This question is asked by everyone wishing to build a house in general and a wooden house in particular.
How is a cost estimate of a design made?
What impacts the house cost? 
“Why can’t you tell me the “average” cost of a design?”

Please tell me the average cost of a square meter. 

When estimating the budget of a design, we suggest taking into account the following concerns and facts:

• First and foremost, everyone intending to build a wooden house must be aware that we do not offer ancient wooden blockhouses, but modern wooden architectural facilities, “live” houses that will always be a warm and cozy home for you.
• We use state-of-the-art technology and building materials at every stage of building houses.
• We engage highly professional specialists at each stage of the designing process.
• Every minor thing, every architectural and technological solution, finishing materials, additional equipment must be taken into account when preparing the budget of a design.
• Please keep in mind that the final cost must include the maintenance and repair costs: replacement of roofing materials, furniture, heating, window maintenance, etc.

We sometimes deal with customers, which reject good realistic designs only because they are sure that they can have a high quality house built with a low budget.
Let us be realistic. We must always bear in mind the price to quality ratio. Some contractors wishing to keep a customer reduce the design cost by:

• using cheap materials;
• using poorly qualified specialists;
• offering cheaper technological solutions.

They do not tell the customer or “forget” to tell the customer that he/she will be have to pay sooner or later.

Information on the customer’s budget amount will considerably accelerate the process and will make it possible to avoid a lot of unnecessary ideas and offers.

It may be unpleasant to hear it, but the truth is that the full cost of your design will be known only when construction works are completed.

In order to avoid unpleasant surprises, as much information as possible on your design is required. Study carefully the package of construction drawings and building documentation.

The cost of a blockhouse and the rafter part with installation and delivery is what we can be sure of at the initial stage and use it as a starting point. This is the starting price of Canadian and American companies building blockhouses. More details are available in the section “Blockhouses – Complete Set” .

Yes, we can. It must be remembered that the blockhouse designing process has its own laws and rules. Every design is developed according to its building technology. In particular, it will be quite a problem to produce a blockhouse according to a design made for a house built from bricks or laminated logs. The design solutions for a blockhouse will be needed. Yes, we can provide you a more or less fair estimate of the cost of building the wooden part of a blockhouse. As regards the full cost of a house, it cannot be accurately estimated without having a full house design, preliminary survey works, but even after that the cost estimate will be approximate as the prices of works and materials will have changed by the time they are needed.

There are no reasons for which a wooden house structure would not be perennial, without exaggeration, or at least would not exist for centuries, which is much longer that the time period we plan to use it for. A good design of the blockhouse, proper understanding and use of methods of wood protection against decay and fire permits to hope that modern blockhouses will exist as long as we wish. Norwegian wooden churches with corner buttresses are perhaps the oldest wooden structures currently known in Europe.

25 to 30 churches built in the 12th and 13th centuries have survived from among hundreds of them. Interestingly, obsolescence tends to be more and more obvious. This concerns construction, too, as new materials, designs, and styles are becoming available. Houses built 20 to 30 years ago do not correspond to present-day concepts of comfort and beauty. However, wooden blockhouses are beyond fashion and they have practically not changed for the last few centuries. This provides grounds for believing that a blockhouse built today will still be modern in 50 or 100 years.

Yes, they do. But there are several aspects to be kept in mind. Fire can be set absolutely to any house, and, in most cases, fire occurs inside a house due to non-compliance with the fire safety requirements and rules. And it is impossible to live in a house made of any materials that survived fire: the smell of fire cannot be removed and deformation of load bearing structures due to the fire temperature makes it further use impossible. In case of fire, the main objective is to leave the building in fire as soon as possible. This is viable when it comes to both a stone and wooden house. Cars are very similar in terms of fire protection. A car is burned down within 2 to 3 minutes and it is practically impossible to put it out; however, this fact does not prevent us from buying and driving cars.

Logs a blockhouse is made of are characterized by natural humidity. Wood dries up or the blockhouse contracts naturally within two years after it was installed. And this natural process is typical of any building, including stone houses, which get settled during the first year. If a wooden house is built consistent with all the technologies, the contraction process requires no additional consent and generates no inconveniences for its owners. Regulation of vertical elements such as columns, if present in a blockhouse, is an exception. If wood dries up across fibers more than along fibers, walls and columns change their sizes differently. If this is not taken into account in the house building process, this fact can really lead to negative consequences.

Cracks appearing in a blockhouse have no impact on the house warmth and strength, if it was built by specialists. It is absolutely up to you to ignore or block such cracks. Some people prefer the natural, authentic appearance of wood with cracks while others like an ideal surface of logs. It is up to you to decide. It is important to follow the blockhouse building technology and its shrinkage process to reduce the number and size of cracks.

Forests of northern areas, mountain areas should be used to manually build houses. Forests there grow in severe conditions: wood is denser and a difference between the log thickness at its top and bottom is smaller. A house made of such logs will exist longer. However, it is important to keep in mind that poor quality processing of even ideal building wood will not make it possible to build a quality blockhouse and low quality installation of even a properly made house will seriously affect the final result.

Differences are numerous despite the appearing similarity of technologies and materials. The key ones are as follows. Every log for manually made blockhouses is selected and prepared on an individual and high quality basis. As a log is not made regularized round, all its defects will be visible in the blockhouse, unless this is seriously addressed. One of the main differences is the size of logs. In case of manual processing, logs with a diameter ranging from 35 to 60 cm and up to 12 meters long are used. In case of regularized round logs, trunks are normally 6 meters long and have a diameter ranging from 18 to 24 cm. All of this affects the blockhouse characteristics and its capacity to keep warm. Every manually made blockhouse is unique just as all of us. Interestingly, the difference between the cost of a manually made blockhouse and a house made of regularized round logs mostly consists in the cost of the wooden part only (actually the blockhouse) and all other house completion solutions are similar in both cases.

It is about technology. A regularized round timber and a laminated log are produced by using industrial equipment. No high qualification of labor is required. On the contrary, high qualification of labor is required in the process of building a wooden house from manually made logs as every log is individual and is fit to each other manually. More details about various building technologies can be found in the section “Articles”. 

Most wood is procured in winter when the soil is frozen. Wood can be procured and prepared with the minimum damages to trunks, which is particularly important for manually made logs. In summer, wood is procured as well although it is sometimes difficult to enter a forest.  More details about any existence or absence of advantages of winter-cut trees can be found in the section “Articles”. 

Yes, there is. The quality of trees for regularized round timbers is not so important as the upper protective layer is removed and the boon of a log is mainly used.

There can be any finished coverage appearance. “A heavy roof” is preferred as it makes more pressure on the upper crowns while the lower ones are pressured by the weight of walls. In this case, crowns are set to each other more densely, the log does not “drive” so much along it, and chinks in grooves are smaller when wood is dried up.

A casing is a box for door and window openings installed so that walls could freely displace with respect to boxes. There must be space for shrinkage in the upper part. A casing in houses from manually made logs should be arranged from a block or a laminated log with a special structure so as to make it possible to install modern tilt-and-turn windows and doors.

Yes, it can, but it must have ventilated space between the wooden wall and bricks. In this case, one has to wait for at least two years until the house contracts. At present, wooden houses require no cladding because there are many fire and bio protective and tinting coverages. And the entire beauty of natural wood is hidden by the external wall.

Ventilation, gas, electricity, water supply and sewage – all the utility systems work well in a wooden house. Moreover, all the wirings can be made hidden just as in a stone house. Technology enables to technically maintain utility systems. It is important to appropriately plan the entire utility part before building works begin so that all the necessary preparation works could be carried out while assembling the wooden part.