Rozett,
Five years ago I looked into buying a modular home. Something like 1800-2000 square feet in a ranch. The advertized prices from a half dozen builders was from about $55/sf to maybe $65/sf. When we where done "designing" what we wanted it was $77/sf. A house across from our lot was stick built. It is a two story, lofts, vinyl siding, some hardwoods, two car garage, for $77/sf. We ain't building modular. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
Both of these houses did not have high quality materials for the siding or roofing. Standard 2x4 construction. The stick built house has very few windows for its size and many of them are small.
The house we are building has 10 foot ceilings, 2x6 walls, brick, ridgid insulation under the slab and on the walls, lifetime warrenty on the roof shingles, a small fortune in windows and exterior doors, interior door are 8' x 3', and a decent kitchen with granite countertops, and about 450 sq ft of porches. Its not a large house but we built it to last and have good quality materials.
I think we will be in for at a bit over $100 per square foot. That is the house cost including site clearing, foundation, well and septic.
In my area brick siding can be a rip off. I think the sales people in the new subdivisions are ex used car dealers. I have heard builders are getting as much as 20,000 - 30,000 dollars to put up brick veneer on ONE side of the house. You see this in most of the deveopments. 400,000 dollar homes with only the front of the house in brick. I forget exactly what we paid for just the brick but it was cheap. Even the builder was suprised at the cost. I think we figured the cost of the brick installed was $6-7 /sf on the wall. Not per sf in the house. A multistory will cost more due to the extra labor. What is funny is that we have a large number of brick factories around here. The cost is pure profit to the builders.
We have a slab foundation. My understanding from talking with our builder is that inusrance would recover the rebuilding from the slab up if the place burned down.
We will have to get insurance this month.
Hope this helps.
Dan