The method
The catalog's numbers are not a marketing position. They fall out of six design decisions, made the same way on every home, before a shovel touches the lot. This page is those decisions, in the open.
Method 01
Every catalog home is one clean volume under one roof plane: a shed, a flat, or a single gable. No valleys, no dormers, no bump-outs. Corners and roof intersections are where framing labour, flashing, and leaks live. A rectangle spends that money on the rooms instead.
Method 02
The catalog runs 980 to 1,680 square feet, with a median of 1,210. Every plan publishes its program and its area on the same page, so nothing hides. The cheapest square foot is the one you never build, and a plan with no hallway to nowhere needs fewer of them.
Method 03
One pour is the foundation and the finished floor. There is no basement to excavate, form, waterproof, and heat, and no framed floor above a crawlspace. Foundations carry 10% of the hard cost on our model; a slab holds that line down and hands back a polished floor for free.
Method 04
Posts and beams land at spans dimensional lumber already wants to make. Sheet goods stay whole: the plans hold to the sizes plywood and fibre-cement ship in, so almost nothing is cut to waste. Structure and framing carry 16% of the hard cost; stock sizes are how that number stays honest.
Method 05
A catalog is a repetition machine. The same post-to-beam connection, the same window buck, the same cladding module is detailed once and built again on every home. Crews get faster each time, and the details that repeat are the details that get priced sharp.
Method 06
The envelope is the biggest line on the sheet: 24% of hard cost for roofing, windows, cladding, insulation, and air sealing to ACH50 at or below 1.0, blower-door verified. A simple form has less surface for the same floor, so that money buys thickness and tightness instead of shape. A tight, simple envelope then shrinks the mechanical bill behind it.
The proof
Every home page publishes the same seven-line hard-cost sheet, built on a $310 per square foot Okanagan 2026 basis and stated as an estimate with a ±8% band. The shares below are the model. As House No. 1 gathers real supplier and trade receipts, receipts replace estimates, line by line.
Model v0.1. Excludes land, design and permit soft costs, and GST. Sources and live data on the receipts page.