Reality Check
Ouch, that hurt...
Had a meeting with the lads (and their burgeoning staff of architects) today. We met Suzanne and Johannes, the most recent additions to the Measured team, and they both seem like they know what they're doing. Suzanne put together another kick-ass model of the current design for our place (sorry, no photos yet - I'm having upload issues). The lads have made some great tweaks to the design and we had a good conversation about where that's going. We dragged out our list of questions from the last round of drawings and renderings and we made some suggestions about some further tweaks (e.g., softening the interface with the street make the entry more inviting). Luke showed us the latest round of natural light calculations for the suite - largely overshadowed by the main floor but Luke modelled a few potential scenarios to get as much natural light as possible in there.
Then the proverbial poop hit the fan. Earlier in the week (maybe it was last week) we agreed with Clinton that they should bring on their quantity surveyor (smart guy who can derive the construction cost for a building to a remarkable level of detail) to give us an idea of how the design fits the (small) budget. If you haven't seen numbers from a quantity surveyor before, they are generally scary. Usually higher than one wants to see and always backed up by a dizzying amount of detail. In this case the numbers were way higher than we wanted to see. I was prepared for higher (e.g., 20% above our budget) but I wasn't prepared for the 40%+ above our budget that we saw. As Count Floyd (Joe Flaherty on SCTV for you youngsters) would say - "Scary stuff keeds!" Clinton and Matthew were good about suggesting economies to try to help us dig through the rubble of the cost estimate earthquake to find our original budget but at the end of the day we have a serious problem on our hands. Am I the only guy who thinks that it shouldn't cost over $300 a square foot to build with basic finishes and a few green features? The way this budget is headed we'll have stripped out all the green and a big chunk of the living space to get to a workable dollar figure...
What's driving the cost? A bunch of things - of course - because this kind of thing is complicated. But certainly a big part of the problem is parking. As Matthew noted, the parking solution we have to use on our property (because we have no lane and can't park in the setback area) is roughly equivalent to building that many square feet of indoor space. It requires excavation, retaining walls, additional clearance height (to the overhanging main floor) to meet code, etc. There's also the fact that the design has elements on three floors. That's great for our wants/needs (i.e., separating living from sleeping spaces) but it drives lots of exterior surfaces to be sheathed/clad, more stairs wasting square footage and construction dollars, and other real cost drivers.
Perhaps I don't need to tell you that we left the office significantly deflated. We love the design, love the team, but are really queasy about the numbers. I don't know what's next but I do know that Krista and I will be spending some serious time looking at the problem this weekend. Number crunching, re-thinking needs vs wants, and a basic viability assessment are all on the menu for this rainy weekend. We've got some big decisions to make before our planned next meeting on Friday of next week. Wish us luck...