Ok! This is exciting!
You have decided to build a new home
but now where do you start? You remember all those magazines about
House Plans back at the A&P. This is serious so you buy one of each,
8 House Plan Magazines in all. You soon find out that each magazine
contains most of the same plans! Now you're wondering if the A&P
will take them all back and give you a refund. Well that didn't
work. Next you visit a home builder in town but it's one of those
Production Builders (we use to call them Tract Builders). Sure, they
can build you a home but you must use one of their standard plans.
Any revisions to that plan will cost you dearly. You don't like any
of their plans. You have your own ideas of a house plan you have
been dreaming of for years. That's why we call them "Dream Homes".
I'm going tell you what I tell my clients who call or come in and sit down
with me in my office. Buying house plans can be sort of like buying
a shirt at the department store. I can go over to Jock Pena's and
buy a nice shirt of the shelf for about $30.00. If I need
alterations done to that shirt I could wind up spending $60.00. If I
have their Taylor custom make me a shirt from scratch I might be
spending $300.00. The same is true in buying a plan. There are loads
of companies online selling house plans. Warning... Many of those
are House Plan Brokers are selling plans from many different Home
Designers and like the magazines from the A&P, they have most all
the same plans. I know, I compete with them everyday. I am a little
prejudice because I want you to
buy your house plan
from me at my web site. From an online source you can find a
house plan that you will be very happy with.
The first thing you need to do is visit with your financial
planner, sometimes it's our Dads, and determine what the budget for
your new home will be. Depending on how you hope to finish the home
out, houses have been costing around $95.00 to $125.00 per square
foot times the Living space of a house plan. This price includes a 3
Car Garage and about 10% of the Living area in Covered Porches and
Patios. So a 3,200 square foot home could cost around $300,000 to
$400.00 depending on how extreme the finish out will be. These
prices also do not include the land so remember to add the cost of
the lot into the equation. However, there is only one sure fire way
to know how much a house plan will cost to build and that is to
visit with a few home builders and get prices.
While searching for a house plan, place 90% of your search on the
Floor Plan layout and not so much on the Exterior Style or what we
call the Front Elevation. Exterior Styles are mostly cosmetic and
can be revised more easily than revising a Floor Plan layout. Don't
pass up a house plan simply because that house plan shows shutters
on the windows and you don't want shutters.
Your House Plan Options are:
- Buying a Stock Plan from a
Stock Plan
Company.. If you find a plan that's just the
way you want it, you can buy it "Off The Shelf".
This is often called a "Stock Plan". You can buy just one set,
multiple sets, PDFs so you can print your own sets or sometimes
the actual CAD files.
- Revisions to a Stock Plan. Yes, this is where you
find a plan already drawn and you want to make some alterations
to it. You can expect to spend in plan alterations as much as you did for the plan, or more, so the plans now cost you twice as much
as if it were just the Stock Plan. Final Cost = Stock Plan + Time for
Revisions.
- Custom Plan from Scratch. Have your wish list ready
when you come to visit with the Home Designer. A custom home
plan can take a couple of months to complete the project and can
cost several times that of a Stock Plan. In the long run it all
works out because you are getting almost everything you Dreamed
about.
Before beginning your
search for a house plan, you need to review your wish list and know
how much size in square footage to look for. Size is determined by
budget so you need to know your budget.
