Cost To Build A Pole Barn House EP 21

Hey guys, this is Paul from Smart Easy DIY. This is episode 21, cost breakdown for the pole barn house. I've had a lot of requests for this video, so I'm going to try to cover all the questions that I've had. Make sure to watch this video all the way through to the end because I'm going to go through all the different categories of what things cost and then a cost breakdown per square foot. I'll also talk about some things that you could do differently to save some money and break that down by price per square foot, and also about cost about the shell itself just to get it up and enclosed, so stick around until the end of the video so you don't miss anything. So this price has to do with just building the pole barn house. I'm not including anything for site prep, electrical hookup, drilling the well, or the septic since that can vary a lot based on the distance of your utility hookups, the depth of your well, and your septic situation. So let's start at the start where all good things start. So first of all, the building is 36 by 64, which is 2,304 square feet with 10 foot sidewalls. I did not buy this as a kit. Most of the kits that I saw were not the greatest quality, so I shopped around quite a bit. I bought the laminated posts and the trusses from a local place that builds trusses. For all the lumber, I went with a little better quality, select structure grade, and I got that from a local lumber yard that has the best price. The steel roofing I got from a local place that makes their own. All this type of stuff, I found it's better to go with a local place than a big box store for price and quality. I rented a skid steer with an auger bit to drill the holes for the posts. I hit so much rock drilling the holes that I ended up having to rent an excavator with a jackhammer to break all the rocks up, because it wasn't just rocks, it was like a layer of rocks. So, pretty crazy. I also ended up renting an extended boom forklift to set the trusses. The rental for the equipment was $1,671. So for the post package, the trusses, the roof purlins, ceiling joists, steel roofing and the soffit, it cost $12,086. I hired two young guys to help me for two days to set the trusses and to put the steel roof on, which was $750. Don't worry, I fed them really well. Anyways, really quick, you guys should come hang out with me on Instagram, at SmartEasyDIY. You can follow along on there to see what I'm up to on a daily basis. You could also subscribe to my channel if you're not already. The concrete floor, I decided to have someone else pour it, since it was just too big of a project for me to handle. The cost for the concrete floor was $7,410. That included the concrete and the labor for pouring it and finishing it. I recommend checking around and getting some good reference when you're doing your floor, because you want them to do a really nice job. These guys I was really happy with did a nice flat job, so it made everything with laying the floor and everything really easy. To frame up all the interior walls, that was included in the cost of the lumber, so the whole lumber package, which includes interior walls and exterior walls, was $1,757. For the siding, we decided to go with a steel board and batten, since we liked that look. We found one that we liked made by Quality Edge. It's called True Cedar, if you're wondering about that. It ended up being quite a bit more than just going with regular steel, but we like how it turned out. So, the price for all the house wrap and the siding was $8,678. For the windows and doors, which includes the exterior and the interior doors, was $7,605. So the plumbing, which includes under the concrete slab and everywhere throughout the whole house, and the tub and showers, was $2,034. So the electrical, which includes from the meter box into the house to the panel box, and then wiring everything in the whole house, including stuff once the drywall was finished, like the electrical outlets and the covers, and the LEDs for all the million can lights that I did, was $1,956. I really like the lights that I found for in here. They're 3,000 Kelvin color temperature, and they look really good in here. I'll link to those for you down below the video description if you want to read more about them. For the radiant heat, which includes the PEX tubing for in the slab, and the manifold that I bought pre-assembled, and for the electric on-demand heater, the cost was $3,969. Also I thought about, if you guys have any questions about how I got to this process in the pole barn house, you can go back and watch the pole barn house video series, because that might answer a lot of the questions that you have. I did a whole playlist for that. So I did the HRV, heat recovery ventilator system, which pulls in fresh air from the outside, recycles it through the house, and then returns the stale air from inside back to the outside. So the system that I chose, and all the ductwork I had to run in the ceiling, and the vents to finish it later, the complete cost for this system was $1,082. Any of these things that I think might interest you, and that you might want to do more research on, like the HRV system, I'll include a link in the video description down below the video so you can check those out there as well. Depending on your climate, if you're in the south, where it's warmer, you'll want to research ERV, energy recovery ventilator. For the insulation, I did a compromise of 2 inches of spray foam on the exterior walls to seal it off for a vapor barrier, and then I finished it off with 3.5 inches of fiberglass for a total of R27. I did blow-in fiberglass in the ceiling for a total of R60, up in the attic, and in the walls, separating the bedrooms and the bathrooms. I did Roxul Soundproofing Insulation, that's spelled R-O-X-U-L. It helps a lot with sound transfer. The best place that I found that is Lowe's. Some of the stuff at Home Depot I didn't like as well, it's a different brand, but for this type of stuff, I found that big box stores like Home Depot tend to have better prices. Like the lumber and stuff, I got that at a local place, but this type of stuff, it seems like Lowe's and Home Depot have a lot better prices on them. So the price for all the insulation and soundproofing was $5,933. The drywall was one of our biggest expenses, but it was a lot of drywall. The drywall itself isn't too bad, and getting someone to hang it wasn't too bad. There was a guy that hung it for 25 cents a square foot for me. I had to be out of town for work right then, so I decided to just let him do it so I wouldn't be too far behind schedule. The main expense though was when it was mudded and finished. That was around 55 cents a square foot. We ended up doing a light texture on our walls called Skip Trowel, and we really like how it turned out. But the complete cost for all the drywall material, hanging it and finishing it, was $11,420. For the paint, I was able to borrow a sprayer from work so I didn't have to rent it. I ended up priming it myself, and I painted it myself with my wife helping me. They had a really good sale going on, and some good Sherwin-Williams paint at Lowe's at the time, so we got all the primer and paint at Lowe's, and we're really happy how it turned out. This also includes the paint for the trim work, because we painted that. So the price for all the primer and paint was $1,735. For the flooring, we decided to go with a heavy-duty laminate. We wanted something low-profile, because we have radiant heat, and it works well with that. We did the whole house with this type of flooring, except for the mechanical room and the bathrooms. The bathrooms, we did a vinyl plank floor that you can glue down with adhesive. So the flooring came out to $5,821. For all the trim and the whole house, we decided to keep it simple and just go with a number two pine, which was pretty good quality for number two. We just sanded it and primed it and painted it white. We got it from a local mill, so it's a lot better quality than what you would get at most lumberyards, I think, for number two. But this was for all the casing and the trim for the windows, trim for around the doors, and all the baseboard. So the cost for all the trim was $941. The cabinets, we shopped around quite a bit and decided to go with Kemper brand. It's all plywood construction and very well made. It was sold through a local company here, close to us, but other places for the size of this kitchen wanted at least twice the price for cabinets that weren't as good a quality. We decided to go with a laminate countertop to save a little bit of money. So the total for the cabinets and countertop was $11,190. So if we total up all the categories, it comes out to $86,901, which is $37.71 per square foot. That does not include appliances because it varies quite a bit depending which appliances you want. So I did not include appliances in that price. Everything else is included. All right, now I wanted to talk to you guys about some ways that you could save some money and do things quite a bit cheaper than what I did, if you want to. One would be the concrete floor. I figured out that if you could do it yourself, you could save $3,000 on the total. Like if I'm figuring the size of my building. Also if you did all fiberglass insulation, R21 in the walls and no spray foam, that would save $1,750. The next thing is drywall. If you can hang it yourself and finish it yourself, you'll save so much money. If I figure the price of drywall and roughly $1,500 for materials for mud and corner bead, you'd probably save about $5,809 by doing it yourself. You could also save a little bit by not framing up the exterior walls like I did, like a regular stud wall. You could just run the studs horizontally, two foot on center. I decided to run it like normal, 16 inches on center vertically, just to make it a little sturdier. And it was about $325 difference to do it that way, but you could save that $325 by not doing it that way. You could also save quite a bit of money on siding if you just did regular painted steel on the exterior instead of a special siding like we did. If you did that, you would save $5,178. The other way that you could save some money is to not do any flooring at all. Like you could just clean the concrete and just stain it or paint it. So if I still figured $1,500 for the stain and the cleaning supplies, that would save you $4,321 if you did not do flooring. The other thing is you could go with a smaller kitchen cabinet set and maybe for a guest, you could knock off $3,000 if you went with a smaller set. Depends on your needs, but that's just an idea. Another way you could think about saving money is to go with a smaller size building. All the examples here, like I said, are based on my size building. But if you can get away with it, you could go with a smaller building. Then accordingly, it would cost less. All that savings, if I added all that up, would be $23,384, which would bring the price per square foot down to $27.56. So if you deducted all that stuff, that would bring the total price of the building down to $63,517. So that's really pretty good if you would cut some of those costs like that. So that's just some ideas of certain things that you could do. But there are certain things that we wanted a little bit nicer that we wanted to spend the extra money on. And there might be some things that you don't want to compromise on, but there's some ideas. Okay, so the next thing is I've gotten a lot of questions about how much it costs just to frame up the building to get it enclosed with the roofing and the siding and the concrete floor. So I'm going to break that down next. Now this would include in the cheapest example that you would just use regular steel siding and yet you would pour the concrete floor yourself. If I figured everything that I had in materials to get it framed up, which includes the whole roof system, the ceiling joists, insulating under the slab, running the PEX tubing for radiant heat, pouring the concrete floor yourself, renting the equipment, paying two guys to help with the trusses and the roof, studying the exterior walls between posts, soffit, the fascia, siding, windows and doors. For my size building, 36 by 64, 10 foot walls, I would have been able to get the whole shell done with the concrete floor for $28,425. Now I've gotten a lot of questions about the radiant heat too. I think natural gas boiler to heat the hot water for the floor would be the cheapest if you have that option, but I don't have that option. My driveway is very steep in the winter, so I didn't want to depend on propane deliveries either. So electric was my only option unless I went with like an outside wood boiler to heat my radiant, which I could do in the future. But the main thing I can say for radiant is that it is an awesome heat, very even, very pleasant heat. My wife has dust allergies, so it was a lot better choice than forced air in our situation. I've gotten questions about the radiant system and how it performs. It actually does really well and with the added insulation in the walls, it works really well especially. I think the worst electric bill that we got last winter when it was below zero for six weeks straight was $235, which includes everything in the whole house too. That doesn't include just the heat, but that's like the whole electric bill. I didn't include anything for air conditioning since we rarely use air conditioning. My only thought was sometimes it gets smoky from wildfires in the summer here, then it would be nice to put in a mini split system for the main living area for air conditioning since we don't want to open the windows when it's smoky out. So that might be something that I add down the road. As far as time goes, I have about 10 months into building the building. When I started, I worked almost every night and weekend for 10 months straight. I don't know how many hours I have in it, but I would guess probably somewhere around 2,000 to 2,500 working by myself. The one thing that was cool is once we got our septic and well working up here, we bought a camper and parked it right up here beside the house. We lived in here with our two boys. It was a little tight, but we did what we had to to save money on rent and that way I could be right here at home in case my family needed me while I was working. It also saved me from having time to commute to work on the building every night and when I was done, I could just walk to the camper and go to bed. So that could be something that you consider doing too if you want to save some money and you know, it's just an idea. The worst part about doing that is I had to winterize the water lines and the pressure tank from the well to keep it from freezing. So we had water to use in the camper during the whole building process, but it was worth it in the end to do it that way. So the cool thing about pole barns is you can do a lot of different varieties. As you can see, I pretty much did just a square box and I'm planning to do some kind of simple porch on each side eventually once I decide what I want to do, but I didn't do that for now with all the snowfall we get with the snow coming off the roof, I got to figure out how to deal with it in the winter and I haven't decided quite yet how I want to design my porch. So that's why I didn't do those. So that's not included in the price either. So we didn't do a garage either. We'll probably do one separately down the road. Probably ideally if we had enough level area on our site, it would have been nice about maybe doing a two story living quarters on one end and a single story garage on the other end. But our land is all hillside. So we had to work hard to level off as much as we did. Having everything on a single story is pretty nice too. All right. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I really appreciate all the positive feedback in the previous walkthrough video. I've had fun doing this series. Let me know if you have any comments or questions or feedback for me and I'll try to respond to them as much as I can in the comment section below the video and I'll catch you guys in the next video. Thanks for watching guys.