House build attempt 3. After having a couple of significant changes to circumstances and ending up with a prohibitively expensive design we have chosen to not go ahead with our previous design and are now moving onto design 3. With our previous design we had ended up going down a path of using some pretty specialized products that most builders were not familiar with. The one builder who was used to the product was not available and when we had it priced by others in came in between 37% and 55% over budget. So we chose to walk away at that point.
Having a couple of builders price the build did give us some clarity about some of the costs. Effectively there are some fixed costs with a build and then variable depending on the size etc. So foundation costs, plumbing, power etc are not going to change much if the house is another 30sqm bigger. Previously we had thought to build in two stages, what we need now and what we want in the future. As we have identified we are only really taking about another room and bathroom we are now considering a bigger house as a single stage build opposed to the previous designs which were looking at a couple of stages.
So we have met our next potential designer/builder and added to our previous brief of a further room plus bathroom. We have also asked them to look at an off-the-grid option as the cost of this seems to be quite justifiable at the moment.
Design wise we have our previous design which we really like and can potential fall back to that (with some modifications) but as we are with someone new we will take advantage of their skills and see if they can impress us with something different.