Mother's Low-Cost Home-Building Contest: The Winners

Image Gallery The Kennedy's three-story, passivesolar home cost only $11.85 per square foot for materials. PHOTOS COURTESY OF JAMES PHOTOS COURTESY OF JAMES KENNEDY

After months of agonizing deliberation, our six-member panel of judges has narrowed the financialists to five superior designs.

It sounded simple enough at first: We'd have a contest to see who could build the least expensive home. Maybe there'd be a first, second, and third prize, and the top entries could split $1,000 into $500, $300, and $200 awards. We'd have a six-member panel of judges—an architect, two professional builders, and a trio of MOTHER's editors with various levels of building expertise—to bring a broad base to the scrutiny. Well, a year has passed since we announced the contest, and we can tell you for sure that it didn't turn out to be quite as simple as we'd imagined.

For one thing, there are big houses and little ones, and economy of scale certainly applies to construction: A 3,000-square foot home is much easier to build for less than $15 per square foot than is a 1,000-square=foot one. Initially, we planned to correct for this by limiting entries to houses of 1,500 or more square feet. The trouble is, the best way to limit overall home cost is to keep the dwelling small. Not wishing to eliminate any potentially interesting entries, we lifted that restriction. Then there was the question of houses built from trees on the owners' property. Should we throw in the cost of the land and, if applicable, the cost of purchasing a sawmill to cut the timber? And, of course, to some degree you do get what you pay for. A cheaper house isn't necessarily a better one; should long-term operating costs be considered?

As the 33 entries in the Low-Cost Home-Building Contest began arriving in April 1985, the need to weigh these and other considerations became increasingly obvious. In short, it became apparent that we couldn't simply divide material cost by square footage to pick a winner. Nonetheless, we were receiving some extraordinary entries. All of them represented ingenious ideas, but a few of the designs did stand out.

By July, our panel had made the easy decisions. We'd managed to pick out seven homes that were particularly inexpensive, innovative, and well executed. Getting from there to choosing the winner, however, proved to be an almost insurmountable problem. We simply couldn't agree. No question about it, personal taste had come into play. And, unfortunately, some of the opinions were so disparate that it would have been unreasonable to work out some sort of point-based ranking system and decide by averages.