House costs minus profit?

Factual Questions
1

Around here, one may buy a cement block house, two bedroom, living room, kitchen/dining room, 2 bath, enclosed garage house in a gated community for $130,000.

First question: Since the place is being sold by a company, how much of that $130,000 would be above building costs? 1/2, 1/4?

Second question: I’m considering building, in the future, a house with 2 foot thick, reinforced cement walls and probably the roof. I’m tired of seeing scenes of hurricane and tornado destruction and want my home to last and be secure. Based on the above figures, anyone have an idea how much more such a place would be?

Locally, people are turning away from wooden houses because of the cost of lumber approaching the price of gold.

2

I don’t know about building companies in your area, but my mother in law works for one, and she says that, really, the company makes very little off of the construction and sale of the house. They make their money off of the sale of the lot that the house sits on. The company buys a chunk of land cheaply, sections it off and makes their profits selling it.

3

Or visit your city planning department. Ask to see the folder for the project address. It should have a list of costs, then you can count the units, do some math & Viola! the answer.

In my city, a condo in a gated community was $699,000 this year. Used.

4

The cost of a residential builder’s services typically ranges from negative numbers (ie a loss) to around 20%-25% of the project cost and a good builder is worth every penny.

If you intend on building an absurdly over-engineered house (2 foot thick reinforced concrete walls!) then get ready to write some big checks. The 100,000 sq ft + concrete, industrial buildings I sell for a living don’t have walls this thick. Are you concerned about a tactical nuclear strike on your house?

I think you need to talk to a competent structural engineer regarding realistic cost-benefit designs for a house and then an architect in that order.

5

Well, actually, I’m interested in constructing a house to last over 100 years – somewhat like those castles in England, only not as huge! One which a tornado cannot rip up nor a hurricane blow away and far above any potential flood zones with walls no idiot’s military gun can shoot through and fire can’t hurt.

There have been two men who constructed unique homes, one out of hand poured cement and another out of huge blocks of stone. Both places are historic sites and both men are long dead. The construction intrigued me. I cam across a place buried in weeds on the back roads behind a small housing development which was abandoned 3/4 finished made of sculpted concrete, designed along the lines of a castle.

The neighbors knew very little about it, but a few of those who had been there for decades said some guy was building it by himself, with occasional help, out of rebar and cement. He’d stopped something like 14 years ago and no one knew what happened to him. The site had rolls of rusty, old reinforcement wire in it, stacks of rusted rebar, coils of iron wire that were pretty much rusted away, old mixing toughs full of holes and so on.

Any other tools had been stolen long ago. What impressed me is that the structure is still sound as a mountain, if not a little bizarre. It has spiral little ‘towers’ like those kids make dribbling wet beach sand, scattered about. The main single story structure has a poured cement floor and walls over a foot thick with big, curved top, Spanish style windows. It’s designed along the size of a 3 bedroom house, a small one.

I was impressed. I’m not strong enough nor knowledgeable enough in building to make such a place myself, so I started thinking: Why not have one built?

I happened to think about it again when I signed onto the SDMB, and decided that I would ask a few questions here.

Any house repairs I do usually wind up basic, held in place with many nails, screws and glue and look like a kid put them up. I’m still trying to accept the fact that a second grade 2x4, that I used to buy for $1.50 is now $4.00 and a reverse cycle, adjustable drill to me is still a marvelous piece of engineering.

6

You don’t need that kind of structure to make a house last, if your criterion is 100 years. There are lots of wood frame houses around that have been standing for 200 or more years.

Your best defense against having your house torn down is to make it really, really nice. Mansions tend to become historical buildings, and therefore are maintained and protected properly. You can build the world’s strongest cement structure, but if it happens to be in a place where someone wants to build something else, they’ll just tear it down. So either build it in the boonies, or if you build it in a desirable area make it too nice to demolish, even 100 years from now.

Have a look at the contruction techniques used in extreme areas. Here in Edmonton where we get extremes of hot and cold, new houses are being built with 2 X 6 construction, engineered trusses for flooring, 1/2" plywood sub-floors, etc. Houses like that will almost certainly last 100 years. There are a lot of houses in Edmonton that date back to the turn of the century and are structurally sound today. A friend of mine lives in a house build in 1917, and it doesn’t creak, the doors all swing properly (no sagging or leaning in the structure), etc. It’s just a frame building with a basement foundation.

If you’re really stuck on a huge cement house for other reasons (energy efficiency comes to mind), then you might want to check out the ‘earthships’. These houses are typically built into the side of a hill, and the exposed walls are made by taking car tires, filling them with compressed sand, then pouring concrete around the outside to make a solid, smooth wall. These are about 4’ thick, yet they only use a fraction of the concrete.

I don’t have a link for you, but if you type in ‘Earthship’ in a good search engine I’m sure you’ll find lots of links.

Or, you can buy a used missile silo and move in. The government is selling a few of those off, and at least one couple has converted one into a pretty nice underground residence.

None of these options will be cheap, though. As someone else said, the minute you move away from standard, volume building practices the costs start to mount rapidly. Labor is extremely expensive these days. Even these Earthships which use surplus materials for construction wind up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

7

I looked into the old missile silos.
Right about the time it seemed that the idle rich decided they’re ‘unique.’ They cost about a million each. Then those need to be really cleaned out because decades of rust, water and vandals have wrecked everything. I saw pictures. Basically it might take about another million to make them habitable.

Once done though, they are cool! I saw pictures of one turned into a home. That guy doesn’t have to worry about bill collectors or gang bangers when he buttons up for the night! Enormous amounts of space, though I wonder if they need to worry about radon?

But, I missed the boat. I could probably have bought one for under $50,000 10 years ago, but not anymore. The ‘in’ crowd has discovered them.