Roofing costs, part 1

In the past, I've been a bit cagey about the exact costs for our house-building project. However, I'm going to be open about the finances of our roofing decision.

First, when I say 'roof', I mean of course 'roofs' because we have two houses, the big one at almost precisely 100 square meters, and the small one at 24 m². For the sake of simplicity, though, I'm just going to say 'roof', which will refer to both roofs at a total of 125 m².

Janne has told me a simple corrugated metal roof costs about 90 kronor per square meter. The rule of thumb is to double the cost of materials to account for labor, transportation and incidentals, so let's make the installed price 180kr per m². This gives us a benchmark cost of 22,500 kronor, which is why I had originally budgeted 25,000 for the roof.

As I posted previously, my original thought was the Ruukki, which is a high-quality, handsome, and easy to install metal roof. Janne had estimated it would cost around 45,000 kronor, not including installation costs. A Ruukki roof is very easy to install, so if we pretend I'm available to help, it would just take a day's skilled labor to put up. The average workman's rate is 350kr per hour, so 10 hours would add 3500kr, making the best-case total cost of the Ruukki around 50,000kr.

Given the dwindling amount left in my budget, and the fact the roof really isn't visible from the house, we're going to pass on the handsome Ruukki and go to plan 'B'. That plan is developing, and there'll be more news this week.