Something that can be tricky to decide on when building a house is which upgrades are worth the extra money. Everyone’s answer to that question will be different because everyone places different value on different upgrades.
It’s really annoying to try and make those decisions though, if you have to go out and price every little thing to figure it out. I HATE trying to price things out ahead of time and piece them together to get an estimate. Of course, I really like it when someone else does the work for me, but unfortunately that doesn’t happen all that often.
Buuuut, I know how important it is to do. Since I hate doing it so bad, I figured there must be other people out there who would appreciate some prices to go off of when deciding on upgrades for their future home. Yeah, you’re welcome.
I wish I could give you a giant list of every upgrade imaginable. What I can do though, is a list of all the upgrades we did (or thought about doing) in our own home. Those are the ones I know the prices on, and the pro’s and con’s of making the financial sacrifice.
- Oversized doors: $1,000-$3,000 each
I am someone who really likes BIG things. Oversized is a better word because it’s not that I need everything to be huge, it’s that my personal style is just “biggie sized”. For an example, (because I know I am not explaining myself well), let’s take a wall in my living room for example. Where one person might like a collage of pictures and cute décor, I would MUCH rather put one giant item on the wall. Or another one would be my kitchen. I don’t want a BIGGER kitchen, I just want the things in it to be oversized like the fridge and the stove and the range hood.
So rather than wanting to put up a bunch of decorations and curtains and other stuff, I chose to make my windows and doors oversized. Then I put wider than average trim around them so that my entire wall is full of door or window. That’s just my personal preference, so oversized doors were something that was important to me.
We only did it for some of our exterior doors (although I love the look of a super tall interior door as well), and yes they were spendy. We have 3 exterior doors that I wanted to be 8 feet tall instead of the standard size of 6’8″. Two of them are also wider than your average door but still within the realm of “standard sizes”. What that means is that I didn’t have to pay even more for a “custom” door, I just purchased a large size door instead.
Completely custom doors (where you decide your own size and style instead of choosing from what they already have) will run you anywhere from $2,000-$10,000 MORE expensive than a standard size exterior door.
An oversized door (like what we chose) will be $1,000-$3,000 MORE expensive depending on the style usually.
2. Extra gable on the roof: $4,000- $5,000
Originally Farmer and I wanted to keep our house as simple as possible. That really is our style, oversized but simple. We light straight lines, square, and clean cut, rather than intricate detail. So when I drew up our floor plans, I made it a perfect rectangle except for the garage sticking out on a 90 degree angle. Well when we got looking at how the roof lines looked from the road, we decided we wanted to give it just a little more personality.
We started by shifting the bedrooms a few feet so there was a change in the roof line over the bedrooms. But that still didn’t fix the problem of the side of the house that everyone sees from the road just being one long rectangle. So we decided to add a large gable coming out over top of the porch. This gable was completely unnecessary and was entirely for looks. It was also very large. From one side to the other, the gable was approximately 60 feet.
By putting a gable on the roof, we added extra roof trusses, lumber, roofing supplies, siding for the front, and hours of labor. After all that, our gable cost us about $4,000-$5,000 extra.
Remember, this gable was about 2/3 the length of our house. Most gables that are added for looks (around windows or over doorways) are more like 5-30 feet.
3. Bonus room inside the roof trusses: $5,000-$6,000
We had such a huge open space inside our roof (because our house was almost a perfect rectangle) that we really wanted to find a way to use some of it. I asked a guy from a truss company how much is would cost to add a room into our trusses. He told me after increasing the pitch of the roof enough to fit the room, and redesigning some of the trusses, it would only add about $1,000.
I was pretty happy with that number. Building a room, or rooms, into the trusses is different than adding a second level. They build your floor joists and walls into the trusses for you so you have an open box inside your attic to frame in a room. For only $1,000 they gave me the bones for a room in the upstairs.
What that $1,000 does not include is the stairs to get up to it, or any of the finish work like the floor, the drywall, the paint, the lights, the heating and air, the windows, etc.
After all that is said and done, our added 400 square feet of bonus room inside the trusses will come out to about $5,000-$6,000
4. Higher pitched roof: $1,500-$2,000
The reason we changed the pitch of the roof from 5/12 to 6/12 was to fit our bonus room in there. It only changed the price of the trusses a few hundred dollars. However, it did add some expense in roofing supplies and the amount of time it took to roof the house.
The higher pitch you go, the harder it is to roof the house. If you were to go up to say an 8/12 roof pitch, your cost would jump quite a bit because you can no longer just walk on the roof without slipping down. Beyond about 7/12 they have to begin building things for them to stand on because the roof is too steep.
To go from a 5/12 pitch to a 6/12 pitch on our roof cost us about $1,500-$2,000. No extra equipment was needed, but it took longer and we had to purchase more roofing materials.
5. More energy efficient windows: $2,000-$6,000
The energy efficiency requirements in our area are quite strict. We actually HAD to up our windows U-factor to meet our building code requirements. Most areas are not quite as demanding as the ours on this particular subject. I know that, because the guy at the window company told me they almost never deal with U factors as high as ours were.
When we first had our windows quoted, our U factor was pretty standard. We didn’t ask them to change it because we didn’t know at that point that we needed to.
Once we learned we needed to raise the U-factor, the price jumped from about $11,000 to $16,000. Holy cow!
We were floored that it would cost that much, but after calling around we discovered that no one else would even take on our job because of the difficulty of our needs. The only other company that would do it was several thousand dollars more expensive.
I can’t actually tell you if it will be worth it in the long run because I will have nothing to compare it to. How do I know how much money our windows are saving us when they are the only windows we ever had in our house?
However, they were a requirement for us, so we had no choice but to upgrade. This one hurt the pocket book because we definitely didn’t budget that amount for our windows. Total upgrade cost for us- $5,000
It’s hard to say how much it would be for someone else because it depends on how many windows you have, their sizes, and how much higher you need the U-factor.
Okay, since I am not even a quarter of the way through the upgrades we did in our own house, I have decided to break it up into a few different posts.
Let’s call this “part 1”, and you can see “part 2” RIGHT HERE.
Anyone else out there have an upgrade and it’s cost that they would like to share with us? Leave a comment below!
~Farmer’s Wife
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Kim says
I love these posts – I think it’s really easy to try to find the “best possible price,” but sometimes that means you end up with crap. We chose several upgrades – including windows, doors and heating/cooling. I will never regret those changes. We figured that spending money on upgrades that really can’t be changed down the line (or would be REALLY expensive to change) were worth it. And the geothermal/in-floor heat upgrades have been worth their weight in gold. Between tax rebates and heating/cooling savings, we’ll recoup the cost difference quickly.
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
Thanks Kim! I totally agree! The most important ones to consider are the ones that are hard to be changed later on.
Dennis Meyer says
Not many people know that with today’s building science, you can build a home to near zero energy by using passive house science. It is prescriptive- a passive house consultant or architect can help with that. It will add more costs because not many people know how to do it, but worth it’s money in comfort, healthy indoor air and wall resilience. A good site to help you find local help would be PHIUS (Passive House Institute of U.S.) or PHAUS (Passive House Alliance-US). Once you visit a passive house, you will WANT to build one. I don’t like natural gas…fracking, water contamination from fracking etc. Less equipment=less maintenance. Windows and doors are more expensive- but perhaps money can be saved on finishes etc.
Thanks for the website and sharing of knowledge and experiences.
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
Thanks for the comment Dennis. It’s always good to hear new ideas and new information. The more the better!
Lee says
Just a note to say U-factor and R-value are reciprocals, so you needed a lower U-factor making the windows more energy efficient. Or a greater R-value. We’re planning to build starting this summer, enjoying all your information.
Lee
farmerswife@therealfarmhouse.com says
Thanks Lee,
Best of luck!