The 7 Line Items Missing From Most Residential Bids

Most residential bids price the house. Very few price the project. The gap between those two things is where owner-builders run out of money, and it is almost always the same handful of items.

1. Site work beyond the building pad

Excavation for the foundation is usually in the bid. Clearing, grading the rest of the lot, drainage, and hauling spoil off site frequently are not. On a sloped or treed parcel this can be a substantial number on its own.

2. The driveway

On raw land, the driveway is real construction: culverts, base course, grading, and enough width and turning radius for a concrete truck and a fire apparatus to get in. A long driveway on rough ground can cost more than a bathroom.

3. Utility trenching and connections

Getting power, water, and gas from where they are to where the house is gets priced by the foot, and the foot count is a function of your site, not your floor plan. Ask specifically whether the trenching, the conduit, the meter base, and the utility company's own connection fees are in or out.

4. Well and septic

On unserved land these are two separate projects with their own permits, their own engineering, and their own failure modes. Well depth in particular is not knowable in advance, which means it belongs in your budget as a range and not as a number.

5. Temporary facilities

Temporary power, a portable toilet, dumpsters and haul-off, and site security run for the entire duration of the build. Individually each is small. Over a twelve month schedule they are not.

6. Engineering, soils, and survey

A soils report, a foundation design stamped by an engineer, a boundary or improvement survey, and any structural engineering your jurisdiction requires. These are soft costs, they come due early, and they are frequently left off a builder's bid entirely because the builder assumes you are arranging them.

7. Permit, plan review, and impact fees

Building permit fees, plan review, and whatever impact or tap fees your jurisdiction charges. These vary enormously between counties, which is exactly why a national cost-per-square-foot figure is useless to you.

What to do with this list

Take it to whoever gave you a bid and ask, line by line, whether each one is included, excluded, or assumed to be yours. You will get one of three responses, and all three are informative.

Some builders will walk you through it item by item. Some will say those are yours to handle, which is fine as long as you now know to budget for them. And some will get vague. That last response is the one worth paying attention to.

Want a line-itemed number for your own project? Run the Guesstimator. It is free, it takes about three minutes, and you do not need to hand over an email to see your result.