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Turnkey House: What the Price Actually Includes
The real difference between a shell kit and turnkey, what each price covers, hidden costs, and where not to cut corners.
Published: August 14, 20263 min read
Shell kit or turnkey — what each one means
A shell kit means the house structure is done: assembled SIP panels, a finished roof, and exterior doors and windows installed — essentially a sealed, weathertight shell you can finish at your own pace. The estimated price starts at roughly €500/m².
A turnkey house means you get the keys and move in — every stage, from utilities to finishes, is already done. The estimated price starts at roughly €1,000/m², about double the shell kit, reflecting the real amount of work left to complete.
What the turnkey price actually covers
Beyond the SIP structure, the turnkey price covers every stage through move-in: electrical and plumbing, insulation and interior finishes, interior doors, flooring, and basic bathroom and kitchen fit-out.
In practice, turnkey means you're not coordinating an electrician, a plumber, and a finishing crew separately — everything sits under one fixed price, set after a consultation, with no surprise invoices along the way.
Why the price is fixed, not a starting point
Many "turnkey" offers on the market are actually a starting point, with "options" added later that push the final sum up significantly. With us, everything discussed at the consultation goes into the contract at a fixed sum — any later change to the project or the options is discussed and agreed explicitly, never added to the invoice automatically.
That approach lets you plan your total moving budget from the consultation stage onward, not partway through the build, when changes almost always cost more.
Shell kit plus your own finishing crew — who it suits
The shell kit makes sense for clients who already have a trusted finishing crew, want more control over the interior materials used, or prefer to spread the budget over a longer period.
The main risk with this option isn't money — it's coordination: without one team responsible for the whole project, a delay in one trade (say, the plumber) can hold up the next stage, like the finishes.
Hidden costs worth watching for
The most common costs people forget with classic construction are the foundation (which depends on the land, not the house) and utility connections — water, power, sewage — especially if the plot is far from existing networks.
With us, the foundation is always discussed separately, with clear options — piles or slab — because it depends on your land, not the project you picked. Every other stage of the turnkey package sits inside the price fixed after your consultation, so you don't discover extra costs halfway through the build. The same goes for site access or a working platform for equipment — we cover that at the consultation, not once the build has already started.
What not to cut corners on
The foundation and structure are the last place to trim budget — an undersized foundation or a cheap structure affects the whole house long-term, no matter how good the finishes above it look.
On the other hand, some finishes or outdoor landscaping can safely wait for a later stage, after you've moved in, without touching the structure or the house's safety.
A simple test: if a proposed saving touches the structure, insulation, or foundation, it's probably not worth it — if it only affects how a finish looks, it can usually wait without any risk.
A worked example: a small house vs a large one
For a compact 39.6 m² house, the shell kit starts at roughly €20,000, and the turnkey option at roughly €40,000. For a large 151 m² house, the shell kit starts at roughly €75,000, and the turnkey option reaches roughly €150,000.
Both examples add the foundation on top (€2,500 for piles or €4,000 for a slab) — see the full price breakdown for every project in the catalog. For a mid-size project, around 80–90 m², the estimated price sits proportionally between these two extremes.
How we fix the final price
We go through the project you picked from the catalog, your land, and your desired finishing level together — only after that conversation do you get a fixed price for the entire job, with no recalculating later.
This usually takes a single meeting — enough to cover every variable that matters, so the build starts with a price we don't change later.
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