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We see many cases on building sites where unnecessary expenses are incurred. |
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Ideas to reduce building costs.
- Only build once. Often nowadays you see buildings with multiple floors and walls.
e.g. Concrete floors with a screed on top. You don't need an extra floor layer, just helicopter trowel the concrete.
e.g. Stud walls with OBS board on under the plasterboard. You don't need two walls, the OBS is not required.
e.g. Render is not desireable on brickwork. Brickwork will last 80+ years with minimum maintenance. Render will probably require re-painting every 10 to 20 years, and will crack and need repairing probably every 20 years.
At Affordable Price Housing we design for the minimum required for the top quality construction.
- Use the minimum number of different materials.
e.g. Using brickwork with stone "feature" parts may require a different trade, and will certainly increase costs.
e.g. Timber framing with steel members involves an extra trade and cost.
- Provide substantial roof overhangs.
Although this is a minor extra cost the benefits in protecting the walls from weather damge far out weighs the extra roof cost. Also gutter blockages will not damage internal structures.
Overhangs will reduce summer heat exposure to the walls.
- Make lengths and heights of areas suit sheeting sizes where possible to reduce waste.
- Affordable Price Housing will develop building designs for the minimum overall cost. |
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A review of advertised cost shows that factory built units cost from possibly a minimum of $3000/m2, an average of $5000/m2, up to maximums over $6000/m2.
By comparison a quality site built home is complete for $1700/m2. |
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There are many EXTRA COSTS involved in factory made buildings, e.g.
- The cost of the factory building, buy or rent.
- Massive extra beams under the structure to allow loading and unloading.
- Many economical building materials such as set plasterboard will not withstand the movement involved in trucking, thus requiring more expensive alternative materials to be used.
- Transport costs are doubled when building in a factory, delivery of materials to factory and then the units to site, compared with single deliveries directly to site.
- Service connections are more complicated and expensive to connect between the building and site services and between multiple parts of the building when assembled on site.
- Finishing works are required on site.
- The longest lasting and often a relatively economical external wall cladding, brick masonry, cannot be factory built.
Many of the claimed advantages of factory units do not in fact exist.
- Wastage will be similar for both methods. There is no reason materials cannot be delivered to site cut to specific measurements. The important point is to plan for the most economical supplies, Affordable Price Housing specialise in minimum wastage building.
- Speed of construction is often stated, but such claims conveniently forget the time spent on construction in the factory.
- The same labour saving tools, nail guns, cartridge screw guns, etc are used on site as in a factory.
- Building in a factory is no more "environmently friendly" than building on site.
- Building on site obviously can utilise low-energy lightbulbs and the most effective insulation materials, providing our normally expected savings on energy costs.
- Building to a smaller carbon footprint can only be provided by careful design and analysis, as is done by Affordable Price Housing. Obviously the location of construction, factory or on site, has no effect on carbon footprint. |
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- Do not buy factory made panels or systems, they will cost many times that of building on site. |
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