If you use startbuild.com to estimate your house build cost you can transfer that information in to my Google sheet budget tracking template. This is organized in three major sets of columns:
- Budgetary estimates by category I populated from startbuild.com from a very similar online plan in my building zipcode. Startbuild.com will use your plan for about $75 if you didn’t get your plans online. I then tweaked these for things I new would be different and added things like the sidewalk I have to put in. I also added costs for appliance similar to what we intend to install and were pretty easy to get. Note this budget isn’t meant to be perfect, but the more accurate the better.
- Firm estimates based on contractor bids or materials takeoffs from suppliers.
- Actual Costs after I have paid invoices.
A the bottom I have totaled each sub category, calculated the percentage of the entire budget and then ranked each category by its percentage of the overall budget. Finally I sorted them from largest percentage to smallest percentage. This tells me that my top 4 budget categories by percentage:
- Framing Rough Shell
- Concrete work
- Ext Doors and Windows
- Siding
are about 50% of my build costs. So my plan is to get these four categories estimated as quickly as possible. That should tell me whether I will be more or less on track with my plan without having to get estimates for everything.