off topic but- Anybody building a house?

[Ron]

My wife has decided it is time to build a house, Wow is buiding expensive. I have looked at RTM homes (two piece with basement, not a double wide trailer), they say price starts at 85/sq ft, I was quoted $135 for stick built, the RTM would still need basement, furnace//ducting, some plumbing.
Has anybody tried a RTM home? What do you think 10 years later? Is the 135 crazy (central alberta) or should I just clench my teeth and sign the papers? The rtm salesman said 3 1/2 months to deliver, price fixed when ordered, no cost overruns ever. That sounds pretty good.
Oh yeah, I suck at wood, I am pretty good with steel but building/helping myself is not an option. I am way better sticking to what I do and spreading the $$$ around than trying to learn a new trade to build one house.
Thanks for any input

[dalek]

Many people in our area have RTM homes and are extremely satisfied with them.
There are many designs and most of them don't look any different than a stick built home upon completion.
In Alberta there are numerous companies that build these 'modular' homes and if you plan on going that route I would certainly speak to someone that has one to get an idea of which companies are the most trustworthy and whose workmanship is excellent.

[wmoebis]

There are lots of cheap/good vacant farm houses in Saskatchewan for sale. I wonder what the cost of moving one would be? Some are pretty new and built very well by profectionist farmers.

[Shonravin]

Ron! We just put up a new home on our farm in the last six months. We never stick built but we had a custom home done by a small company from north of Edmonton. I would call it a modular although these guys are deffinetly a few steps above your regular assembly line type modulars. They preferred to do our plan. My self I learned a small and very cheap house program and put together a floor plan of my own. We ended up with 1500 sq.ft it came in 4 pieces and was completed on site in about a week. We put it on a walkout basement which gives us plenty of room. We were very pleased with the end product, to me it wasn't any different than stick building other than you didn't have to worry about watching your your house get rained on with no roof or have to deal with any contstruction tradesmen which are very low on my useful people list right know. As far as the quality of the build I see no advantage to stick building unless you want to run the show your self and then you might as well take about 10 months off of what ever kind of work you do and start babysitting trademen. Because very few of them you can leave on there own.

As I was saying I do not see any advantage to stick building This house we did was originaly designed to be stick built but then we approached these guys and quickly changed our minds.We did talk to two other outfits that do a similar type of home ,also from Edmonton area,west side, but one tried to steer you more towards what they wanted to build and the other said that they wanted build our plan but again kept pointing out one of the six houses that they had sitting along the hi-way on display.

I'am not sure what you mean by RTM but don't think you have to be two pieces . These guys have built two storey and I believe up to 5 or 6 piece.

A few of the things to watch for if you go this route is make sure that the builder hires the crane,these guys did, this can be very important don't let anyone tell you diffrent because it is one of those varibles that make or break the whole expeience. When these guys showed up so did the crane that they use exclusivly and it was clock work. Another thing that I liked about these guys was that you got to deal right with the owners of the company they both are active in the building of your house. They do have a sales lady out front that is a super person and loves to take the time with you but dose tend to forget that you haven't done this before and when she asked you to make out your wish list you need to ask her for a reminder list and schedule of what order they need to know things by. This was a very minor downfall with these guys as I said she is a very tenditive type person and mean well.

Anyhow as far as cost goes it is very hard to compare apples to apples basic costs are going to be close to the same but finishing is where it starts to turn on you. We ended up at about $110/sq that was finished up stairs but there was still electrical hoodup and plumbing drops.

Just an extra note if you are looking at alternative heat definetly consider hot water with a coal burner we have one that is looks like it is going to work very weel to heat the whole farm and looks after its self as far as coal in ash out. We should be at about $600 to $700 worth of coal for a year to heat the house ,shop and barn.

[Shonravin]

Sorry Ron "these Guys" are Millennium Homes north of morinville.