I recently had to explain to somebody from the South East that construction costs in the San Francisco Bay Area are much higher. For similar scopes of work a project that costs $150 per square foot in the South East will cost $450 per square foot in the Bay Area. Why this is is beyond the scope of this blog post, but building in the Bay Area is expensive.
Construction costs will vary wildly from project to project depending on the location, the schedule, the scope of the work, and selected finishes. Just as an example, the Sunnyvale project, a whole house remodel, completed on a VERY tight budget was only about $65 per square foot. But the Fremont kitchen project, which rebuilt a small kitchen, was completed on a reasonable budget of about $465 per square foot.
In this post by Lee Calisti, explains quite nicely, 10 strategies to keep your building costs under control. Using most of these strategies, I was able to keep the Sunnyvale project under budget. We also used these same strategies to keep the Fremont kitchen construction costs from going even higher, as it could have easily have topped $650 per square foot.
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