For instance, behind the plaster is the modern metal lath so superior to the old wooden variety.  The exterior walls are as thoroughly insulated against heat and cold as any one of several highly efficient materials can make them; windows and doors are products of large wood-fabricating factories noted for superior work.  All these are points of advantage with tangible merit, but time and your own efforts are the only means by which your new home can acquire personality and charm.  This new structure is yours, made to your desires; and what you make of it is your own problem.

The house that you buy and remodel starts with certain attributes given by age, as already stated.  Here we must offer one caution.  It concerns houses built during the last quarter of the 19th century.  The majority were badly designed and the quality of workmanship was none too good.  Such houses are apt to be perched on high foundations, have exterior walls that offer the minimum resistance to winter winds, while architecturally, lines and proportions reflect an age when taste was either bad or lacking.  We know of several attempts to remodel country homes of such vintage and are convinced that better results could have been achieved for less money if the operation had started with wrecking the structure and building anew.

On the contrary, except where decayed beyond salvage, we have yet to see a country home of the 18th or first half of the 19th century that did not respond admirably to remodeling.  But it is well to be practical and compare its cost with that of a new building.  Among architects, it is generally recognized that, save for a house with unusually expensive details or added equipment, definite figures per cubic foot of size may be computed that will cover the entire cost of construction.  To get the cubical contents of a house, the architect takes the area in square feet of the ground floor and multiplies it by the height from the cellar floor to the eaves, plus half the distance from that point to the ridge of the roof.

For example, if the proposed house is thirty feet wide by twenty feet deep, its floor plan area is 600 square feet.  Then, if the elevation dimensions are seven feet from cellar floor to living room floor; eight feet from living room floor to that of the bedroom floor; and seven feet from bedroom floor to the level of the eaves, which in turn measure eight feet below the ridge of the roof; the cubical contents would result from multiplying 600 square feet by the sum of seven, eight, seven, and four, or 15,600 cubic feet.  With this figure established, it is simple to approximate costs as follows: 

Wooden construction                 $0.45 per cubic foot
Brick veneer construction            0.55  "    "    "
Solid brick construction             0.65  "    "    "
Field stone construction             0.60  "    "    "
Cut stone construction      $0.75 to 1.50  "    "    "

This tabulation, an average for the United States as a whole, is as accurate as any generalization can be and a safe one for forming a preliminary estimate, but local conditions may increase or decrease costs.  The architect can readily determine which.  This table, of course, does not include cost of land, construction of driveway, landscaping, or expenses incident to bringing electric service or telephone wires to the house.