Solid house or prefab house - experiences?

Hello Questie,

we are also building in the district of Günzburg. We had exactly the same issue. We have now decided on someone from the area, we can gladly discuss this here if there is interest.

Regards

Plot: 760m², slight sloping terrain (1.5m gradient over 30m), bordering a public road to the north and west, neighboring plots to the east and south.

How and with whom did your neighbors build?

Perhaps this is a negligible detail in your case, but we did not consider it in our construction project and luckily there was no problem related to it.

Our construction manager recently told us that another client chose a house from his company (prefabricated house with timber frame construction), on a sloping site. In this case, the problem was that the trucks, despite what appears to laymen as a "normal" road, could not drive up to the plot with the large house components. As a result, a "transshipment site" had to be found with great effort away from the property and had to be rented with all necessary permits and safety regulations (including those from the city), the house components were transferred by crane onto smaller trucks, then driven to the plot and had to be craned again on site. This was feasible, but the additional costs and time delays are borne by the client. When the builders signed the purchase contract for the prefabricated house, they had not thought about this, and neither had the seller.

--> Therefore my, perhaps unnecessary, tip. In the construction service specification, which you can have checked by a specialist if necessary (we did that), pay attention to whether the potentially prefabricated house components can be driven to and unloaded at your property. Usually it is specified in the construction service description which trucks with which loadings must be able to access your property. You could also drive the main access route to your property under this aspect.

If my comment is nonsensical, please simply ignore it, but the experience of other builders "alarmed" me. As non-experts in our cars, when streets are not in tiny Italian villages, we often perceive them as sufficient.

...

After the summer holidays, there will be one or the other building fair again. Perhaps you will find what you are looking for there. Since you want to build in Günzburg, the Heim+Handwerk 2024 in Munich might be helpful. Or there are other building fairs in your region. You have probably already been to the Günzburg Building Trade Days, if they are still taking place. I am not familiar with the local area.

I have been silently following along the whole time and have a few tips for you:

- Write down what is really, really important to you and what is not. A few questions that might help: Could you maybe do without the basement after all? If not, do you really need a pantry? Wouldn't a large kitchen with plenty of storage space be nicer than a small kitchen and a small pantry? Can you give up the projector and live with a TV? Maybe when you get older, a stairlift (which you can still install in 40 years) would do the job? What else do you want to do with the upstairs when you are old?
When you have clarity here, you can go into conversations much better prepared and be much more flexible to adapt to the provider's options. If you want to do everything 100% exactly as you imagine it, then you have to plan and organize everything yourself, and usually you don’t have time for that. There is no such thing as a 100% perfect house anywhere unless you are a multimillionaire.

- Try to learn something from every conversation. Every craftsman, salesperson, planner, etc., has their own opinions and experiences. Take all the sensible things and leave the negative aside. There will always be salespeople who just talk nonsense. That’s due to the profession and happens in every industry.

- Calculate rather around €3,500 per square meter. We moved in at the end of December and ended up roughly there. And we really didn’t build luxuriously, but it seems to me that this whole project is very important to you, and so you really add quite a bit during the sample selection. Larger tiles, oak stair treads, lift-and-slide door, etc. are what we treated ourselves to.

- Landscaping is, excuse my language, damn expensive and we only have 350 sqm of land without a slope. Your property is twice as big and with a slope, you can sink a lot of money there. 20m of L-stones already cost €2,000 including installation. And you will definitely need several of them.

- Don’t do everything at once. Read up on a topic (e.g., heating), absorb the information, and make sensible decisions for yourself. Narrow it down to 2-3 options and rank them for yourself. Then tick off the house connection box and move on to the next topic. This way, you can easily knock out 1-2 topics over a weekend. No one can remember everything at once and you will forget a lot afterward anyway. You still have to carry on living, working, and having other obligations.

- Many general contractors have sample floor plans. Maybe take a look at those, perhaps there is already something nice there. From there you can then make your adjustments. That’s usually easier than planning everything yourself and as a layman you wouldn’t have most things on your radar anyway.

- Ask people you know why they wouldn’t build with their general contractor anymore. Maybe it’s trivial things that wouldn’t bother you so much. A little anecdote to this: In our building area, a couple kept complaining about the landscape gardener. We had the same one and had no problems. In the end, it was just about communication, and the couple was downright rude to him. See, with communication at eye level and just listening, it was no problem for us.

I also observe many people only visit the construction site every 1-2 weeks, don’t inform themselves, and then complain when mistakes happen. I was there (almost) every day, measured everything after every trade, compared it with the plans, and thought about it again. Potential errors show up earlier that way and you can react immediately. That’s how we got very smoothly through the build without there ever being a real clash. If I hadn’t done that, some problems would only have become apparent when moving in.
It also always helps to simply listen to the craftsmen or ask interested questions about how what they are doing works. Naturally, sincerely and without being annoying. You always learn something and they are happy that someone is interested in their work. Afterwards, you can understand and assess the entire trade much better.
Most people skip all that and think they buy a house like ordering a new car from the factory. But it’s not like that. Every house is individual and craftsmen and site managers work on hundreds of construction sites in their lifetime. For them, it’s just another project they look at that week; for you, it is the one house in a lifetime. Naturally, you notice completely different things.
With a little humility and willingness to learn, many projects would probably have gone better.

- As a final tip, check which general contractors banks near you work with. Often large banks also have a real estate division that offers new builds. They have the most experience in your area and probably don’t build with bad general contractors.