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Building Our Custom Home |
| CHOOSING A HOUSE PLAN We could have hired an architect to design our house from scratch but we figured that with millions of house plans having been draw up over the decades, certainly there is one out there that was "close enough" to begin with. There are a couple of big companies that have house plans available online and if you live in a sizeable city, there is probably a home designer close to where you live. What worked the best for us was to find a floor plan that worked really well for our lifestyle in our square footage price range first and then we found the front elevation that we liked. If you first look for a house that you like on the outside, chances are that you wont want the layout inside. A good designer can put practically any look on the outside of the floor plan you choose. There were probably 50 small items that we had changed on the design to customize it for our needs and tastes and the overall cost for the plan was less than $3000. The great thing about getting existing plans from designers is that they have been built before and usually any problems in the plans have been caught on a previous construction. Going this route also saved us over $40,000 compared to the cost of an architect. Unless you are wanting 100% custom and something that is a bit complicated, definitely look into using a home design service. |