Re:
Webbmeister
I read your post with some interest as my wife and I went through somewhat the same thing with our house. From your previous posts it seems that you are a building a timber frame house. The paint bid you have gotten is about double what it should be if all they are doing is painting wallboard. If the price includes finish on all the exposed beams and staining of trim and doors it might get to 15K. When we were doing a lot of construction ,painting costs where about$0.40 per sq ft of wall, current market conditions have probably pushed that up some but I wouldn't think by very much. If you know how many sq ft of drywall or surface area there is you could calculate that yourself. As to the GC fee, if by that, you mean the contractors profit and overhead, it should be about 10-12% of the total project cost (which is what we always used to charge). I would have them break it out for you so you know. If they are adding their general conditions and labor burden into the fee that could raise it substantially but those things are more generally put into the direct costs of construction. I am sure that there are websites out there that have construction cost figures but I haven't searched for any of them. Your local library should have a copy of Walkers construction estimator which gives a range of costs for different trades and then has adjustments for different areas of the country. If you didn't hit it off with your contractor you probably should find a new one, this is too big of an investment to not have a good relationship. Are you getting your timber frame from a manufacturor or is the general doing that. The people that supply the timber frame components can more than likely steer you to a good contractor, especially one who has worked with their product.
The magazine Fine Homebuilding has several ads in it for timber frame products you might check that out. Good luck.
