How Much Does a GO Home Cost?
Most of our projects fall between 1,000 and 2,000 square feet in size and cost between $400 and $500 per square foot before site work, design fees, and any optional finish upgrades. The panelized Passive House building shell alone typically represents between 30 and 40 percent of the total construction cost.
What Kind of Building Site is Best?
Every home site comes with its own pros and cons, but the features with the greatest impact are topography, solar orientation, and distance from a public road. Our monolithic-slab foundation system is best suited to level sites with well-drained soils, so steep slopes and exposed bedrock ledge will involve additional expense. A southwestern exposure is optimal for passive solar performance. And the shorter the driveway, the lower your site development costs will be.
Will You Help Evaluate a Site Before I Buy it?
We will be pleased to provide consulting services to ensure that the land you are considering is compatible with both your budget and the house you have in mind. Send us a note via the Let’s Talk button below and we’ll contact you to learn more about your site.
Can I Buy Just the Building Shell?
Yes! In most of southern and midcoast Maine, we are able to provide design and general contracting services for a complete, turn-key project. But we are happy to design, prefabricate, ship, and assemble a GO Home building shell on any suitable site within 400 miles of Portland, ME. Clients who choose this path typically hire a local general contractor to prepare the site, install the foundation, and complete the finish phase of construction. If you don’t have a local GC in mind, we’ll help you vet and hire one. We’re also adept at working with clients who act as their own GC, providing as much assistance as required to achieve the best possible results.
Does GO Logic Panelize Projects Designed by Other Architects?
We love collaborating with other allied professionals and have worked successfully with architecture firms throughout New England, lending our depth of Passive House and panelization expertise to their design projects. Whether you are a client or an architect, contact us as early in the design process as possible to discuss how best to incorporate our services into your specific project.
Prefab, Modular, Panelized (?) … Please Explain.
The umbrella term for constructing buildings primarily off site is prefabrication. Building components—from as small as a section of wall to as large as half a house—are built in a shop or factory then shipped to the site and assembled on a foundation to create a finished building.
Prefabrication, or prefab, comes in several different flavors. The most common is modular construction, which factory-fabricates a building in a few relatively large chunks, typically comprising several rooms, including finishes and fixtures. If you’ve seen one of these assemblies lumbering down the road, you can infer the limitations of this system in regard to build quality.
When we founded GO Logic, we took a very different approach, pioneering a prefabrication system centered on individual floor, wall, and roof panels—with doors and windows preinstalled—that we efficiently flat-pack transport to the site and quickly assemble into an insulated, weathertight building shell. The critical work of air sealing and installing finishes is completed on site, safe from the disturbances of road transport.
While modular construction exploits the efficiencies of factory production primarily to lower cost, our panelization method leverages those same efficiencies instead to increase quality. Compared with on-site construction, the controlled conditions of our fabrication shop let us build to closer tolerances—resulting in a more airtight building with higher energy performance and better indoor air quality—as well as provide a safer, more ergonomic work environment for our craftspeople.
But while prefab panelization is at the heart of how we build, what we do doesn’t stop there. We marry this highly refined construction methodology with the most advanced building science and an international procurement strategy that allows us to source the finest materials in the world. The result, in our view, is the highest performing, highest value building shell available anywhere.
