Home Plans

[bfrikken]

For the better part of one year, I've been commuting for an hour each way to my job. My wife works right near where we live, but she is down to 2 days a week because she stays home with our daughter.

We are considering her staying home full time, and if we do this, we will move to the town where I work. Of course, we'll be leaving behind a wonderful subdivision, and a beautiful house

Long story short, we are considering building a home. I'm going to start looking for house plans, but was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on where I can find home plans. Maybe a website, a book, software, etc.

My wife is making a trip to our library today. I'm gonna hit the web and try the library close to me.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

[stewchi]

Not sure about were to get plans, we started looking into when we moved here and found construction prices are really really high. Decided instead to buy and house, and bought a 2 year old house for $92 / sqft. With construction costs estimated at $120 sq/ft for the basic and $140-$160 sq/ft for more custom like wood floor, tray ceilings, custom kitchen and baths etc. Good Luck on the move.

[scorrpio]

First, you'd have to know exactly what your new plot looks like, its size, orientation, shape, and soil characteristics. Weather it'll be a brnd new construction, or replacement of a pre-existing building. A house plan that might look great to you in a book might be a total mismatch with your plot's size, shape, climate, orientation etc. There also might be certain community rules in your new place. For example, my mother owns a house in a community in Reston, VA area, and when her neighbors decided to expand their rear deck, they first had to acquire community management approval - including agreement from my mother. That's just for the deck.

Second, whatever house you decide to build, the exact plan that fits your plot will have to be approved by a licensed architect before authorities allow to build it. You WILL have to involve an architect, so might as well involve one as early as possible, in order to avoid wasted efforts.

Gather as much info as possible on your new plot, do a survey if possible. Go through magazines, books, even real estate listings, print out pictures and highlight the elements that you like.

Decide on number and relative sizes of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc, again check magazines, books and such for interior styles. One or two floors? Full basement or slab/crawlspace? Cathedral ceilings? Straight or spiral staircases? Size of garage and attached/detached? Patio? Deck? Porch? What utilities are there (gas, electric, water, sewage, phone/ cable) and where will be their points of entry? Will you be need to be using a well, septic tank, LP gas/oil tank? What heating/AC system type will you use?

All these and a thousand more questions will have to be answered before any sort of construction starts, and without a qualified architect, you will just end up wasting time.

And yeah, contruction is darn expensive. There is increasingly a shortage of skilled labor, so contractors cut all possible corners and often hire unskilled workers who will do shoddy work. All my friends who did major alterations to their house agree that if you are heavily budget constrained and have to go with the lowest bidder, be prepared to personally oversee every little step and stock up on your favorite headache medication.

If you decide to go ahead with this, good luck. You'll need it.

[Thalermade]

Check out the magazine rack at your local grocery store (or HD or Lowes). Ususally there are magazines with numerous floor plans and styles of houses. On the other hand that puts you into more of a "custom" build situation.

If you are planning to build do look through books and magazines, but also start touring homes for sale in the neighborhoods or by the local builders and see what they are like.

You should look into the house builders in the town you want to move. See what their standard floor plans are and inquire about modifications. There are numerous personal modifications to the basic dozen floor plans in our neighborhood. Quite amazed when you see some folks with sunken living rooms, others with stair cases ending in the kitchen instead of the foyer, wider staircases (42" instead of 36"). And all it took was asking the builder.

From experience, this is the easy part of home building.

[bfrikken]

Hmm, I'm wondering what went wrong with my original post....

I'm looking for suggestions on magazines, books, websites others may have used regarding plans for building a home. I don't think it was intended to be negative scorrpio, but I was rather taken aback by your post. It was very patronizing and condescending. My question was one about resources in finding house plans. Not asking about pitfalls about building or the negatives.
A lot of your post deal with some common sense questions unrelated to my post. I'm very sorry, but you made me feel dumb for asking my question.

Anyways, we've decided to slow down some of our building discussions. We've found a couple websites for house plans. We are going to start digging through these.

We are open to different areas we may eventually may build. We will be scouting out some potential properties to purchase and hope that we can find a subdivision/development that is open to any builder and will work nicely with a plan we select. Kind of the chicken/egg syndrome...

Also, we picked up a bunch of plans at a builders expo that happened to be going on. So far, none have been to our liking. Although there were 2 different builders who we liked after talking to a bunch. They'd work off other plans and also would sit down with us and their architect to get our ideas down and come up with something.

[jAngiel]

That is what I was going to suggest, searching online. Google house plans and all kinds of sites become available. And it's free, no buying books, no getting old books with outdated houses. We searched and looked for weeks before we decided to add on to our house instead of building a new house.

[LarryG]

We will be scouting out some potential properties to purchase and hope that we can find a subdivision/development that is open to any builder and will work nicely with a plan we select. Kind of the chicken/egg syndrome...

A little bit chicken/egg, but not too much. Ideally a house should be designed in response to a specific site but if you're looking at subdivision lots, you won't have a lot of options WRT how the house is oriented. Further, most stock plans that you'll be looking at will assume the house's front will face a street, the rear will face your own back yard, and that there will be neighboring houses on each side. That will dictate the general layout to a large extent. You may have to know whether you need a design for a flat lot or a sloping lot, but that's about all. A house's footprint is small enough that it would take a pretty extreme piece of property, grade-wise, to make a design totally unbuildable on that lot. Lastly, you'll need to decide whether you want a single- or multi-story house.

Any decent bookstore will have any number of "magazines" containing hundreds of stock plans; bigger bookstores will have even more in their Home Building/Repair/Remodeling section. If you look at enough of them, two things will happen: your eyes will glaze over, and you'll realize that a lot of the plans are either exactly the same or very close, with a different exterior design to make it "Traditional" or "Contemporary" or "Colonial" or whatever.

My 36 year career has been spent on both sides of the construction and architectural fence; I've also straddled it, when I worked as the in-house designer for a design/build firm. I've done probably 250 houses, mostly during the first 10 years; the firm at which I've worked for the last 19 years does very few houses and I really kinda miss 'em. Anyway, as your plans settle down I'd be more than happy to give you whatever help I can.

[linear]

What worked well for us was using the aforementioned magazines (cheap and readily available) for the initial stages. It let us narrow down on specific features we both liked, things that were to be avoided, nice-to-haves, and so on. Looking at a few dozen plans and elevations is an excellent first step, and you're not married to any of them. Library books were too out-of-date in my area, but the mags were pretty good.

We were able to find a plan that was about 85% of what we wanted. From there, we worked with an architect to get that number as close to 100% as we could afford. You may find two plans that have appealing features and want to merge them into a single plan.

I'll also offer that using the software was an enormous waste of time for us. It just amounts to a less-convenient way to browse the dozens of plans you need to browse before you decide what you like.

[lago]

We built our retirement home about 3 years ago. We spend many Sunday afternoons looking at model homes and then I used 3D Architect and came up with the basics before turning it over to an architect for the final plans. Don't have any major regrets at this time.

[scorrpio]

Sorry, did not mean to sound condescending or negative. Just that from my experience, once you see a plan you like in a magazine or elsewhere, by the time that plan is adapted to the particulars of the site and all the local codes and regulations, it is about unrecognizable.

I did suggest magazines and real estate-related websites (just about like everybody else here), but I guess where I did not make my thought clear is that these resources are best used for various design elements - chances of finding a house plan that'll exactly fit are rather slim.

[bigstick509]

House plan site

http://www.coolhouseplans.com/