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1 - Is land prepared and ready for a building. If not, site preparation can cost as much as the land, or more (lot less depending).
2 - Are utilities (electric and water) already in place? That can also be a sizable cost and if you're thinking of going solar, add another 5% or so to the building costs.
3 - The least I've heard for building a fairly basic stick-built house (not adobe) on a pad-ready, utilities-in-place lot is $115 per square foot. For $50,000, that would give you a home of 435 sq.ft. - but not made of adobe.
Adobe is actually mud... Mud with a combination of clay, sand, sometimes straw which are usually sun dried. And can get expensive because of the labor involved. Here is a lengthy discussion: //www.city-data.com/forum/new-m...obe-homes.html
Last edited by Poncho_NM; 02-05-2017 at 02:36 PM..
Because the City of Santa Fe now requires all new residential construction to meet Green Building Code requirements (minimum HERS rating of 70), the cost of building in the city has gone up. Consequently, although the cost of putting up adobe walls is still more expensive than stick (frame) construction, it's now only about 15 % more. Energy efficiency has more to do with the quality of construction than it does just about the material used for the walls. It's really an interesting topic, but worth a lot more discussion than we'd want to bore anyone with on this forum!
This is info relevant to Taos, not SF: Do you want a truly alt home? If so, Sustainable Green Buildings - Earthship Biotecture. The simple survival model, which is small, costs about $15,000. You could add on to it in increments and get as fancy as you could afford. I haven't read all the previous posts (sorry!), so I don't know if you have your own land. If not, I can tell you that the Earthship community has its own 300+-acre expanse of land, and the entire site, after years of architect Mike Reynolds fighting all the idiots--uh, I mean nice folks--at the Palace of the Governors, is considered a test site, and thus immune to all the codes.
I have no financial stake in this and haven't even met Reynolds and company yet (God willing, at a seminar this July). My interest stems from seeking forms of housing--as self-sustaining as possible--relevant to my fledgling nonprofit, NEST (Nurturing Exceptional Souls Together; see, if anyone is interested, www.facebook.com/NESTnonprofit, and read the "About" section). So if you're talking alternative, this is a prime example of such. And it's not too shabby either. Some of the already-built ones (like the one that belonged to the late Dennis Weaver) cost BIG bucks.
P.S. And here come the realtors in 3...2...1!
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