Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett
New Parliament House in Canberra was built in extravagant haste between 1984 and 1988, by digging up a large sandstone hill, building a palace in the hole, and landscaping over the roof. It is panelled with rare hardwoods and marquetry, and lined with rare marble, and is really quite lavish and, well, palatial. It cost A$1.1 billion and has a floor area of 250,000 square metres. That's $4,400 per square metre, one sixtieth what you suggest. Adjust the price up for inflation. Adjust it down for not fast-tracking construction in the most wasteful way. Adjust it down again for not cladding the columns in rare green marble quarried in Queensland, exported to Italy, and re-imported to Australia, not laying parquetry floors, etc. |
I think that Crakkerjack is increasing the final cost extravagantly for having to do the renovations on the castle itself (or at least a wing of it) without making any major use of any technology originating after the Industrial Revolution.
Personally, I think that would increase the time the labour portion took, by some
huge factor, which in turn would increase the labour costs. It would also affect materials cost, a lot, but I have no idea how much. You'd need to log trees with low-tech methods, make use of the rock that was already there and quarry what new rock you needed using sweat instead of diesel for fuel, etc.
Ridiculously expensive, if you needed a lot of new materials, but perhaps not much of a factor if most of the renovations consisted of clearing away stuff, not adding to it, and you didn't need to add any large slabs of stone. It would matter least to small-scale improvements and most to gigantic scale projects.
I have no idea how much these things would cost, as I don't know about anyone who wants to do such a perfectly ridiculous thing as what amounts to archeological reconstructions of a whole castle (or at least a wing).
Fortunately, though, for that part of it supposed to function as a sanctum, it doesn't have to look new. It just has to be inhabitable. It's perfectly okay if that part of it still has a bit of a ruin-ish aspect.
For everywhere else than the sanctum, it's okay to use normal construction techniques, possibly taking care to keep any large-scale machinery away from the vicinity of the sanctum.