What does the $40K price include? Will it include primer or will the siding already have a factory applied primer?

It is a factory primed Hardie, but good question, I don't know if the bid factored that in.

I also conjecture that replacing Hardie shingles with Hardie planks might reduce the painting cost but have no idea of the magnitude of the difference in labor cost of painting shingles vs painting planks. As painting will be a recurring maintenance cost, I think shingles vs planks is an important decision.

Now that we are moving away from Greene and Greene, we have more choices. We can use Hardie trims also around the windows, and maybe the weather proof soft fit as well.

In the thread below, the colorplus Hardie is not recommended because it gets scratched up during installation that we'll need to repaint it anyway. So I guess we'll just get the factory primed one - is that ok if scratched up or will we need to redo the primer?

https://www.nachi.org/forum/f16/does-hardiplank-require-caulk-joints-60984/

I have yet to understand the advantage of fiber-cement shingles over real shingles in the long run.

IMO if you need to do anything to your siding in the first 15 years, you might have bought the wrong siding.

I guess if you plan to sell the house in 5 years, fiber-cement makes sense but I just put factory stained white cedar shingles on a large house renovated by a developer and he said he expected it to raise the sale price of the house more than the additional cost. The soft texture and wrapped corners make it obvious its the real thing viewed from the street so I suspect his assumption is correct.

And if the local authorities won't allow the factory finish on the fiber-cement singles, that should tell you something about what others think of the appearance of the material.

Our house that we recently sold had pre-painted fiber cement.

It was faded so badly that it had to be painted in about ten years, despite a thirty year warranty on the finish. I don't see how repainting could be so high. I think we paid 7k and the paint was provided.

i would not use pre-painted fiber cement again.

we are tentatively planning on using a product called "Shakertown".

JDS in some areas such as SW FL fiber cement is a better choice than shingles. Can we say termites? I'm wondering if in certain areas of CA which have a constant threat of fires, if the same may hold true

Skakertown is a company that sells real red cedar shingles factory bonded to a shiplapped plywood panel so there is less shingle overlap and the installation is faster. Its essentially cedar shingles that install like lap siding. They provide factory made corner pieces.

CP, I would be more concerned about framing a house in wood in such locations.

JDS I agree with you 100%

Our constant threat is earthquake, we keep talking about making infrastructure strong enough to withstand the big one. There's a milder concern about flooding, esp given the recent rain.

Coastal California is in one the most restrictive seismic zones in the U.S. Lighter-weight wood framing, with properly engineered foundation tie downs, shear walls and roof diaphrams, all connected together, which will take the lateral and vertical movements of seismic events down into the foundations, is much preferable to the heavier concrete and concrete block construction commonly used in high wind zones. The additional weight of the concrete materials simply makes the construction that much more difficult to resist both compression and tensile forces common in seismic events. The lighter weight and greater ductility of wood frame construction is much more suited to seismic zones.

As for exterior finish materials, could you use Shakertown shingle panels and simply allow them to weather to a natural finish? No painting, no maintainence. I designed my own home using these in Stillwater, OK many years back, and they have weathered to a natural gray. You can have your builder trim the corners of the panels so that they overlap and no corner boards are needed.

Thank you for the suggestions for natural cedar! We started considering composite shingles when we saw some homes with natural wood shingles in our area seemed to have problem with rotting on the shingles. But I don't know if the wood species is cedar. The property we are living in right now has Hardie planks and they don't look that great even brand new, I think up close they don't look like wood, a bit too bulky. But they have an artisan line for the planks that look great in pictures though I haven't checked in person. I guess I need to consult an installer who specializes in Hardie and get a quote on various choices, as well as researching natural cedar. Virgil, how old is your Shakertown panels?

Is there a reason why you would not want to use the corner pieces in the Shakertown JDS and Virgil?

thanks.

Corner boards are an aesthetic, which means they appeal to some and not to others.

Using corner boards introduces a vertical component to the overall visual image of the exterior of the house. For those of us who prefer a unified and continuous exterior of cedar shingles, the vertical boards at inside and outside corners is an unnecessary and visually interrupting intrusion.

Siding contractors may like the corner boards because it makes their work of applying shingles easier.

At the end of the day, it's all about what one prefers: 1) A continuous exterior envelope of shingles which enclose and shape the exterior of the house, or: 2) A series of various applications of shingles interrupted by vertical corner boards which stop the flow of the exterior siding and cut the siding up into small segements here and there.

Youse pick your aesthetics and youse takes your chances. Consult your architect if in doubt! ;-)

When you say "corner pieces" its not clear if you mean corner boards or pre made corner shingles.

For me, shingles are more attractive than lap siding not only because of the subtle texture and colors of stain but the sense that the shingles are like a cloak that wraps the house. They can transform a house into something pretty special.

Thanks JDS, we do love the look of shingles too, but with the cost of labor where we live, and the quotes we get, we decided to replace it with planks, and the basement might have to be bare stucco. It is an infeasible project right now, so either we cut down significantly and do what our neighbors do to build, or we need to cancel the project.. We took neighborhood walks this weekend, and 99% new build here are using plank sidings or bare stucco. We will have to alter the exterior significantly at this point to make the project happen, even going to modern craftsman outline if needed, otherwise we have to scrap the whole plan because we won't pay for those trims and gables and masonry and the whole nine yards..

Have you priced 5" and 7" factory stained Shakertown shingles? Have you priced fiber-cement plank siding? Have you considered not having any trim? Has your architect made cost reduction suggestions? The cost of siding and trim should not be a major driver of a project design.

In a high labor cost market, your architect must know effective ways to reduce labor and I doubt installing individual fiber-cement planks is one of them. Not to be cynical but the last place I would look for ideas is your neighbors. Sometimes it seems like there's an unspoken tradition of repeating mistakes in the home construction business.

Here is a siding calculator.

Skakertown shingles:

We haven't priced Shakertown shingles. But the breakdown is quite telling. The cost of Hardie shingles is just >$20K for our project. Installation cost is ~$45K, and painting cost is ~$45K. The painting cost is recurring, and for shingles it is at least 35% more than planks, can be more. So that is around $15K saving every time we have to do maintenance. Moving from shingles to planks will save us ~$50K in project cost, then $15k per maintenance. We also have to do drastic reduction in trims, remove all exterior cosmetic beams, reduce the corners, remove all the curves. We have a lot of gables, even the standalone garage has two gables, but unfortunately my husband thinks we cannot remove the gables without triggering structural review; so we need to cut elsewhere. Visiting our neighbor's properties have been actually a great learning experience, given how big our budget mismatch is. Our friend is building a mansion just 15 minutes from us, about the same size and with basement, on a hilly ground, healthy materials that we want, and they are almost done, and per sqft it costs about half of our quote. It's been eye opening. We have problem more than just the siding unfortunately, it is all over the place and of immense magnitude. We are looking at everything in the exterior now, because that is more time pressing for permitting. Right now, the approach we need to do is to start with a modern craftsman outline (and throw out all the corners, curves, details and trims) then add sparingly with cost in mind to get *a bit* more traditional look. And no G&G, we want the reasonable craftsman that everyone has. I don't think we can use the current design and modify given an approximately 100% budget overrun. We are trying to trim 1-1.5M from the estimates, especially as our bids don't include certain things (major part of basement finishing, landscaping, owner provided appliances, fixtures etc). We will revise the bids after we get the new design, and see if we can save the project or if we should just buy a house that is ready for us to move in.

Any photo example of a good looking house, especially craftsman, with no trims? I have no idea what to look for and what windows with no trim look like. Thank you!

I have zero to add to this conversation - other than to say I keep twisting your username to be ca-bewbie instead of cawebbie.

That is all.

I dunno...but cutting $1-$1.5MM from estimates seems rather a huge task to me. Cutting $1-$1.5MM out of how much? If it's 20%, you have a chance. If it's 100%, there's simply no way. Is there any point in asking how the budget got so out of control?

Cutting it out of $4-$5M estimate, which is the more realistic estimate we have. We visited a construction site yesterday, a job of the same scale that is almost completed, and their estimate was half of ours (~$2.5M for a job of similar scale and approx 1000 more sqft of finished space, material and finishes that we want). It did go up but was no where close to our estimate. I think we have at least $1M in trims plus other stuff we don't value, I think we can drag the estimate down to a realistic $2.5M, because once we execute, it will go up when we get the surprises. The inside and outside of the house looks like the wood work in the forbidden city if I view it in 3D using skechup. I was not involved in planning for so long, and in 2D it is not that apparent. I am pretty sure we can cut a lot from there, but we need to tame the outside first. We are not going to do it at $4-$5M, we will just sell the lot if the highest estimate is over 3M. I think one builder who estimated it at $3M won't be able to execute it at 3M, the upside potential is too big. I want our highest bid to be at 2.5-3M (it's an ok at 2.5, a maybe at 3M to build). A builder told us many builders will be scared to bid on the house, there are too many small details that can go wrong; we need to remove those.

I checked my neighbor's elevation document. Ours is way too crazy. :(

Do you have an architect advising you?

Yes we do, our designer who designed our elevations. But right now we are advising him on what we want. We were inexperienced, had no idea how to budget or what would be a reasonable budget and what people in the area spend. We know what we wanted, but this was not what we want, nor our style actually, but we drifted into it. We came back to our old docs of wishes and wants and our picture albums of what we liked, and we are reminded of what we want, which is a fresh painted house. It is a lot simpler than this. There can't be a bigger mismatch. We have two friends currently building large high end homes, one of them almost done, so we have very realistic reality check on what a reasonable cost of a high end house is with this kind of economy of scale. It is good we found it before we started digging, so we can still choose to walk out of the project if we cannot fix it.

For a house this expensive you should hire a contractor to act as a consultant to advise you of costs during the design phase. And you should have an experienced architect to guide you through the process.

To solve your problem of shiny fake shingles you should get a real price for the Shakertown shingles before using fiber-cement planks that are ridiculously expensive. I keep seeing references to the lower maintenance cost of fiber-cement but in my experience the reverse is true.

Here's an installation video for Shakertown.

JDS, I keep thinking about your advice about real shingles and no trims. I will do more research on this. Those pictures are beautiful. I don't want to pay for both the shingles and the trims, but might be willing to go with no trims. Also, looking at the pics, we like much quieter facades even if cost is not an issue, which is a big if.

We had a retired contractor we hired for advice, but he fell out of the loop, and I am unsure if he ever looked at our elevations; our mistake.

Very busy right now but wanted to add a thank you for sharing your knowledge.

I still haven't heard if I can share my elevation here, but this house' front elevation looks a lot like ours, if all the trims and masonry work are stripped, viewed from a mirror. Holding everything constant, our bumpout is where the chimney is, and the chimney is where the bumpout is. The bottom of the vertically massed face has two windows, the top has three windows. A detached two car garage in the back. Our side elevation however is more complicated.

Will this front facade look good with cedar shingles and no trims? Also wondering if I can stucco the basement sides.. Thank you!

Would really love this interior. It has a lot of the same features that we have. Open staircase, stacked windows above large glass wall doors, the triangular beam. Except that ours currently has curve everywhere and is stained everywhere, and have a lot more detailed curvy trims and complicated beam joins. I'd like to clean it up, but would like the exterior facade to lead into this kind of interior.

https://www.houzz.com/photos/new-bungalow-at-the-lake-craftsman-family-room-columbus-phvw-vp~13850703

JDS, thank YOU so much on the suggestion to use Shakertown shingles without any trims. I just checked a local example and saw one craftsman home that did just that. Funnily it is my coworker's house, and I visited it (and adored it) once when it was brand new, the architect was the friend of my friend, and so on. But it just never occurred to me to copy this solution, I didn't realize the house had almost no trims, because it looks beautiful. It has extremely minimal trims, just like very thin white planks around the windows and doors, and very minimum beams (what looks like beams are just planks facing with their widths facing the street). But the cedar siding makes it look gorgeous.

I guess I need to ask a contractor to help me price it? I don't know how to use the shingles calculator, esp when I need to factor in labor. The materials was not the major driver of expense (only $20K out of 67K quote for siding).

Post some photos of your friend's house.

Please find more pics below, thank you! Some notes:

1) they mix some painted windows (red) and stain grade windows. So far the windows we priced are all stain grade douglas fir (Loewen), and we don't mind keeping them. Isn't it a pity to paint them?

2) I don't mind a mix of stained and painted interior. I like both airy beach houses (white) and also rustic airy houses (with knotted wood, which I just learned is about 1/6 the price of stain grade wood, for doug fir for instance). I also like some mix of white and stained. Now I am thinking maybe I can mix some white and knotted wood, but need to see real examples of those. We want relaxed look inside (3 rambunctious kids and plan to have 2-3 rambunctious big dogs who will live inside).

3) This friend's house is on the rustic side outside. All their beam works are flat planks of knotted wood, in some cases two flat planks sandwiching the vertical posts. Inside it is a lot of stained interior, stain grade wood, but all with simple lines. If I recall correctly, shaker cabinets everywhere and that kind of style throughout.

4) I can use advice on driveway material. We use concrete up till our front gate, and then a short stone pavement. The short pavement in the material specified by our designer is almost $55K, and the other bid (unspecified material) is $19K. I know our neighbors don't spend 55K on a short driveway, and since labor will be about the same, it seems we have $35K diff caused by material choices, and that cost will expand if we use it also for landscaping. Also including a picture of a driveway material that looks ok, but don't know what it is, and I am flexible about the look as well, just need a more reasonable solution.. Also can use suggestion on the material for our front porch flooring (also natural material), I think right now we have designer rocks, but have no bids for that one, I am scared of it. I think all of the materials of our exterior needs to be revisited.

I just called Shakertown and left a message, asking them to introduce me to a dealer who can price our project.

The house in the photos has window trim even under the sills where it isn't necessary. None of these houses seems nearly as expensive as you have suggested. I'm having trouble understanding what is restricting you from a design you like.

None of those examples are even close to 5M houses, so I'm having a really hard time seeing where some of this costing is coming from. Unless you are factoring in a 4.3M lot into that figure.

did you work with an architect or a "designer"?

I would not consider the yellow house you posted a craftsman house. It looks more like a farmhouse

Sophie in certain parts of CA a shack sells for 1 million

But it shouldn't cost that much to build it.

There seems to be something odd about the prices in this thread. Perhaps, if the OP will post floor plans and elevations, we can better sense and respond to the situation.

I will hand draw the rough floor plans and elevations so that I will not violate the contract. It will take a while and might not be to the exact true scale of it, but hopefully is close enough. I love the floor plan, it was made with a lot of our feedbacks, but hate the curves put in the master bathroom - seems pointless and expensive. I deeply dislike the exterior and interior detailing (not just cost matter, I feel it was pushed on us against our interests), and I also am feeling very unsure about our roof line and gables (can it be simpler or fewer? does it matter to reduce cost?). I am annoyed that we have to spend almost 30K on a fake chimney. We don't want to trigger structural review if possible (6 months delay + 20K structural eng fees), but given how bad I feel about it, we are discussing that maybe it is not too bad if we delay the project for a year while trying to fix the design issues and looking at the housing market for alternatives. And who knows, if we are ok with triggering structural review, the additional saving could be substantial that we care less about the 20K structural redesigning fees. We started the design process years ago when we were of more limited means.

Ours is a building designer, not an architect.

cpartist, I do think the yellow house look like a farm house. Our started out as a Tudor, and we keep most of it when the city wanted craftsman instead. I think it only look like a forced G&G, and the only thing that might fool some people into thinking it's G&G is the brick/rock work and excessive detailing. But then again, reasonable G&G homes I look at have much quieter exterior. The house on the left of our lot is "supposedly" a craftsman, but doesn't look like it at all. I think the city wants the craftsman "flavor". We are not purist, I don't mind some modifications to craftsman, but don't want a loud expensive exterior and interior.

Thanks to the veteran architects in this thread, I am learning a lot from you.

Sophie, we currently live in a 1.5M cottage. But JDS is right, it should not cost nearly as much as our quote to build it. Our first reality check is our friend's mansion currently built at half the ceiling of our quote. She spends money on NO artisan or hand made doors/glass/lights and NO dripping detailing, she splurged on 2-3 chandeliers, but you can't tell. Also all her windows and doors are standard sizes and squared, no spend on artisan stuff there. It is not a mc-mansion, the house has character and detailing but not excessive, they have made smart decisions which drove the cost down.

I browsed the real estate listings for pics of 5-10M homes, and they have no dripping details inside and outside. Tons of painted front doors.

That means we have serious issues with the decisions reflected in our drawings and should revisit everything. We are hoping that most of the efficiencies is not in the decisions that affected structural, and that we can shave ~1.5M by revisiting those cosmetic stuff. It'll still be 1M over what our friend spends for more sqft, but we can live with it. Right now we have 2M upside potential above a 3M estimate. I want a 2.5-3M BID, not estimate with that much risk.

cawsebbie, send me a message. You must turn on messaging in your profile on your home page.

I just did, JDS.

Actually the city wants either craftsman or California bungalow. I don't know if those come in stucco. I think I might want part of the house in stucco, cheaper when we have to repaint and cheaper to install. I also want the basement in stucco, right now we put siding on everything,

sounds like you need to ditch the so called designer and find a real architect who will actually listen to you.

We are worried about starting from scratch, we have little energy for that, but I can't judge how much work is needed for that, maybe it is not as bad as I thought it would be.. I think there's improvement in the listening, but it is a bit late in the game now. I will see what the city says, and also we do some work in the meanwhile. Like with the wise folks here.

I think it is beyond listening problem. It is also either blatant ignorance of costs and favoring expensive stuff and expensive design, and not using best practices (conventional design can be good), or lack of understanding of how certain design translate to costs. Both are not good. We probably share the blame for our own lack of knowledge, but had hoped our designer would have steered us into wiser cost decisions. It has not been reflected in the estimates. I am feeling very concerned that the risk to the estimate is in the order of 2M.

So what happened? The numbers don't make sense to me.