Thing I dont get about insulation is why people waste money on insulation that can be damaged by water vs spray foam/foam panels. I can see with panels it might be a PITA to cut and fit for nook and crannies. Sticky spray on might be tricky to take out but if u ever did need to take it out a simple light layer of vapor barrier or membrane before spraying can fix that.

Money.

Spray foam is expensive in comparison to fiberglass, rock wool or cellulose and the majority of clients just don't care what's behind the drywall. The exception was the client who 220k in spray foam, he literally insulated every single wall in the house with the most expensive product available.

If you go with closed cell foam, you don't even need to worry about vapour barrier, it will stop passage of air directly at the sheathing.

In general however, spray foam is worth the cost. The measure of quality of a traditional insulation install is the fitment of the batts; if the installer crushes a piece of batt insulation a bit to fit it into place you loose R value, if they don't trim the batt perfectly to fit you have air leakage. No matter who does the installation, all those little air leaks add up to the equivalent of leaving a window or door open year round. Spray foam doesn't have the problem, it's provides a 100% perfect seal. Imagine how much higher a homes energy bills would be if it had a door open year round, that fact alone should make spray foam worthwhile. That's just one of a number of benefits.

So many things that can increase or decrease the price in building a new home. A few examples would be the plumbing fixtures, kitchen appliance, heating system (radiant or baseboard), exterior siding (hardie, stucco or vinyl), soil condition (hard pan or blue clay), city connections (does it need sump pumps), interior finishing and so on. There are a lot of things to consider. I would venture to say that if you want a quality built house and not looking for all the high end top of the line fixtures. You are looking at $170-$200


PM me if you need anymore information. I am a licensed residential builder with the HPO and covered by National Home warranty.:D

I know this might be a typical ricer/naive kid question, but are there any laws that prevent someone from building a medium sized house, lets say 2200sqft, but with a 4-5 car garage?

There are builders out there that arn't covered under the NHW?

I don't think so just depends on what size structure is allowed on the lot.

yup, some of them are really really good too, and some are..... not so good but in the end they have tons of inspections to pass, so if something isn't done correctly it won't pass that stage etc..etc...

It was 45K more for me 4 years ago, I didn't want to deal with renters so decided against it.

Depends on the size of your lot.

We actually did work on a house for one of my dads friends last year that had exactly that. The actual living area was maybe 1200SQF, the garage was probably 2000SQF with 4 or 5 bay doors and a 14' Ceiling. You could park two cars behind each door. The house had a lot of funky details but it wasn't my cup of tea. 1 Bedroom, living room, 2 bathrooms, office and a kitchen. He was older, divorced and lived by himself with lots of toys. This was in aldergrove so he had lots of land, I doubt that would work in the city. The house doesn't even look like a house it looks like a small school because of the type of roof and the high ceilings.

The only problem is that house will be damm hard to sell if he ever wants to move and he put a lot of money into with the detail work and funky architecture.

National Home Warantee = you're not good enough to get on with travellers.

My fam looked at a house in Abbotsford that was somewhat similar. It used to be a church, then had additional house built on, and then a massive 4 car garage added to the back.

It had been gutted, so the expense of the house had an additional 100k reno budget added. In the end, everyone fell in love with it, and then ran from it like a curse. Other than a really impressive coolness factor, it wasn't going to work for everyone. Beautiful little property too, with a stream running through the backyard.

there are a few providers out there. I am just saying that I am a licensed builder and if anyone got any questions regarding building a house, they are free to ask me questions and I will try my best to answer them.


passing inspection only means that the work meets the building code and its safe. The house could have framing thats not leveled, concrete floor thats wavy, painting thats bad and so on.

This is a joke right? I really dont see any problems with NHW, we just signed up with whoever at the time.

btw, are you covered by travellers and why is travellers better in your eyes?

In Richmond there is a ratio that it goes by (forgot the exact ratio). But say for example if your house is 3000sq/ft, you are allowed to have your garage at 500sq/ft that will not count and anything over that the sq/ft will count towards your house.

Travellers takes the best/better builders in BC, it's not really a secret

NHW takes alot of the builders travelers rejects, therefore have many more claims

If you're a quality builder and go with either it's a personal choice and costs etc come into play, but IMO travelers is the superior warrantee provider and almost all builders we deal with including us are covered under travelers.
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I really didnt know that and havent heard about it being that way. Either way, we never had any claims against us and we get a very good rate from NHW.

Are you also a builder?

I'm a super for a construction management company, we build mostly town houses and other multi family
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We also do the same thing for a developer. We built around half a dozen complexes in Richmond and a few low rise wood frame in Vancouver.

I am starting up a single family out in the west side. Should find a chance to meet up and chit chat.

To give you a perspective from a first time home builder, what I noticed is that your interior finishing will cost you the most when determining the cost of your house. All the framing, sheathing, foundation pouring, isn't going to be substanially different from say a 3000sf home and a 5000sf home but a choice between say using laminate flooring vs engineered hardwood flooring alone can easily cost you 10k in difference or more. Also, doing a bunch of research, I personally found that building your house under a cost + base structure would probably give you better flexibility and probably better product in the end than a contractual 150 bucks a sf base. I'm a firm believer in you can what you paid for especially when it comes to hiring tradesman. Sure you can save 10k in framing say between an east indian framer and a high quality framer, but would you really want an uneven floor, wavy walls, walls that are not plumb, and rooms that are out of square? If you got more questions feel free to ask a guy who's still currently building his house in vancouver east right now. ( And no, I'm not building the house to flip but I'm actually going to be living in it)

You are dead on with most of your points. I hire a quality framer thats around 10-11bucks a sq/ft, where as if I went with a EI framer it would be around 5-7bucks a sq/ft. But in the end you will have less headache with failing city inspections and your structural engineer inspections. Your interior finishing will really take around 25-30% of the whole project. Cabinets, fixtures, flooring, doors, trims and so on.

When I build a spec or custom house, I always go by cost + base like you said. Reason being is that the customer can always choose what they want and they wont be tied to use whatever I give them. In the end, the client will be happy and not be stuck with materials inside their house that they dont want.

But one downside is that, I get a lot of clients walking away from me when they try to pick a builder because I am never the cheapest compared to the builders that charges a lump sump to build the house. They dont seem to understand the you get what you pay for.

So different from Commercial, lowest price almost always gets the job. Then again in home design it's way more custom ie: cabinets, appliances, flooring ect.... Where in commercial the jobs there is less change after drawings are up for tender.

We build it how it's designed there isn't much room for play. This wall is here, it's built out of this material, this is the insulation we want in the wall and this is the finish we want. Stuff comes up where maybe the architect wants something changed here and there but for the most part what you see is what you get.

comercial sounds nice lol

as Sellanne said there, it's amazing the people who absolutely cheap out on finishing when basically its the most important part!

and with that being said, the people you'd least think would fuck up their fininshing are also typically people with the most money

in the past 3 years we've helped 2 different developers who have homes in west van, one was one of the newest houses in BP, the other is down closer to the water

Both basically were in such a rush to move in when the drywall etc. finally got up that they just said GO GO GO GO with all their finishing

now we are in places that have had occupancy for like 2-3 years, never got a final, and they are -fucked- to the point where one of them when i walked in and saw the problems i was thinking "lol this is just like holmes on homes, i didnt think people could fuck this up this badly"

The problem with commercial and I'm sure you get this in residential as well but it is sometimes it's a race to the bottom. You get contractors coming in and driving down the prices. The problem is they aren't sustainable they might come in and pick up a bunch of work and be real busy for a year, maybe even two or three. Once the bills catch up to them the cashflow slows down and they run out of credit and start getting cut off by suppliers they fold.

Meanwhile they've had a longterm effect on the price of doing business and the wages in the industry. The wages in Steel Framing and drywall and ceilings right now are around the same place they were in 1992. Think about that, 20 years of inflation and this is where we're at in BC it's so fucking gross.

I'm working in Sask right now which is pretty busy, headed back to BC in Jan. and when I get there I have to take a 25% paycut to what I've been making over the last 4 years. It's so fucking disgusting. At least I'll be sleeping in my own bed and be able to tuck my kid in at night but yeah, not to happy about it.

I think it always comes down to the owner when it comes to choice of sub-trades in residential homes anyways. If it's a spec home and built to sale, most of them would care less how to work is as long as it's the lowest bid for the job. I was just at an open house in west vancouver this past weekend, and a house currently listed for 2.9 mil has such a terrible finishing job it's disgusting! The floors on the top floor isn't even level and you can feel it when you're walking in the room barefoot, the drywall isn't even cut and then mud in properly around the switches so that there's already all sorts of nicks and cuts around it, the choice of granite for their counter-top is cheap (black galaxy if you know prices of granite), shower tubs are still using the real cheap 4mm framed slider show glass that wobbles as you slide them. This is absolutely outrages that these houses are demanding that money they are, the only thing they have going for them is location, but you would think they would put a little bit of conscience in it when they build, but nop!
If everyone was building a house to own/live in, i'm pretty sure 75% of those east indian would go bankrupt/jobless. I refuse to hire any east indian trades on any of the important tasks but even on the simple stuff they still manage to fuck up. My excavation and demolition contractor manages to fuck something up every time he's on site: Kinking the water line when he was back filling cuz they didn't support the water line properly underneath prior to just dumping dirt onto it, knocking and damaging the garage foundation with their bobcat during backfill of the garage, tried to bill for me something that was never discussed and claimed he did etc.
If you're planning on building a home for yourself and not to sell, if you can avoid it, I would avoid the east indian trades like a plague

people also have to understand there is a compromise in finishing

its one thing to buy a 2 million dollar house and expect GOOD finishing

its another thing to buy a 350k townhouse and expect absolute top notch finishing, dealing with clients on these matters is the bane of my existence

Hey hondaracer, I understand and I always preach you get what you paid for so that's why I was talking about a house that's asking for 4 million and the hosue is only about 4000 sq ft.

I wanna praise you on keeping your moral and your work ethic. You may lose client now but in the long term, I'm sure this will only help you. It's a small industry in vancouver and don't under estimate the power of referrals from a happy client