Using square footage on your foundation may be the cheapest usable square footage in your home. Well, what does that mean to you? Simple, if you want to save money, and I mean a lot, use your basement square footage as part of your home…not just as you hold it. Think about how much it costs to build your basement, whose only function is to hold up the rest of the house… and to store your furnace, hot water tank, and all the stuff you can’t get rid of. Also, think about how big it is. If you are designing a ranch, it should be as big as the rest of your house. In other words, you live (upstairs) on top of another complete house (basement)… but you don’t take full advantage of what it offers you. Why?

I’ll tell you why. He is not as comfortable as the rest of the house. Its base is usually cold, dark, moist and smelly. The only people who live down there are the spiders, the children when they play, or the teenagers when they want to rebel and don’t want to live with the rest of the family. They think that makes them independent now, or at least they are until it’s time to eat and do laundry.

It doesn’t have to be that way. By using energy efficient systems like ICF, PWF, concrete studded basements, light gauge steel framing and more, you can build a basement that feels as good, if not better, than the floors above it…and save money as well. If you’re building a basement (basement) anyway, why not build it energy efficient and remove some or all of your second floor? The additional cost to improve the basement is much less than the savings of an entire floor. I have designed homes where this thought process has reduced the total cost per square foot by as much as 50%. That’s not a typo.

One of my favorite examples involved a single woman who was going to be the project manager in her own home. The design was a 1400 square foot, 2 bedroom ranch on a lake that had a partial walkout basement using PWF construction. In this case, what I mean by that is that the slope didn’t really steep enough for a true strike, but since I was only building one story, I was able to raise that first story enough to bring it about 8 feet to level. .. well a complete strike. On the street side, simply slope down to the porch and you’re all set. Now his cost (this was around 1995) to build the whole house was around $115/sqft. This included everything except finishing the basement. If this is where he stopped, he would have had a 1400 square foot, 2 bed, 2 bath home with an unfinished basement.

Now, this is where the fun begins. He finished part of his basement, or about 1,000 square feet (the rest went for the oven, etc…), which gave him 2,400 square feet of usable/living space. When you add the cost of finishing the basement to the cost of the upstairs, the cost per square foot is down to $70/sqft. This is the best way I know of to make building a home more profitable…and when you build your home with energy efficiency in mind, you win on all fronts.

So what to do with the money saved? Well, you can upgrade other areas of the house…like the kitchen or master bath, or add a fireplace or hardwood floors. You can always just not spend it or invest it too. The choices are yours, but now you’ll have choices you wouldn’t have had before. You see, energy efficiency can be very profitable, with the right design decisions.

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