How Much Does it Cost to Build a Home in San Diego County?
We’re going to talk about pricing for custom projects that we are building and have built in the San Diego County area. I want to show you the pages on our website, and when I show you these houses, I’m going to give you the prices for each of the homes and what the build costs are. Then we’re going to examine the level of finish. So when I show you what the level of finish is for these houses, which range from average to custom to upscale, you will have a good understanding of what you’re getting at that price.
Custom Home Cost Examples from Freeman’s Construction
On our website, many of these homes that I’ll show you, there’s five of them, they have a video and a 3D walk through that you can look at. Each home has pictures that you can click and look through for each house to get a feel for the floor plan and what exists. So I’m going to share with you the web pages plus I’m going to show you another document at the end to recap not only just the building costs we’re talking about today but also all the costs associated with a custom building project. We’ll recap that at the very end so if you’re listening to the podcast, make sure you go over to our youtube channel where you can see the actual pages that I’m going to be clicking on and showing. I will be talking through it so you have a good understanding if you’re just listening.
Custom Home #1: Ramona Modern Farmhouse
Okay, so we are now looking at this house, it’s called the Ramona Modern Farmhouse, but first I want to show you how this relates to the Custom Home Building Cost Guide that we have. If you go to our “Custom Home Building Cost Guide“, you can get that on our website, download it, and you’re going to look at, it’s going to have five examples, number one, number two, number three, number four, number five, and these are different houses. This is number one and I want to show you how you can verify that on here. If you go down the page, each one of these has an individual floor plan.
It says custom home plan one, our custom home plan number one. That’s going to correspond with the guide so make sure that you’re looking here to reference the pricing with the floor plan. You can also get all of these plans in our custom home floor plan called “Popular Custom Home Floor Plans” download, which has 23 different floor plans, in which these are the first five in that brochure. I mention this to clarify where we’re getting these.
Home Specs for the Ramona Modern Farmhouse
The first thing we’re going to look at here on this particular house is the size. It has 2,226 square feet of living area, 578 square feet of garage space, and then 531 square feet of covered patio space. This house has an average level of finish. A couple things are a little bit above average, such as some of the tile work and maybe some cabinets, but this home is close to an average level of finish and not up to the custom grade level of finish. The price point on this house for the build cost alone is $520,851. I would recommend watching this video. I don’t want to go through this and take up your time watching through the video, but I want you to go to this page where you can click on the video and watch it. It’s a quick little tour and only takes about two minutes of your time.
What’s really helpful is our 3D custom tour feature. You can click on it to move around in the home. It starts with a little dollhouse layout of the home. You can go in and virtually walk around, spin around, look in the kitchen, go into all the bathrooms, you can check this home out and see what’s in the house to get a feel for the finishes. This gives a good idea of what you get for that home’s price point. This will take you through so you can go into the bathrooms and you can go everywhere through the house. It doesn’t have an outside tour to view the outside of the home or other parts but this gets you into the home so you can see inside.
This particular home was missing the shower enclosure and there’s still a little bit of a plumbing that had to be completed by the end of this project, so those aspects didn’t get into the pictures, but you can see the tile and other finishes are a bit above cost average. You can potentially do fiberglass in the secondary baths and tile in the master to save costs. Take a look at this and make sure you go through it because it will help you comprehend this level of home. Below the 3D tour you have all your still pictures that you can view and click through as well. If you click on one of those you can tab through it on the side and go through every picture in the gallery on the page.
Let’s do a recap of this house. This Ramona Modern Farmhouse is $521,851 for build costs, 2,226 square feet, with a 578 square foot two-car garage and it has 531 square feet of covered patio space.
Custom Home #2: Modern Farmhouse
The next home we’re gonna look at is a three bed, two bath home that has a fourth optional office/bedroom. You can see that on the floor plan right at the entryway. This one is called the Modern Farm Custom Home. This model is number two on the cost guide. Looking down here again, the number two custom plan is labeled with 2,189 square feet. It is a three bedroom, two bath home, with a 540 square foot two-car garage, and 526 square feet of covered patio. We’re going to look back here and this has a video. The price on this home is $568,952, that’s the build cost. This home is just a little bit above an average level of finish. It’s not too custom yet, but we’re more into the average level or closer to the slightly above average level so you can get an idea.
This is a cool feature that allows you to jump in here, spin around and take a look at things. The ability to walk through the house is a pretty cool feature. You can see this home has a little wine cooler. I don’t want to take a ton of your time going through this particular home, you can do this on your own and go into the laundry, check out the bathrooms, here is your secondary bath. This particular house looks like it has some quartz, maybe a mix of some quartz on the countertops. Further on inside the master you have a free standing tub and tile shower. You have some quartz in the countertops and there are nice cabinets. So that’s floor plan number two coming in at $568,952 and is 2,189 square feet with a two-car garage.
Custom Home #3: Ramona Ranch Farmhouse
We’re gonna jump into number three which is a Ramona Ranch Farmhouse. This is actually a fairly economical plan to build for the amount of garage, porches, and living footage that you get. This particular living space is 2,026 square feet which comes with 953 square feet of garage space and a 578 square foot covered patio. This plan has a good size three-car garage and a lot of patio area. We don’t have any video or a 3D walk through on this particular home but you can view good pictures so take a look at those and this is what would fall under an average level of finish.
You can see the outside is siding, there are some shutters in the front, and it has a composition shingle roof. You have your kitchen that has quartz countertops on top of stained grade cabinets with the slab ends on them. There’s a little pellet stove that has hardie siding behind it so it’s non-combustible behind the stove. The master has this particular bath which is a drop in tub next to a sleek chrome shower unit inside the bathroom. The secondary baths have quartz on the countertops also, along with a fiberglass secondary bath so the shower and tub-showers look like that. This back porch is like your extra porches right here, and this porch does not have any enclosed tails there because it’s not in a high fire hazard area.
These are just bedrooms with carpet. LVP costs a little bit more money than carpet, but these bedrooms have carpet in them. You could probably put LVP in here and probably still be within your average level of finishes, but this gives you a good idea. Here we’re looking at the front porch area and the garage, and then you have your living space inside the house. So that is number three, Ramona Ranch Farmhouse, and the price point again is $636,918 for your building costs.
Custom Home #4: Escondido Fire Rebuild
Our fourth home is going to be our Escondido Fire Rebuild. This home is a 2,939 square foot home with a 1,144 square foot garage and 732 square feet of covered patios. The price point on this home, which is a custom level finish and the next grade up is going to be a price of $910,539. This house here does not have a video nor a walk through, but we do have some pictures that you can definitely go through, they’re good pictures.
This house has two dishwashers, there’s a little butler’s area, it has a wine bar in there as well, it also has a door feature. You’ll see in the back there’s this folding door similar to a multi-slide but it’s a folding door and collapses on itself. There are also two fireplaces, one inside and one outside. It also has some other finishes that are pretty cool. The home has a concrete tile roof and the cat’s face finish on the stucco. The garage doors are upgraded and stone is on the outside of the house. This is all going to be your engineered hardwood floor. You have a little bit of an exposed beam on the top, like a ridge beam. You have some stained gray doors.
The kitchen has some great features. This is granite that’s in here. You have full height backsplashes, the kitchen has built-in dinettes, one dinette so you can actually put your table here and you can sit down on a bench with the full height backsplash all the way to the ceiling. There’s a couple different dishwashers like I was saying earlier, a nice stove and nice hood, and you have all the finished ends on the cabinets, even the ends over here are finished, so you’ll see that in there. You have some of this nice furniture looking at the cabinets. There’s the butler pantry inside and you have your carpets upgraded in a home like this. There’s some nice tile work inside the showers, the countertops and backsplashes or tile backsplashes .
How Much Does it Cost for Custom Finishes? | Escondido Fire Rebuild
You can see that there’s a difference from the average level of finish to this home. There’s a glass bowl that you see for the sink, another little upgrade from your average level of finish. These are some of the things that are different in there. There’s another refrigerator, even that’s an addition. There’s more built-in shelving and more cabinets just in the butler’s pantry, and more countertops. The stain grade doors like this add cost, not all of them are that way but this one wasn’t here originally. Let me show you the exterior.
I want to get back over and show you the exterior of the master bathroom. The exterior you can see this extra outside area which has the pavers. There’s some built-in cabinets too but look at the nice pavers on the outside of the stacking door. The stonework looks nice out here along with this fireplace. As you start to add those costs with this and that, this number four house, Escondido Fire Rebuild, is 2,939 feet of living area, a 1,144 square foot three-car garage, along with 732 square feet of covered patio that equates to a price point of $910,539.
Custom Home #5: Escondido Craftsman Custom Home
Let’s jump over to number five. Number five is an upscale or luxury finish. This is our Escondido Craftsman Custom Home designed by a very well known architect. It’s a very nice home with very nice finishes inside. This house has 5,023 square feet of living area, 2,236 square feet of garage space, 526 square feet of covered patio, and the price point on this one is $2,155,012 in build costs to build this house.
Looking at the bottom here, we have this entryway to the house. It has some nice high-end finishes here that you can see. Let me click in here so you can see the open beam. It has nice entryways and hardwood floors inside the home. You can see all the open beams up top there so lots of nice finishes, lots of stone, look at all the stone in the fireplace, that’s real stone too, it’s not cultured. You can see all this structural tongue-and-groove, your trusses, your rafters it’s all there. This looks really nice. Then you have your kitchen down below.
So as you go through this one you can see this is getting into the upscale luxury finish. You can see the wood wrap jams on all the windows, so is much definitely an upper and higher level than the previous custom finish we were just looking at. The home also has pocketing multi-slide doors that pocket all the into the back of the wall. Those are expensive doors. You can look at the nice recessed area in here and the kitchen hood, which is a recessed hood with nice wood cabinets. So this is a very custom level home.
Okay, so now let’s recap with you. The price of the Escondido Craftsman is $2,155,012 to build this house. It’s 5,023 square feet.
Putting All Costs Together to Build a Custom Home
Let’s look at this last document. Here is how we are going to get to our total cost to actually build this home. We’ve only reviewed the build costs up to this point. So we’re going to take 4% to 6% of the build cost and put that against our plans and design costs. Then we’re going to take our permits and fees, and we’re going to add in our site costs for the development of the site to get ready to build. Then we’re going to our build cost, which we just talked about today, so if you have questions on any of these other items make sure you go back to previous videos in the custom building cost guide series, check those out, that’s exactly what we cover in all these. It’s going to give you a good idea what you would spend on these. Once you add all those together, you’re going to get your total build cost and then you will have a good idea what you’re going to spend for your project.
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