on any Bensonwood home. "We have access to generic national databases of construction," says Andrew Dey, a project steward at Bensonwood. "But we've found that our database is more useful for estimating costs on our projects."
The Team Approach
A project steward and lead designer are assigned at the start of the Bensonwood design build process. "The designer is focused primarily on creating the design. One of my primary jobs is to estimate, track, and manage costs," says Dey. "By working closely with the designer, I help ensure that the evolving design is aligned with the client's budget objectives."
The comprehensiveness of Bensonwood's Open-Built design system is also key to accurate and timely estimating. Open-Built components used by Bensonwood designers reside within the database as digitally-stored, designed, and engineered units with a known cost, thus greatly simplifying estimates for homes designed within the Open-Built system.
Paying it Forward
Dey explains that in the early phases of the process, when the design is still taking shape, the cost estimates are preliminary but useful enough to determine whether significant changes might be needed to comply with budget constraints. As the design and specifications develop, the cost estimates become increasingly detailed.
"At each schematic phase of the design, clients are given the information they need to make informed choices about the next steps," says Dey. While costs are driven in large measure by size and complexity of the home, the choices a client makes in fixtures and finishes will affect the overall cost significantly. "We provide a clear sense of where overall costs are headed, as well as the cost implications for the many options in fixtures and finishes," Dey explains. "That way our clients are able to have a strong influence on the final project costs."