What would you do differently in the next house construction?

Hello Andreas,

great detailed report!

A few questions.
What do you mean by having the house painted and saving 2-3 thousand?
Having it painted costs a multiple more, right?

Are 25,000 euros common for ventilation?
My builder offered something for 9,000 euros.

Which interior doors did you choose?
Prüm?

Best regards

Our general contractor demands a surcharge of €17,000 for a central ventilation and exhaust system. With two other construction companies, the offer was even significantly higher (€19,000, €20,000).

We also wanted to paint ourselves at first, but due to lack of time we had a company do it after all. It cost 6000€ for the whole house, including fleece on the concrete ceilings, all walls on the ground floor (living rooms, kitchen, hallway...), Q4 filling and sanding, and painting everything with silicate paints, about 600m². Just the painting was about 3-4k€, so what Andreas writes is quite realistic if you take it out of a general contractor contract and compare it to the enormous effort as amateurs.

A central ventilation system is not the same as a ventilation system. We also had offers around 20, with own labor it was about 7 plus geothermal heat exchanger, which we had built.

Hello,

What do you mean by having the house painted and saving 2-3k?
Having it painted costs multiple times more, doesn’t it?

Is 25,000 euros common for a ventilation system?
My builder offered something for 9,000 euros.

Which interior doors did you choose?
Prüm?

The discount for painting ourselves (inside) was around 4,000 € with our friends. You still have to buy paint and so on, so in the end less than half of that remained with them. And for that, the work is no longer worth it.

The 25k € was the price the general contractor wanted, but the planner (from whom I later bought the parts and who offered some of the lowest prices online) would have charged about 17-18 k €, including installation. The craftsmen hit you mercilessly there because you hardly can build a house without ventilation anymore. Therefore, they can almost charge whatever price they want; you often have to have a controlled residential ventilation system to meet the Energy Saving Ordinance. (Not always, I know, but for example, a gas heating system hardly goes without it).

For us, the pure material costs for the ventilation were also about 7-8 k €, plus another good thousand for the ground heat exchanger (which I had the shell builder install right away since he had the excavator there...), and a bit of extra money for the plumber because he had somewhat increased effort while insulating the floor and laying the underfloor heating. All together it was about 9 to just under 10 k €.

The doors were from Jeld-Wen "Lombardo 2810-3," which we got for about 180 € each.

Best regards,

Andreas

We received 7500 euros for the painting work and did it ourselves with about 500 euros worth of materials. Shitty job, I don’t want to do it again, but financially it was worth it. [emoji16]

The extra conservatory lacks internet. Annoying at a party without connection for music.

My generation still knows offline storage media for music - CD, DVD, etc.

No sockets in the window reveals, better somewhere below.

I can't really imagine anything useful about that either: how should sockets in reveals not hinder opening; and: why exactly would you need them there?