South Florida Construction & Price Question

[empirevideo]

Hi all,

Need some advice and suggestion.  I saw a company called American Home Partners about helping people build homes instead of buying pre-built homes and it got me thinking about that option.  I am in South Florida (south of Miami) and wanted to build/buy a small ranch/country style home.  But I wanted to do something very different if building to keep cost down.  I was looking at 1500 to 2000 sq ft but with a wide open design.  Picture in your mind New York style lofts were you have one big huge room and that's it (except for area for bathroom and kitchen).  Considering cost involved with having homes to hurricane standard - what do you guys think this would cost me and would it be a lot cheaper than buying a traditional home.

Any help or suggestions is appreciated.

Adrian

[glenn kangiser]

If looking to use their program I doubt you will be able to build as you want.

We offer ranch, split and colonial style homes. In fact, there are twenty-two different home plans in various sizes and configurations that meet the needs and tastes of most families. More importantly, they have been professionally designed in conjunction with our strict material specifications to maximize the appraised value of the home without adding unnecessary costs.

CAN I USE MY OWN HOME PLANS?

   No, you must choose one of our nineteen different home models. Our homes are specifically designed to maximize the appraised values and to minimize the cost of construction. Our plans are available in different elevations and the floor plans can be reversed to meet-the-needs of your building lot.

Also, their interest rates are about double what we are paying now.  While they say there is no catch, there is usually a catch.

[empirevideo]

Yeah..I saw that they don't let you customize so going with them may not be an option (I am actually still waiting to hear back from them).  In the meantime, I wanted to explore other options and cost to see what could be done with a simple design.  I never really thought about the whole build it yourself option and while I don't have any expertise in this area - I am sure there are folks out there who do and can give me some advice on the process

Adrian

[glenn kangiser]

Browse through our owner builder project forum postings and you can get an idea of what is involved.

Jimmy Cason and Progress Finally are a great place to see most of the entire process, but all have a great deal of information that the builders have posted for our benefit.

http://www.countryplans.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?board=OB1

[John_C]

I would suggest you make yourself completely familiar with the codes down there.   I built a house in Tavernier (FL Keys) in the mid 80's and even then the codes were difficult.  The flood maps and wind gradient maps meant houses not too far apart could have substantially different considerations.  It is my understanding that the building restrictions got much worse after Hurricane Andrew not to mention the more recent storms.

My house was a 1000 sq ft stilt house with the main floor 9 ft above grade.  The main floor slab and roof were poured concrete.  I had about 300,000 Lbs of concrete in the roof alone, 20+ ft. in the air, with a 2/12 pitch.   That adds a lot to the cost.   If you are in the Redlands and can build for 110 mph winds instead of 140-150 mph and can build on grade, costs would be much less.

I am a photographer and I was hired to cover the aftermath of Andrew.  I still have several thousand slides of Hurricane damage and relief efforts.   A lot of the destruction didn't have to happen.  I found blown off roof panels that had 6 or 8  6d or roofing nails securing them.  My understanding was that in a project a crew would put up the plywood and "tack" it in place. Then another crew would come along and nail the panels and a third crew would do the roofing.  They all got paid by how many sq ft they did in a day.  If the roofing crew was faster than the nailing crew the nailing guys would skip ahead.

Out Coral Reef Drive there was a large development (I think it was called Country Walk) of expensive homes that was all but destroyed.   Nearby four smaller homes stood nearly unscathed. The common link was that those four had been built by Habitat for Humanity.  It's not rocket science, but a good place for PEG's maxim  "Build it stout, and with something you know about".