Guys and Gals,
Over the past month, my wife and I finally made a decision we’ve been putting off for years. We’re tearing down our rear porch and rebuilding it with a new porch and a one-car garage. This wasn’t a quick or easy call. We saved, we planned, we set up a HELOC, and we went back and forth more times than I can count trying to decide if it made sense financially.
What pushed us forward wasn’t confidence that prices would come down. It was the opposite.
For years, we had priced this same project over and over again. Each time, the number didn’t hold. It didn’t stabilize. It just kept climbing. At some point, the question shifted from “Is this too expensive?” to “Is waiting actually helping us?” And the answer became clear.
What $225 a Square Foot Buys Today
It’s expensive. There’s no way around it. And like everyone else, we’re feeling that pressure. The market is what it is, and here in Nashville, it’s one of the more aggressive environments in the country when it comes to construction costs.
What’s important to understand is the type of project we’re talking about. This is a porch and a garage. It’s a nice one, no doubt, but it’s still one of the simplest forms of residential construction. Even so, by the time this is complete, we’ll be sitting around $225 per square foot. That’s with a general contractor building the shell while I take on portions of the interior work myself, electrical, finishes, and anything else I can reasonably handle.
To put that in perspective, before COVID, $225 per square foot would have been a solid spec home, and around $300 per square foot was a typical custom home. Go back even further to when we first moved to Nashville, and $100 to $150 per square foot was the norm. And those numbers were for fully conditioned, finished living space. Not a porch and garage.
The $300 Conversation
I’m not sharing this to complain. I’m sharing it because this is the reality I see every week in conversations with potential clients. I regularly speak with people planning to build custom homes at $300 per square foot, and more often than not, those conversations end when we align on what that number actually delivers in today’s market.
The truth is, $300 per square foot today either means you’re taking on a significant portion of the work yourself, or you’re stepping into a more standard solution than you probably set out to build. And if you’ve spent any time on our website, you know that’s not the kind of work we do.
Our role is not to sell an idea that doesn’t exist. It’s to guide people through the reality of where things are and help them make decisions within that framework. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in working alongside builders early, using technology to study cost in real time, and designing with a level of awareness that simply didn’t exist in the old design-first, price-later model.
The market has changed. The goal now isn’t to fight it. It’s to understand it, and design within it.
So What Are the Real Numbers?
That’s the question everyone wants answered up front, and the honest reality is, it’s not something you can define accurately sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper and a few inspirational images. Without doing the work to understand the project, the site, and the level of detail involved, any number you hear is going to be broad at best.
If I had to give a range without pre-design, it would be somewhere between $350 and $1,200 per square foot. That’s not meant to be helpful. It’s meant to be honest. The gap exists because cost is directly tied to decisions that haven’t been made yet.
The only real way to narrow that gap is to build the right team early. That means bringing a builder into the design process and keeping the architect engaged through construction. When those two are working together from the start, pricing becomes a moving, informed conversation instead of a surprise at the end.
But even that only works if the feedback is real. A lot of “budget check-ins” during design are surface-level and depend entirely on how much effort the builder puts into them. The difference comes when you treat pricing like a service, not a favor. Hiring your builder hourly during design changes the dynamic. It creates accountability, it brings real numbers to the table, and it allows the design to evolve with cost in mind instead of reacting to it later.
That’s where clarity comes from. Not guesses, but informed decisions made in real time.
Back to the Porch
I went through the same process I walk clients through. I designed it, got pricing, made cuts, waited, watched prices go up, got pricing again, and made more cuts. It wasn’t a straight line. It was a constant adjustment between design, cost, and reality until I finally landed on a hybrid approach: bringing in a contractor to build the shell while I take on the portions that make sense for me to handle.
The pricing was all over the place. There wasn’t a single clean answer. But with real feedback from a builder, I was able to keep the core of the design intact, make strategic decisions on where to pull back, and apply sweat equity where it actually moved the needle.
The Process Isn’t the Problem
What this reinforced for me is something I see all the time with clients. Construction doesn’t have to be a painful process, but it often becomes one when people try to simplify it the wrong way. The instinct is to reduce design time, skip steps, or limit diligence in an effort to save money. It feels efficient on the front end, but it almost always creates problems later, during pricing, during construction, and in the final result.
The process isn’t the problem. Skipping parts of it is.
Trust the Team You Built
I think a lot of people naturally look at contractors with skepticism. There’s this underlying assumption that they’re out to take advantage or cut corners. And to be fair, that can be true when there’s no process. No diligence, no structure, and no accountability on either side.
But that hasn’t been my experience with the contractors I’ve chosen to work with over the years. The ones we continue to partner with operate with integrity, communicate clearly, and take pride in the work. That doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from being intentional about who you bring onto the team.
The responsibility on the owner’s side is to interview, to vet, and to understand how that contractor works. Not just their pricing, but their process. And once you’ve done that, the goal isn’t to manage them through fear or suspicion. It’s to trust the process you’ve put in place and let the team do what they’re good at.