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I have heard quite a range in the building costs in Costa Rica and I know costs are going up. I am meeting with architects and builders this week. What is a reasonable cost per square foot to build a 1 storey house in concrete with high ceilings and nice finishes?
Your architect will tell you that the College of Architects has a standard cost per square meter that they base their estimated cost upon. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s pretty low. The actual cost of building will vary greatly by area and by who builds your home. You can find a cheap traditional Tico builder who won’t build to anything like American standards or you can engage an American builder who’ll charge U.S. prices. There are excellent builders in between.
My experience (with building two houses in the past year) is that you should preliminarily budget about $65 per square foot to cover all costs. That would include site preparation, architectural fees, permits, workers’ compensation insurance, and a finished out house. It might not cover appliances and it certainly would not cover the property itself.
You may come in cheaper and you may spend more, but if your project and your budget won’t tolerate a cost of $65 per square foot, then you need to do some careful rethinking.
David Have you ever used those prefabricated panels. My architech says the lightweight ones have to be used because of the soil and don’t any of these places offer plans? It seems like a ripoff that every house has to have a set of plans drawn up to the tune of $4k to the architech seems to be a ripoff.
Stan PutraHeading right out to the end of the limb here . . .
I have no experience with prefabricated panels nor with Super Blocque. Having seen one house under construction with the latter, however, I think I would pass. This is a former bureaucrat, not a building professional, talking here.
I think you would be well served to have an architect develop a unique set of plans for two reasons. First, you can have what you want and need rather than what somebody else would like to sell you.
Second, those plans will be site-specific. That is, the house will be built with the requirements of the land taken into account. I can’t think of a worse scenario in this environment than to try to impose a houseplan on the site.
The panels can me made to order so to speak, and fitted into your “super structure”. This is not a pre fab house your architect is talking about, just panels to make up the walls.
David – what is your bureaucratic reason for passing on superblocque. Having only seen photos of a couple of buildings under construction with SB, my main objection from afar is that the joints in each course line up instead of having a running bond pattern. That strikes me as a weaker construction method. I don’t know if SB requires that or if what I saw was unusual. Having a 90 cm. block (35.43″) instead of an 18″ block would mean handling fewer, albeit heavier, blocks; could save on labor costs there.
JimJim, my skepticism about Super Bloque isn’t bureaucratic, it just comes from one without a background in engineering.
As you rightly point out, the blocks are about 90cm, and they are stacked vertically without overlapping joints. Every so often (maybe every two or three stacks of blocks, there’s a reinforced poured concrete pillar. And there is a poured lintel (I think that’s the term) that runs horizontally at the top of the wall. There’s a horizontal reinforcing bar laid every three courses of block which is attached to the rebar in the poured pillar.
What strikes me is that within the stacks of block, there is no vertical reinforcing bar and none of the cores is filled with concrete. I contrast that with the walls of the house we’ve just finished. There, the standard blocks are forty centimeters wide and the joints overlap. Every sixty centimeters, a vertical reinforcing bar which is attached to the bar in the footing, runs through the core and up to the same lintel. And every core with a bar is filled with liquid concrete as the wall goes up. So whereas the Super Bloque wall may have a poured pillar every 180 centimeters (or maybe more), my wall has one every sixty. And at intervals the structural engineer dictated, my wall has a reinforced poured pillar, too. And I have the horizontal bar every third course, as does the Super Blocque.
In my youth, I once backed a car slowly through an unreinforced concrete block wall. It did a lot of damage despite the low impact speed.
To my eye, my conventionally-laid conventional block walls seem much stronger. But I could be wrong. Consider the source.
Edited on Dec 13, 2006 07:13
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