New House Build in Valencia

I don’t know if this will help your estimations. Using a builder, my cost to build the house itself was 62% of the total cost while the land clearing and fill, concrete wall around the lot, fence and gate, drainage canal, driveway, and landscape made up the other 38%.

 

I, too would love to have Mr. Santos contact info. And, would you mind sharing the cost per square meter of the house and garage?

 

All my relatives are in the Wirral, including New Ferry.

 

The house is very beautiful. I am planning on building one too but worried about the cost with a contractor. By any chance, would you be able to tell us the square footage of the house? It looks really spacious. Thank you.

 

Yes this house is very beautiful, but the structural integrity of this particular house has been seriously compromised and the same can be said for many other CHB houses here, in fact the truth is most of them by the time they have reached the age of say 30yrs will have needed major structural repairs to keep them going even that long? I must admit this is a bit of guesswork on my part, but some of the faults in this particular house are fairly obvious even to a Blind man running to catch a bus, a few examples are; the structural pillars are built after the walls, always the pillars should be done first and then the walls, there is no proper Lintels over the doors and windows, all they have done is jam a piece of wood at the top of the window perhaps laid a piece of rebar down and then continued to build 4.5 course of CHB above that, this would be illegal in any first world country, another fault I seem to see in the picture of the barely constructed walls is; it looks like a man is mixing concrete by hand, no professional builder would do this all should be using mixers in order to get consistent well mixed batches, now if my eyes are not deceiving me, it would appear very watery and perhaps worst of all they are using round river stone of large dimension; all gravel in a concrete mix should be sized at no more the 20mm and should be crushed stone.

I have posted pictures here in the past on DI where a Foreign builder is using exactly the same bad practises, but at the end of the day they all look beautiful once the icing is on the cake, but underneath that icing they are all Fecked up.

 

In fairness to the original poster I do not think he was deliberately cheated by his builder Mr Santos, likely this builder does not know any better and would even build a house for himself using the same methods, understand this Pinoy builders are most likely never to have had any formal training? this is the root of the problem and also there is no proper building control here, once your plans are passed with engineers reports and whatever, you can do what you want, there is never any checks done on a build in progress here. It is possible to build a fairly good CHB house but not with the methods in which they are done here even with the best of Builders that charge up to P30K per M2, they all have one major failing and that is; the unprotected CHB below grade which is carrying the main structural steel for the whole of the building will corrode, this takes many years to show up maybe as much as 20yrs or above but this will happen of that there is no doubt in my mind, in a serious Earthquake the house will be no more.

If you really want to go ahead and build or have a house built here using any form of cementitious material, a cast in place concrete house is the better option, but before you do anything regarding building I suggest you do some research first, you are welcome to PM me if you need any advice regarding this.

 

I lived in Great Sutton and later had a business in Frodsham.

 

Just an added thought. With contractors in this area, cash flow management is rarely a strong suit. As several friends did, we would buy the major materials ourselves. Let the contractor create the purchase orders, then go to the vendor direct and pay, then contractor arrange delivery or pickup. Not nails or small stuff, but major, appliances, rebar, steel, maybe over P50k...