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Secrets you never learned about home building Labor, Materials, and Tools continued
By arlene | February 22, 2009
MATERIALS
Buy the best! Ten years later, living in the house, you will never say, “I wish we had put in a cheaper door there,” but you may say the opposite. The best will not always be the most expensive, but it often will be.
There is one way you may be able to use less expensive materials than the contractor and be happy with the results. In every fair-sized town, someone makes his living selling secondhand doors, windows, and other building materials. You can use these where the contractor can’t, because you can redesign your house as you go along. Windows, of course, would have to meet your thermal specifications, but you may be able to get a buy on something like insulation, and you definitely should be able to find doors, especially interior doors, that are both better for your purposes and cheaper. Be careful, though. Wet insulation is not a bargain, nor is a door that will take you forty hours to strip and refinish.
Devote a lot of hours and brainpower to estimating the job. It is not difficult, just time-consuming, and a hand calculator is a must. You simply have to count every stick. For example, if the house is 24 by 64 and the specs call for 2×10 joists, you have to go through the following process: “The joists will be butted together at the girder, so we need 12- foot 2×10s. They’ll be 16 inches on center, so I divide 64 feet by 16 inches, which comes to about 48. I always have to add one more for the open end, then I need twice that amount—one on each side of the girder— which makes one hundred 12-foot 2×1Os for that part of the job, plus between 10 and 20 percent extra for wastage, so I’ll order 110.”
You can probably get away with ordering only 10 percent extra dimension lumber; with plywood and other panels, however, it is best to order 15 to 20 percent too much. With materials like #2 cedar siding (clapboards), wastage may approach 30 percent. A good building materials supplier (lumberyard) will cheerfully take back almost anything, although policies do vary widely.
Materials, particularly wooden ones, are not perfect. You should expect to use a certain amount of mildly defective lumber, as long as it is structurally sound, in places where it doesn’t matter. You can return materials that are too bad, especially if the yard picked them out and delivered them. But you will drive yourself and the dealer crazy, and never finish the house, if you refuse to accept a single 2×4 that has even a slight blemish.
Material that shows is quite different, however. A blemish or dirt on top-grade 1×4 pine that you’re using for trim around the windows will still show through three coats of white paint. Not only should you insist on near-perfect materials for this, but you also should buy them just before using them. Your window trim may acquire an indelible boot mark if it lies around the construction site too long.
Selecting the dealer you’re going to use is about as important as picking the site or the stonemason. The cheapest is not always the best. Some big nationwide chains are satisfactory for your purposes; a great many are not. There are definitely different quality grades in lumber.
Be sure you understand the yard’s policies on delivery and returns. How little will they deliver, how far, how often? Most yards will give you a “contractor’s discount,” although it may not be the same one offered their largest and best customer. Have a clear understanding as to what the discount covers. Is it offered only on a big load of lumber they deliver, or will it also cover a hammer you pick up six months later?
Quality is more important than price, but it is quite possible to find a yard that is consistently cheaper and just as good. Compare sample prices (the actual amount you will be charged) from several lumberyards on a number of items: treated 2×6s, asphalt shingles, Sheetrock, 3/4-inch wafer board (2×4s aren’t a good choice for price comparison, as they are often loss leaders). Get a sense of how helpful yard personnel will be. In finally making up your mind, perhaps the best single indicator is your assessment of the customers hanging around in there. Do most of them look and act like contractors who know what they’re doing or like homeowners paneling the den for the first time?
TIP: If the place doesn’t open at 8 A.M. or earlier, it isn’t getting a lot of business from contractors.
No matter what yard you select, you will wind up buying some things at other places. Prices on building materials vary from time to time and place to place. Some other yard may have a carload sale on Sheetrock or factory-made windows, with good quality and prices your yard can’t match. In general, try to buy at the right time. Don’t buy insulation in the fall when everyone else does, unless your own or some other yard is having a huge carload sale. Above all, don’t fret when the price on plywood goes down 10 percent a week after you bought all yours. That goes with the territory. Mostly, prices don’t go down—they go up.
TOOLS
By now, you are certainly tired of reading, “Don’t skimp on the cost.” Sorry, but nowhere is it more true than in this section. You are constructing something that will probably be worth between $100,000 and $200,000, perhaps more. Don’t be surprised if you spend 2 or 3 percent of that amount on tools. If you buy the cheapest possible electric drill, you may go through three or four in the course of the job. It’s cheaper in the long run to buy one good one.
A journeyman carpenter brings his own set of tools to the job, but you can’t expect that of most friends. To have fewer than three hammers available is foolish. If nothing else, the friend who stands around “wishing” he could help may change his tune if you hand him a hammer and put him to work doing something he can’t screw up, like nailing down subfloor.
What tools should you buy? It’s tempting to suggest that you go to a large hardware store and buy at least one of everything. One of the chief differences between you and a professional is the dazzling array of tools he owns. Here are some lists, necessarily incomplete. Don’t rush out and buy everything on these lists; in some cases, it may be better to wait until the need arises. On the other hand, nothing is worse than trying to do the job with the wrong tool because it’s Sunday and the hardware store is closed.
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Topics: Contract, Course, Job, Sale | 6 Comments »
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