It specifically mentions vinyl siding as a cheap option that better-off consumers spend money to avoid in favor of more expensive wood or brick.
Extravagance is perhaps, at times, a matter of perspective and opinion. Some might consider consciously choosing more costly materials, even if they happen to be natural materials, to be matters of aesthetic choice that increase cost. Or even expensive tastes.
I think in any scenario I’d rather refurbish half as often or build half the size and use “better” materials.
Same as buying “good” meat at 2x (better cuts, organic, etc) isn’t a costly extravagance if you simply buy half as much by eating less of it each time or having meat less often.
If there is one thing you immediately notice when you visit the US for example is you often see homes that are of quite shoddy quality but might be 2500sq ft or even 3000. I’d trade 500sq ft for a decent countertop alone…
That's an excellent point! It also provides a handy analytical framework. I'm going to try apply it to siding.
The cost differential between brick and vinyl siding can easily be a factor of five, and wood vs vinyl a factor of six (stone is more like 25). At this point you're trading 2400-2500 sqft of that 3000 sqft house to use "better" materials, assuming shapes that scale surface area directly with flooring size.
I expect this resulting cottage will be of wonderfully high-quality materials, but you may run into a few limits on how many people you can have comfortably living there compared to the original 3000 sqft building. I imagine you might want to be somewhere in between, at which point your choice of "better" materials may become an extravagance in the eyes of some.
Not sure why wood is so expensive, I’m paying under $2/m or for cladding wood for the extension I’m building now. Its around $1 per square foot. It gets slightly more expensive before it’s painted 3 times though (repeat every 15 years as is standard with softwood).
I’m fairly sure I couldn’t find a cheaper exterior cladding. And obviously the cladding is a tiny percentage of the total cost of even just the wall, let alone the whole construction. Cladding will be sub $300 and the 150 sq ft extension is north of $50k all together. Insulation is probably 3-5x what the cladding is, and so is the flooring.
Painting is a bit of work but just nailing up standard wooden cladding is such a tiny part of the work it hardly even shows up on the total, including labor!
Perhaps this is partially because of the high buikding costs to begin with (It’s cold so walls are 3-400mm, a single window is $6-700 (triple glass) and so on. The BOM for my extension was $25k which is half the total. Cladding including labor is a lot less than $1k. I have never seen a vinyl clad house but I doubt I’d pick one to save that little.
Did that article suggest vinyl siding, as in the exterior of a building using plastic?