Building a new house - upgrades thru builder vs. contractor post closing

[lpepping]

We recently finished building and skipped the hardwood at the design center. They were charging twice as much. Just not worth it. FYI, we are installing engineered floors.

[HP48G]

I got red oak nailed down for the entire house including kitchen for $9/sq ft from the builder. Initially I wanted hickory floors but the available engineered hickory was more expensive and didn't have enough color variation. Going to an external contractor to do floors after closing was not worth it for me.

[lpepping]

Originally Posted by HP48G

I got red oak nailed down for the entire house including kitchen for $9/sq ft from the builder. Initially I wanted hickory floors but the available engineered hickory was more expensive and didn't have enough color variation. Going to an external contractor to do floors after closing was not worth it for me.

Which builder?

[Kikelch]

Originally Posted by EDS_

OP..............

A. The order of operations should be although none of this is really critical.

1. If you decide to change the water heaters that should be done first.
2. Granite/quartz tops.
3. Floors.
4. Paint.

B. I'd bet you could hire a contractor to manage all of this, advantages...........

1. All projects could all be done more or less at the same time or dovetailed tightly.
2. It's possible your contractor could buy a bond guaranteeing the job's completion, quality and no damage.
3. Good contractors tend to work with the same set of subs consistently. There's value in that.

C. Doing all of this yourself you are looking at saving tens of thousands of dollars.

Thanks for the tip!
How would find a good contractor to mange all?
is there one who does all? I thought I had to contact floors/paintings/kitchen counter tops all separately.

[Beardown91737]

I'll also concur with hardwood in the kitchen. We have engineered hardwood in our newly built house. It looks nice to have all of the flooring the same on the first floor. That includes the bathroom which I was reluctant to do.

We also had engineered hardwood in our previous house for the last 13 years we lived there. It was a smaller house and had some high traffic areas, including the kitchen, but it did fine, even when we cleaned it with a floor scrubber. My parents had a hardwood floor in the kitchen for 20 years and it looked fine.

As far as water damage, we had to get a 3x3 foot area removed from a corner of our bedroom in our previous house. To restore it, Ihad to remove a lot more floor. It tapered from the 3x3area into the opposite corner being 2 floorboards wide on the opposite side of the room, which was 15 feet. So that is a concern.

[turf3]

Wood flooring in the kitchen or bathroom is great right up to the point where a dishwasher, fridge-ice-maker connection, or toilet springs a leak while you're away at work or out of town for a day or two. If the water heater is in or directly connected to the kitchen, that adds a whole other level of bad.

Then you get to come home to all the flooring buckled, coming up, delaminating if it's not solid wood, the underlayment delaminating if plywood underlayment was used, and lots of repair bills.

There's a reason why the traditional construction was solid wood floors everywhere except kitchen and bathroom where either tile or linoleum was used.

[Wifeyfitnesspro]

We are building with Anerican legend as well. We are lazy though and didn't want any projects. I guess it comes down to convenience/ inconvenience. We paid 90k for convenience. But we shopped around a lot for a year. From khov , standard pacific ETC American legend had the most reasonable prices for upgrades so we went with them.

[Beardown91737]

One option that I wish I had done was to get CAT-6 cable run from where the router was going to where the TV is. We had to get a repeater to watch Netflix because the main router was too far for the TV to see it, and we still have some degradation. We are going to replace the upstairs carpet with wood and I hope that is a good time to put the cable under the floor.

[CookieBoss80]

It may cost you more but what's the point in buying a new house when you have to tackle so many projects yourself? Usually you are already sacrificing location, lot size, mature landscape and things like that to buy a move in ready new house, if you still have to go through so much trouble, might as well buy a nice custom house in a better location and do some changes to make it your own.

[nissan]

You've gotten good advice here. We've gone both routes on our 2 prior builds:

- Wood flooring: Current home we had the builder do it for the rooms they didn't include in the base plan. Prior home, we did it after close. Either way is fine, but it is a large cash outlay which you may want to consider pushing into your mtg considering where rates are. If you have the cash set aside, then do it after close. $29K on a $420K plan seems pretty excessive.

- Tankless: Our builder quoted the same rates. We skipped it all together and are doing just fine w the 2 gas water heaters. Ask yourself if you really need tankless (based on consumption)?

- Frameless: We did it through the builder at approx the same quote as what your builder gave. Didn't seem worth it to do it after (considering the interest rates).

- Ctops: In the kitchen, we paid for level 7 bc the price wasn't all that different from doing it it post-close. We did a L1 island and L1 ctops in the master bc they didn't have the marble we wanted. Doing that post-close wasn't an issue in terms of damage to the cabs etc. Could go either way on this, just depends on the builder's pricing.

- $70-80K on builder upgrades for a $420K home is a little high. I think your original budget sounds more reasonable (10% of base). You also want to be careful about whether the home can appraise if you did have the builder do a lot of these upgrades at their inflated rates. Check w your sales person/realtor to see what that same floor plan homes in the community ended up at close.