Crafting animated objects

Suppose I was a high level caster with the Craft Construct feat and after watching Disney's Beauty & the Beast decided that my lonely tower would be a lot more fun if it was full of animated objects that I have crafted. But I can only find the 1 round/level spell animate objects. Although it can be made permanent with permanency, it is dispellable. Plus it's a bit unfair to have to pay 3,000 XP to make a singing and dancing teapot, especially when I have the Craft Construct feat. Are there any rules out there for crafting permanently (as in non-dispellable and can function in an antimagic area like golems can) animated objects? If not, what you would propose would make some good rules?

I am afraid I've never found a solution for this. It's possibly one of my very early little disappointment with D&D (3ed at least), that there was no spell* to animate a broom like Mickey Mouse in "the apprentice wizard"

*except the high-level clerical spell you already know, except that I've never understood why clerics should animate objects

I don't remember how Craft Construct works, but crafting an animated objects which does not attack or play part in combat should be cheap. The reason why there isn't a rule is probably that, that if it doesn't help combat or adventuring, no one needs rule about that.

If you were in my campaign, I'd let you do the following: as long as you paid costs for masterwork items, an Xp cost of 1/25 of the market price and normal time requirements, it's already enough a cost for something that has no effects on your PC's power.

For very cheap objects such as a broom or teapot, I'd apply a minimum masterwork cost of 50gp (standard for masterwork tools) and one day. What do you think?

I'm thinking of making the base cost Item + 50gp masterwork + CR squared * 1,000 GP.

So, that would make it for the various animated objects Item + 50gp +:

250 gp for CR 1/2 tiny 1/2 hd (size of a cat)
1,000 gp for CR 1 small 1 hd
4,000 gp for CR 2 medium 2 hd
9,000 gp for CR 3 large 4 hd
25,000 gp for CR 5 huge 8 hd
49,000 gp for CR 7 gargantuan 16 hd
100,000 gp for CR 10 colossal 32 hd

If we extrapolate down, we could get
111 gp for CR 1/3 diminutive 1 HP
63 gp for CR 1/4 fine 1 HP

So, this formula covers the prices for the combat useful high CR animated objects, while making the tiny, diminutive, and fine animated objects affordable.

Does this look good? Should it be more expensive. Does a fine animated construct (item gp + 50 gp + 62 gp) have the same game value as an Everburning Torch (110 gp)

Note that Craft Construct has Craft Arms & Armor and and Craft Wonderous Items as prerequisite. So it would take a dedicated crafting spellcaster who took CWI at 3rd level and CA&A at 6th level 9th level to pick up Craft Construct. And a less dedicated crafter longer. A wizard or artificer could pick it up at 6th level.

Is this formula balanced, or should it be different?

You could do it with a Polymorph Any Object spell. It's still dispellable, but no xp cost.

I swear I saw a copy of Dragon Magazine a long time ago with something covering this. Your formula looks just fine to me for animated objects doing their usual task-however, using this to make cheap intelligent items wouldn't work so well. Even if they can't actually do much, any wizard could make a load of cheap companions and advisors through this.