Funny. When I was looking at plans, they all had basements and were more suited for colder climates and we are building in the South. We bought stock plans from an architect in Minnesota. We are GCing ourselves but if it were me and I could afford it, I would pay for the guy with the good reputation and references. No experience with walnut floors for me but they are beautiful. Price per sq ft in our area with higher end finishes is around $120. That's for anything and everything you want without having to worry about costs. (In a normal way I mean). No 24k gold toilet seat...lol. And who needs build blogs when you have GW? No really, many people here have their own blogs also. I just can't recall any of them at the moment.

Per sq. ft. pricing is local so for any accuracy you'll need comparables from your area.

My costs as a builder in Toronto are $175++++ for custom builds, including all "soft"costs such as plans, permits etc.

Presuming you mean black walnut, it's quite soft and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're addicted to "character".

If you want something different, consider jatoba--very popular here and much more durable than the standard red oak.

This post was edited by worthy on Mon, Mar 24, 14 at 18:25

We are really hoping to be around $140 per square foot as well. That's for all brick with mid level finishes. We should have 3 bids coming in within the next couple weeks, so there's a mixture of nervousness and excitement right now...

The cost of building totally depends on where you are building. Here in California 140 would be a very basic build with no upgrades. Closer to 200 you will get mid level finishes and 300+ for high end.

In regards to choosing a GC with great reputation if the price difference is in the range of 5% I think it is worth the premium for a easier build.

We knew going in that we had to be more involved in our build as the GC has built houses for a couple of friends and we were ok with that as the pricing was more than 10% difference. But as we get closer to the finishing touches on the house we are having ti more involved than I thought. Good luck with your build.

Hi Michelle, welcome! I am in West MI- GR area. there are a few of us Michiganders building here.

I just did a quick calculation of our estimated cost/sq foot (building only, not including the land). I was a bit shocked it did come in around 140 overall. Here's the breakdown:
Just under 2400 sq ft on the first floor, 650 over the garage, and around 1900 in the lower level walkout. I know that the starting price for the first floor is 200/sq foot- and we upgraded a bunch of stuff on top of that. It's the other levels that are so much less....I think the bonus (over the garage) is around 60/sq foot, and the lower level around 40-50/sq foot. That would put our first floor at something like 240/sq foot.

Anyways, I say go with your gut feel on the GC. We felt really good about ours, they were NOT the least expensive, but they had many positive references, plus I had been through at least a half dozen of their homes on tours, parades, etc. I still feel great about them, half way through the build.

Walnut floors- yes, they are softer. What this means is they will dent easier than say oak. If you are going with a prefinished solid or engineered, the hard coating should scratch about the same as any other kind of wood. We are considering walnut right now. I have a sample board and I tested it a bit. I dropped some silverware on it, I dropped a matchbox car on it. Yes, it dings. It did not ding through the color at all though. I dropped the same things on my site finished solid oak floors. They ding too, but not as deeply. I would recommend that if you go with walnut you choose a more matte/satin finish and perhaps something that already comes with character marks. We haven't made up our mind yet on the walnut, but it is soooo pretty (and the dings don't bother me as much as scratches do, and scratching is a HUGE problem on my site finished oak floors)

Good luck! Keep us updated on your progress!

Have you looked at building with ICF?

Floors: What do you like about walnut, the grain or the color? For us it's more about the deep rich color, so we'll be doing a harder flooring but finishing with a walnut stain.

Pricing: We're doing 3300 sq with upper-mid level finishes and coming in around $147/sq. Depending on what you're doing in the basement, including that extra 1000 sq ft in your computation might be throwing off your numbers.

Floor Plans: Note on architects, if cost is the big factor. We'd been driving around our area for a long while, noting houses/features we liked. We come to find most of them were designed by the same architect. What we ended up doing was starting from one of his existing plans, then paid him an hourly rate to modify it. Make this bigger, that smaller, change the master suite, etc. I think we made out for around $5k. I'm sure that's much cheaper than starting from scratch. If there are newer homes in your area that are "almost" what you want, you could try finding out who built/designed them and going that route. I suppose the harder way would be to just contact area architects and ask to browse their library of work. Most have hundreds/thousands of designs on file.

It looks like we're going to be around $150 per square foot. But, we do have a lot of open space in two story rooms...about 650 square feet. I'm not including that when calculating the cost per square foot. If I did, the cost would come down to around $125 per square foot.