When you’re planning a new home, the biggest budget decisions happen before you’ve chosen a single tap or tile.
The shape and size of the house impact its energy efficiency as well as your bottom line.
And the person who knows that best is not the architect but rather someone you may have never heard of: your quantity surveyor.
A quantity surveyor can look at a set of plans and work out what it will actually take to build them: from metres of stormwater pipe to steel, cladding, and all the other materials that turn a drawing into a finished home.
But their value goes beyond costing materials. They can help you answer a much more important question:
Where should your money go?
Value Engineering
Say you have your heart set on a particular look or style. There may be several ways to achieve what you want at very different prices.
A good service here is not to simply tell you what it will cost. We lay out options, explain the costs and the long-term benefits or drawbacks, and let you make a fully informed choice. That is value engineering.
At Energy Efficient Homes, we build value engineering into our process from the start.
Instead of designing the house first and discovering the price at the end, our team works in a series of iterations:
Concept. Estimate price. Get client feedback. Develop the design further. Price it again. Check in with client.
That means you can make decisions while there is still time to change them.
It is also more affordable to make changes at an earlier stage. You don’t end up with a beautiful set of plans you can’t afford.
As our quantity surveyor Daniel puts it:
“You can always make it more expensive. It’s quite hard to make it more affordable.”
That is why cost needs to be part of the design conversation from day one.
You don’t have to spend a lot more to get the benefits of a high-performance home. But you do need to make smart decisions about where your money goes.
And that starts long before construction begins.
Watch the full House 2.0 episode to learn how our quantity surveyor can help you build the home you want within budget.
