>>510802598My initial assumption was that this was a contractor justifying the sale price of a house he built rather than an owner line-iteming the cost, so you're right there. And I will confess my math was a bit short-sighted because I used a 2-3k square foot home estimate for the time-to-drywall but he does state the house itself is 8600 square feet, so the labor cost would theoretically be tripled, and that's a much bigger footprint than the "average home" I used in my wall math.
So hey, let's revisit that drywall math a little more carefully, and work it in the reverse order. An average room is about 225 square feet (14x16 feet), with a total perimeter of 60 feet, or about 15 pieces of drywall. With an 8600 square foot floor plan and assuming 3 stories (again, that's generous, the house is not 8 foot vaulted ceilings in every room on all 3 stories and all 3 stories do not occupy the total footprint, the basement and upper floor will be smaller, there's nothing above the garage, etc) that's 115 "total rooms", at an average of 15 pieces of drywall per room, which is 1,725 pieces of drywall, at approximately $14 a piece, so actually $24,150 total materials.
Assume it takes 6 workers 10 days to hang drywall in a 3,000 square foot home; a 9,000 square foot home would take 30 days. That's 1,440 man hours of labor at $45 an hour so $64,800 in total cost.
So if you add the cost and the materials together for a house of that size, it's not really that egregious, actually. Obviously I'm overestimating the total amount of sheetrock to be bought and hung by quite a bit here, but the overheads aren't actually terribly obscene. I guess it's just crazy how much bigger an 8600 square foot house really is than the typical size of 2500 square feet.