Working with home builders in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, or North Liberty, Iowa can be an enriching experience if you take the time to understand what benefits these professionals provide. For example, they can build high-quality homes more effectively and help you settle down in an attractive living environment. However, these builders can also save you money on the building process in a variety of ways.
If you’re on the fence about whether house builders are right for your needs, please take a look at the advantages outlined below to gauge how these professionals can save you money. Ultimately, you need to perform other techniques to ensure maximum savings, such as working with high-efficiency appliances, to ensure that your home is an inexpensive as you want.
Decreased Building Material Costs
Though it might seem that working with home builders would cost you more in building costs, that isn’t always the case. For example, if you buy a prefabricated home, you are not only paying for the labor and materials, but also a markup on the value of the home itself. This markup is designed to make the prefabricated house more profitable, and most people are happy to pay this charge because they want to move into their home sooner.
However, you won’t have to pay this charge if you build a home because you’ll be crafting it on the property that you already own. Rather than hauling a new house to your property, you’ll be building the house right where you want it to sit. As a result, your material costs will be less and you won’t have to pay the kind of annoying “service” fees that are common with many types of prefabricated homes.
Just as importantly, you are getting these benefits while building a home that meets your designs. Trying to fit yourself into a prefabricated home is possible – thousands of people do it every year – but it may be disappointing if you wanted specific design elements in your home. While you could upgrade your house later on when you’ve saved some money, building the home you desire on the first try will save time and money.
Lowered Labor Rates
Labor costs will take up a significant portion of any home that you build or have transported to your property. You might understandably think that carrying a prefabricated house would be easier than working with home builders instead. However, that isn’t always the case. The labor of transporting a home can be a lot higher than you might expect for a variety of reasons.
For example, the prefabricated home needs to be built before it is transported – and these fees are added to the purchasing price of the house, remember – and then moved to your property. Transportation fees include the cost of loading the home onto a trailer, carefully moving the new home to your property, unloading the house, and then settling it on a foundation or attaching its sides, if it is a modular home.
These professionals get paid just as much as house builders and may take a similar amount of time to get you a prefabricated home than it would take to build one. And, again, you have to settle for a home that is likely to have deficiencies that don’t meet your needs. Building a new home will not only prevent this problem but save you money on expensive upgrades.
Improved Efficiency Ratings
Older homes and some prefabricated models may come with appliances and other elements that aren’t designed for maximum efficiency. Or if they were once grand at improving the efficiency of your plumbing or heating, they have become outdated and are no longer as useful. Unfortunately, this situation is likely to happen to a lot of people who refuse to work with home builders on their projects.
Simply put, a custom home can be built specifically for efficiency and tweaked to ensure it meets this demand. For example, you can add the latest and best efficiency appliances to make your home a more comfortable place to live. While these costs may make your home a little more expensive than a prefabricated home at first, they will ultimately pay off and save you money in the future.
For example, a home with a 40 percent increase in electrical efficiency may save you hundreds of dollars every year on electrical bills. Over the lifetime of your home – around 30 years or so, let’s say – a $200 savings every year would ultimately save you $6,000 or so. This savings could go even higher if you also install high-efficiency toilets, pipes, and other plumbing elements.
Bettered Home Design
Although prefabricated homes are designed to be as efficient as possible, they often follow such a strict pattern that it can be very easy to get bored. Even worse, some of these homes may also have design elements that aren’t attractive to you or which may need to be desperately upgraded to make a home more efficient and alluring to you and your visitors.
For example, you can integrate design elements like gargoyles, spiral staircases, and other extravagances that you can’t find in a prefabricated home. And, ultimately, these steps can save you money by making your home more attractive and causing it to become a highly desired house if you decide to sell it after it is finished.
Even better, you can choose where you want to integrate these design elements and work with home builders and designers who can create a streamlined and efficient home. For example, you could add multiple staircases up to the second story to not only improve movement between the two stories but to improve home safety if a fire strikes the house.
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All of these benefits make your custom home building an excellent choice for many individuals. While prefabricated homes do have some advantages – such as providing you with a home that may fit in with your neighborhood or which requires little maintenance after initial installation – they don’t provide you with the diversity of styles that you get from a custom built home.
So if you’re looking for home builders in Iowa City, Coralville, Marion, or Solon, Iowa, please don’t hesitate to contact us today to learn more. Our professionals will sit down with you, help you better understand your many building options, and create a plan for your new house. With our help, you can get past the sometimes disappointing nature of prefabricated homes and get the abode of your dreams.
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H&H Home Builders have constructed Energy Star Compliant homes since we burst onto the building landscape in 1995 as ‘North Liberty’s Premier Builder’. Since then, Energy Star Guidelines have evolved into what we consider today as the pinnacle of efficiency and we, as builders of ‘green’ homes, have kept pace with those guidelines and have adapted them into each home that we build. H&H Home Builders will build you what is known today as a ‘green’ home, but what has always been lesser known as a ‘sustainable’ home. Sustainable homes are quality built so that they last not just decades, but are built to maintain value, encouraging pride of ownership for generations to come. An H&H ‘green’ Home uses raw materials in a responsible way, using fewer resources, resulting in the use of less energy.