The True Cost of Building Green
Our estimate and quoting model comes with built-in pricing and cost controls, to help guarantee that your investment in building green – and the resulting payoff period – both make sound financial sense.
Although it is true with all conventional custom home building or renovation projects, it is even more true with green building and ecological renovations: greener “alternative” products can be hard to source. Installers may be unsure of proper handling methods. Scheduling is then made more difficult. And all of this uncertainty is always added as additional costs within the quotes you receive.
Evolve addresses this problem in several unique and decisive ways.
- First, we maintain our own, in-house, full-time crews who are highly trained in most of the green building specialties we offer. This allows us to be more certain of the length of time it will take to complete key components of your build. This allows us to be much more certain of our scheduling of each phase of construction – after all, it is our own team performing the work. Reliable scheduling of project deliverables helps eliminates surprises and minimize delays, both of which ultimately end up costing you money.
- Experience is necessary but execution is critical. We’ve taken our deep knowledge of specialty products and broken it down into detailed and repeatable procedures and construction details. From early guidance in the pricing process, through design and ultimately into construction, you benefit by the consistency and speed with which we can assess costs and implement the work. With guaranteed quality. Every time.
- Next we began to carry products that were difficult to source or had long lead times. From mineral-based silicate paints, to natural finish oils, to bamboo or cork flooring products, Tenax plaster mesh, and grey water recycling systems – we stock hard-to-source green building products at our warehouse and make them available to you – as a construction client or as a retail sale for you to install – quickly and cost-effectively.
- Eventually, we took this even further, adding even more products as well as our own production capacity. We can now start plants for living roofs in our own greenhouse. From our own woodlot, we can selectively harvest trees to mill for furnishings, cabinets and more. By working with small, local, family-owned artisans and suppliers, we’ve expanded our offerings to include custom solid wood doors, specialty trim and flooring and organic oil paints. We can often produce such items at comparable cost to that of similar conventional suppliers. This particular grouping of green building products is available exclusively to our construction clients.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we have carefully tracked – and continue to monitor – actual costs on every project we perform. This allows us to adjust our pricing with precision as the economic climate changes. That means we have no need to add “safety buffers” for uncertainty. For example, we observed that standard lumber costs actually declined 15 to 17% from 2006 to 2009. This change was reflected in our pricing. You can always feel confident that our prices accurately represent real construction costs and no more – green building or not.
With this pricing model, we can provide you with firm quotes that we stand behind. No open-ended “cost-plus” contracts or uncertain “time and material” work, which is more typical of green building companies which themselves are unsure of how to budget their work.
Evolve’s competitive advantage starts with our people and products, and finishes with our pricing and quoting.