While waiting in a grocery line, many people thumb through magazines containing house plans. It’s a pleasant way to while away the time and envision your dream home, but does anyone really build a house using them?
The answer, emphatically, is yes. Both home builders and individual homeowners buy the plans and build houses. But if you’re considering doing it yourself, be forewarned: It’s not as easy as it looks.
“Many people who use the home plan services think if you do it this way, everything will be easy and less expensive, but people also want houses that are stylish and eye-catching, and this is expensive,” said Michael Jacobson, a home builder in Tuscaloosa, Ala. You can get all you want size-wise for $200,000 or you can get more elaborate for $100,000 more. Typical big ticket items that his clients desire include a plan with turns and offsets, ceiling heights that can vary from 9 to 13 feet in the same house, two or more skylights, two fireplaces, a steep roof pitch and lots of gables.
When you look at plans, you should also think about resale and make sure that you are getting a “marketable piece of merchandise,” advised Curtis Mickan, a home builder in Georgetown, Texas. In the Austin market where he builds, houses with a second-floor master bedroom don’t sell well. Besides market preferences, owners should also factor in regional building conventions. In Texas, homes are built without basements, and garages are used for storage. But adding on a garage bay to accommodate this won’t work with every plan, he said.
Plans may need to be modified because of local building code requirements, or other factors such as the local climate. In the past, Mickan has gotten plans from a firm in Phoenix, “where it rains four inches a year, but in Austin it can rain four inches an hour, requiring major alteration of the roof and overhangs.”
Altering the plans adds to the basic $400 to $1,000 cost. Some services will modify them for an additional charge, but several home builders said that owners were better off to order the more expensive, reproducible sets, which the builder can modify. The cost to change the plans varies. The extensive changes necessitated by his localitymeans cost of the plans and changes averaged about $2,500, Mickan said.
Homeowners should also realize that every plan will not fit on every site. “Most of the time buyers fall in love with a lot, buy it and then expect the builder to fit the house on it,” Mickan said.
Besides the size and shape of the lot, other constraints such as the slope, orientation, approach and homeowner association covenants can also affect the feasibility of a plan, said Stephen Fuller, president of Design Traditions, a home plan service in Atlanta.
Would-be new homeowners who are considering this route should also realize that the material the plan services offer is like a plot outline. To flesh out the story, you need to have a written list of materials. Most services will include, for an additional $50 to $100, a list specifying the required amount of material for each component of the house. A key point to remember is that quantity, not quality, is given. For every component of a house, there are several choices that range in both price and quality.
Then there is the most critical issue of all–which home plan magazines tend to glide over: Who will bring all the pieces together and how will I find him or her?
From friends, real estate agents, or your local home builder association, try to get the names of at least three builders and interview each one. Be sure to ask how many years they have been working in the home-building business (the longer the better) and what kind of warranty service is offered.
