Cost to Build a New Home late 2020. $350 to $425 per Heated Square Foot (HSF) for a simple, nice house of mainly drywall interior with a few timber and stone accents. Simple budget materials outside with a few timber, wood and stone accents. It can be more.
Look at the rough framing package for this house, built in 2018. And this is just the first.
There were 2 main rough framing package deliveries. Each of these deliveries of lumber materials was around $50,000. X2= around $100,000 just in rough lumber materials, to build this 2,182 HSF house (3,880 GSF).
Not including the roof trusses, which would have made it 3 deliveries and even more material cost.
Now for those of you who rear back and say: “Oh, no, I’m gonna build my new fancy house for $100/HSF”, No you are not. And if you think you and your cousins and going to build it all within 2-1/2 months: no you are not. It takes more than a year to build most homes these days and this company has seen some large homes take every bit of 2-1/2 years. Building is tough, heavy, dangerous hard work. This house above ended up having more than a million pounds of materials involved with its construction. Nothing to be taken lightly.
But what does this Architect know? He’s only been designing custom homes for over 52 years. Why trust him? Well: because he knows what he is talking about. Let’s do some math: if you wanted a 2,200 HSF house x $350HSF = $770,000. And that does NOT include the Architect, or the cost of the land. It DOES include sitework costs (within reason, but not for steep land). So if the land was $75,000, you’d be at $845,000 for hard costs and that does not include the Architect or Engineering or other costs. The days of building a custom large home (or even mid-sized) for under half a million are gone. Sorry. Please don’t shoot the messenger. This is now reality. The cost of lumber products went up 300% in just the last 60 days (fall, 2020).
Moral of the story: be prepared. SAVE, save, save for your dream house. It’s not going to be cheap.