anyone built/building with ask homes or other steel kits hom

piranha · Mar 05, 2008 5:56 pm

We are thinking about building with ask homes who do steel kit homes and seem to think we can save alot of money with them especially if I get owner builders licence (easy) and make alot of the arrangements myself. I had originally planned on getting somewhat involved in the build like supplying furnishings, tiles, kitchen etc but not to the full extent of arranging tradies for evey aspect of the home but I have that option with ask.

I was just wondering other experiences with them or other steel kit homes such as quality, easy to work with, overall price and steel frames in general are they really as strong and noisy as I hear?

Any advice on the matter would be appreciated. thanks

piranha · Mar 07, 2008 5:45 pm

no-one built stell frame home?

coljacqld · Mar 07, 2008 9:17 pm

Hi Piranha

We haven't dealt with a steel kit home before however when we were looking at the initial building process I broached the subject of a steel frame with hubby (who is a sparky). He would not even consider for 2 reasons i remember (sorry can't ask as he has already gone to bed)

1. If a door gets slammed you can hear/feel it through out the house
2. being a sparky he didn't like the idea if having to drill through or fix items to the steel instead of wood.

Not much of a help but good luck.

Anne

blessedpeople · Mar 07, 2008 11:40 pm

Hi there,

we were considering going with steel kit home like Nu-Steel. As it is a cheaper option and if you wanted to relocate, you can always take the house with you. And the most winning point was the fact that they could be built really quickly (comparatively) :lol:

Anyways, we ended up not going with it for 2 reasons:

1) Didn't like the designs very much. We could take and put rooms where we liked but didn't have much choice where double stories were concerned.

2) If you're going owner builder you can save quite a bit. However, if we were going off the plan the cost wasn't much different from the "normal" builders. We didnt have much time to go owner builder.

3) Our concern was also about home & contents insurance. We couldnt find much info on insurance coverage for steel homes but i think it may also be because we werent looking hard enough at that time.

4) We couldn't find many people who had done it who were living close by. Nu Steel was very helpful though and the sales people were great.

Please do keep us updated if you decide to take this path. i think it would be a great source of information for others considering this route.

all the best,
Alison

3) We liked the fac

piranha · Mar 08, 2008 4:28 am

thanks for your input, I have searched for this topic but seem to get varied info nothing certain. If I do go this route it will likely be owner builder as I need to save money where I can and have alot I can input to the build process and I will likely post my progress as I will probably on this site trying to get some more tips myself.

Yak_Chat · Mar 08, 2008 10:21 am

Just be careful of your costs of steel piranha.
I was quoting an IT component of a job the other day which requires $200k of of civil works for a new section of concrete roadway and the civil guy was saying, better hurry up and get this project approved because the price of steel is expected to go up next month - and the word is might be 20 to 30%.
Yep -that all due to China paying lots for our stell, so that drives the price up.

On the other hand - we've worked out how to grow renewable trees.
Steve