Today was a pretty fun, but quick day. As I mentioned previously, Builder B is a father/son general contracting company. We knew the son from mutual friends, but had never met his dad before. Today we did just that. The son invited us to his parent’s home to view their house, which they recently built three years ago, and to get introduced to not only his dad, but his mom as well. His dad owns the general contracting company, the son works there, and the mom does all of the accounting. Talk about keeping it in the family!

Their home was gorgeous! Definitely high quality and the attention to detail was extremely prevalent. It’s a northwest lodge style home, similar to the son’s house with natural wood finishes, slate tile, stone fireplace, wood flooring, and earth-toned decor. Although it’s not the style of home that we’ll be building, the finishes were beautiful and the craftsmanship really showed. It was easy to see the pride in the type of work that they do.

The entire family was than welcoming and they readily answered all of our questions. One of our main questions was about who was going to be working on our project – the son or the dad? Both had a variety of experiences – the dad started out as a carpenter and has been building one or two homes at a time for the past 30 years; the son has been building homes with his dad or for other builders for the past 10 years and has built a higher quantity of homes. Their response to our question was that they would be interchangeable on the project and that they would both be involved in building our home. It’s apparent that the son would be the main point of contact on our project and be the one managing it. The dad would be there for advice (if needed) and help if the son wasn’t able to be at our house for one reason or another.

We also talked a bit more about their typical contract to make sure that we understood the general idea. They work off of a true “cost plus” contract. Meaning that our invoices will be broken down into whatever was purchased for the home plus an additional markup for their overhead + profit. This is different than the time + materials contracts that we’re used to hearing about. Time is not a calculated into their type of contract.

I mentioned previously that we gave Builder B a set of our preliminary plans for him to review and give us a more accurate cost for our house. He said that based on the size of our house and our initial thoughts on how we’re going to finish the house, the cost increased from $115 (initial thought before seeing our plans) to $130 per square foot. That said, he did mention that the $130 per square foot is really a budget level opinion of cost and that it could be built for less (depending on the finishes we choose). That price is simply for the house costs, so taxes and overhead + profit are also in addition to the price. Another thing not included in the $130 per square foot is the cost for utilities and any major hard/landscaping. So really, when you factor everything in and the divide by the square footage of our house, the cost is truly $180 per square foot.

We had to cut our meeting a little short with a sick little one at home and babysitters calling. It was great to get to meet both of them though, tour their beautiful home and see the family dynamic.