From the category archives:

budget

Budget Reduction – Results from Builder & Architect Meeting

August 7, 2008

This Monday, Brian and May from ISA met with Scott from Build It Green Philly to brainstorm final cost reductions that could be made prior to finalizing the construction drawings. The team came up with some good recommendations for cost cutting that get us another big jump towards our goal. Some of the cuts are [...]

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Budget Reduction – Goodbye Custom Casework. Hello IKEA.

July 31, 2008

I guess it should come as no surprise that we are turning to IKEA for budget reductions in the kitchen and possibly bath as well. Maybe I was crazy thinking we could fit a custom, “Urban Kitchen” into the 100K budget or maybe I just wanted another project since I’m not busy enough already. The [...]

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Budget Reduction – Revised Kitchen and Appliances

July 29, 2008

This first reduction is not a big one and is mainly influenced by feedback from our last post on appliances for the 100K House. After reviewing the choices made in that post, I realized that I really didn’t want a bunch of mis-matched appliances from a variety of vendors. Instead I went back and quoted [...]

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Edited 100K Budget with Federal Tax Credits

July 29, 2008

Somehow I forgot to include the Federal Tax Credits in yesterday’s post we will get for the Solar Thermal and Energy Efficient status of the home. $2,000 for each which brings our total down to $111K and change. The spreadsheet is also updated.

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100K Budget Update – Time to Make Final Cuts [edited]

July 28, 2008

With construction only weeks away it is time to review the construction budget and make our final cuts to try and reach our $100,000 target. Our last major post on the budget was all the way back in February. Scott at Build It Green Philly (aka Level 5 Construction) sent over the most up to [...]

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The Three Elements of Construction Cost

April 19, 2008

Over the course of this project I have found that there are three elements to true construction costs:

The cost of the material being used.
The quantity of the material being used.
The difficulty or labor involved to build an item.

I have often heard that labor makes up 60%-70% of the cost of any constructed item from cabinets [...]

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Federal Tax Credits Available

March 21, 2008

We all know there are not many federal government incentives for green building right now. Many states have picked up the ball and implemented some decent local incentives of their own. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is not one of those states at the moment. They are working on state legislation to improve this, but for now we [...]

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Budget Priorities for an Energy Efficient Home

February 25, 2008

I arrived at the topic of this post in a round about way today. It started with a search for the best refrigerator for our project on the energy star website. While we obviously need an energy star model, the range of energy usage ranges from roughly 400 – 700 kWH / year on [...]

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Budget Spreadsheet

February 7, 2008

Quick post to release the first budget spreadsheet for the 100K House. This will be a work in progress over the next few weeks as we make our final design tweaks.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p4D0y9XxZM0uDf8vWkh2Vaw&hl=en
I will also add this to our documents page in the next few days.

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100K House Budget Review – Our Biggest Meeting to Date

February 7, 2008

Yesterday afternoon we had our much anticipated budget review with the entire team for the 100K House. Scott from Level 5 Construction had taken the past two weeks to come up with a comprehensive estimate based on the most recent design of both homes in the project.
I knew we were exceeding our $100K budget with [...]

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