We are in the process of building a non-traditional home in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. If you're from the area, our property is near the intersection of Lake-Cook Road and Old Route 53, in Lake County-about 30 miles outside of the city.

We have no intention of selling this house, so building something for future resale is of no concern. We are designing a simple, box-like concrete structure that goes up quickly, has decent thermal mass and insulation, and is sturdy. What we have in mind is essentially a residential warehouse. The options so far are:

--Dukane Precast (Naperville, IL) SIP; concrete sandwich panels
--CarbonCast from MidStates Concrete (South Beloit, IL); concrete sandwich panel using composite connectors
--Thermomass (Boone, IA); precast sandwich panels, particularly interested in their modular precast product

Alternatively, we could also do a double-walled cast in place structure. I like the idea of a monolithic structure, but I'm concerned about cracking in the concrete, which is probably inevitable. However, the at roughly $4 per cubic foot for concrete, it is by far the least expensive--and fastest--way to stand this kind of structure up.

At this point, we are leaning heavily towards Dukane, but it would be great to hear an other ideas or opinions.

We want the interior to be raw, so using ICF's aren't very interesting, since would need to finish the interior with ICFs. The benefit of Dukane--and likely the other panel systems--is that the panels come finished (polished concrete). All of the HVAC will be exposed duct work, as well as external conduit for the electrical.

The size of the home is roughly 1800 square feet; 30' x 60'. There will be no basement and we are shooting for a 10-foot ceiling.

Based on conversations from various manufactures, it might be possible to erect the shell for about $75,000. This includes material, shipping, and labor.

Looking forward to everyone's thoughts.

so the interior is rough concrete? Where is your insulation?

It's not super-rough concrete, as Dukane does a good job of smoothing/polishing it at the factory. Their double-wall system places 8-inches of polyurethane in between concrete wythes that are a little under 3-inches thick. So the insulation is between the two concrete panels.

you'd need to be careful of the bottom of the panels where there is likely some thermal bridging where they sit on the footing. And make sure your concrete floor is isolated from the footing and wall. If I remember correctly they use plastic ties to hold the form panels together; metal ones would bring cold into the interior.

You have ruled out SCIPs?

I thought that all of the products I mentioned above were SCIPs?

unless SCIPs are exclusively made with shotcrete.

You might be right technically, but generally SCIP means shotcrete. The weakness of precast panels is the joints and perhaps the shipping cost. So I'm curious why shotcrete SCIP isn't a consideration.

What is the installed cost per square foot of a SCIP shell?
Can SCIPs be smooth finished pretty easily?