ᐅ House Construction Planning: Solid Brick and Mortar House or Prefabricated House? With or Without a Basement?

As far as I know, Picea requires the Passive House standard since heating is provided only by waste heat from the electrolyzer. Plus about €50,000 (approximately $55,000) extra for photovoltaic panels. That would definitely be a cool setup.

BUT: A relatively straightforward house with 250 sqm (2,690 sq ft) plus basement and an affordable plot of land already costs the full €600,000 (approximately $660,000).
+ Passive House standard: €50,000 (about $55,000)
+ KNX smart home system: €40,000 (about $44,000)
+ Home cinema: €30,000 (about $33,000)
+ Picea system: €100,000 (about $110,000)
+ Photovoltaics: €50,000 (about $55,000)

So: I think the plan is really cool. But I guess you’ll have to tighten the budget.

By the way, for the planning stage I wouldn’t look for a building company, but a good architect. They will tell you HOW to build. You don’t have to figure that out yourself. (oh yes: + €80,000 (about $88,000)) ;-)

untergasse43 schrieb:

You might be fully knowledgeable on this topic as well. If so, have fun! It could be really cool!

^^
Yes, exactly, I am completely familiar with the subject ^^
I handle all the programming (cable routing and installation) entirely by myself.
That is my world.
And my main goal is to do all of this work myself during the house construction.

(When building the house, it should be planned so that all cables can be retrofitted along the ceiling in cable trays, and the ceilings inside the house should be dropped/slung so that access is always easy later on.)
We are absolutely obsessed with home automation and want a smart home of the highest standard.
I am fully aware of the purchase prices here.
Since I want to do all the programming and installation myself, it is obvious how many euros we will save just in labor costs 🙂

Although I’m not professionally involved in this field, I have been working on it in detail for years and have already built several test installations.

Currently, we operate a radio-based smart home, entirely self-programmed, with almost 300 components working together.

Now I want to switch from wireless to wired.
And completely avoid any online cloud services, which with wireless solutions are sometimes unavoidable here.

Well, regarding costs: we want to do as much as we can ourselves.
The rest of the house’s furnishings should be custom-built furniture, not from IKEA.
However, we already have a comparative quote from a carpenter.
Equipping the entire house with custom-built furniture actually turns out to be cheaper than buying a similar setup from mainstream furniture stores and having it installed.

The furniture is not included in the roughly 600 K price mentioned above (not necessarily).
That figure refers purely to the house itself, including floors, fittings, walls, and technical components — mostly the house itself.

Basically, though, we want to keep costs as low as possible and do not want to build a luxury mansion.

We don’t need expensive fabrics or designer models.
A standard house is enough for us.
We just want it a bit larger because we need space for our well-being.

The technology is already factored into the price (at least conceptually).

Since we have no idea how to implement all our wishes, we ended up here.

We’re now 27 and 30 years old and want to invest our long-term savings into our own home.
This should free us from rental prices and neighbors directly above and next door.

Basically our own place.

And we want the technical possibilities to make living comfortable and interesting in the end.

Your wishes and your budget differ by a six-figure amount.
With $30,000, you won’t get a basement—maybe just the excavation and disposal of the soil.

First, read up on all the additional construction costs here.
Think carefully about what you really want. Saying 200–300 sqm (2,150–3,230 sq ft) is too general.
What do you dislike about your current apartment? Visit show homes to get a better idea.

RomanoD. schrieb:

Regarding the budget, our absolute maximum is €600,000 (about $650,000)...
Power generation and heat production are planned to run via HPS Picea and a ventilation system combined with underfloor heating (Picea and the ventilation system require a lot of space, plus a control cabinet and 2–3 server racks).

The heating and ventilation inclusive energy system (hydrogen/solar-based) already costs around €100,000–110,000 (about $110,000–120,000) without the tubing for the underfloor heating but including a finished ventilation system.
In case you're wondering, Picea is a system that guarantees 100% autonomous power generation, meaning you don’t need a grid connection for electricity anymore.
The grid connection is planned to be installed as a backup but will not be connected.
...

Well, my brother-in-law is a building services engineer with 35 years of experience and wanted to install such a system for his son (also in the industry, but with a bachelor’s degree 😉 ). Planning started around 2019. I don’t know if the system you mentioned was available back then. It is definitely still experimental, but that does not mean it should be dismissed! They had similar offers at the time but with hydrogen tanks installed outside.
It ultimately failed due to the lack of binding commitments regarding consumption and performance. I performed a feasibility calculation back then (photovoltaic yield, hydrogen energy density, electrolysis losses, etc.) and found it barely able to cover cold months—quite clearly, the numbers showed it would not have worked!
I can hardly imagine that so much has changed in two years, but on paper, “snowball systems” often look good at first. Also, as others have mentioned before, I clearly see a significant gap between wishes and budget.

Deliverer schrieb:

As far as I know, Picea requires Passive House standard since it is heated only with waste heat from the electrolyzer. Plus about €50,000 more for photovoltaic panels. Then it’s definitely a cool project.

BUT: A relatively straightforward house with 250 sqm (2,690 sq ft) plus a basement and an inexpensive plot already costs the full €600,000.
+ Passive House standard: €50,000
+ KNX smart home system: €40,000
+ Home cinema: €30,000
+ Picea: €100,000
+ Photovoltaics: €50,000

So: I think the plan is really cool. But I guess you’ll have to tighten the budget.

By the way, for the plans I wouldn’t look for construction companies but rather a good architect. HOW it’s built will be told to you by the architect. You don’t have to figure that out yourself. (oh right: + €80,000) ;-)

Yes, I think it’s slowly coming together ^^

So KNX, yeah, the €40,000 might actually not be enough for everything we want.
But at least we’re slowly getting closer to all the information we need.

The home cinema itself might be a bit exaggerated.
We’re fine with a good old flat screen TV with the best possible OLED quality; it doesn’t have to be the absolute top of the line.
The main thing is that the feeling in the end is good with what we’ve achieved.
At the moment, we still have an old Sony Bravia three times in the apartment plus Sonos speakers, all connected through the network with Logitech and an AV receiver.
That will then be centralized a bit more in the technical room instead of cluttering up the living room cabinet.
Sure, we want a good Dolby setup.
However, the particularly expensive technology behind it doesn’t have to be installed in the house right away.

I’d rather have everything prepared and the space in the technical room so that we can gradually install it ourselves.
The cables should be thoughtfully planned and laid by me personally so that they’re ready to connect.
Step by step, when something technical is ready, each installation phase will be done by ourselves.
It’s basically become a huge hobby to reach the technical maximum.

So the most important house functions like lighting should, of course, be installed and ready right away, which will likely cost around the €40,000 again.

The rest we want to upgrade ourselves over time.

We’re not wealthy enough to have everything installed completely by professionals.
So we don’t want to give the wrong impression about ourselves.

What makes smart home systems really expensive, of course, are the labor hours (which we want to invest ourselves) and, in the end, the technology in the technical room itself.
If you think about systems like Control4 and so on.
But that is affordable if upgraded gradually.

In the end, it should be a real smart home and not some gimmick.
A house that thinks along with you, which can ultimately be integrated with Apple Watch, facial recognition, and so forth.
That’s the plan—out of personal interest—to push technical boundaries as far as possible.
I’m confident and not intimidated by that.
And ultimately, there are enough forums and plenty of other “crazy” people who wire their homes just the way I imagine.

And since we are kind of odd people anyway—vacations for us are at most two-day trips to a German city, and after that, we’re glad to sleep in our own bed; we don’t need a Mercedes in the driveway, a Skoda is enough—there’s money left over from what we save to spend on this home luxury.

Besides, our family and circle of friends are so small that we never really go out partying.
So through no vacations, a normal car, no costs for parties or going out, we save a considerable amount since we don’t have the expenses that other people do.

So I want to emphasize again that we’re basically quite normal people ^^
But we’ve been saving and generally budgeting for many years now so that we CAN make this happen.
We’re just not fully aware yet of where we’ll end up with all the costs.

Of course, there’s more buffer than the planned buffer, but we don’t want to completely strip ourselves financially, so it’s more sensible to add on gradually.
That way, the joy of the hobby of automating and wiring the house never fades because doing it yourself is what makes it really fun and, in the end, affordable for us—since the technology really comes from a different segment.