Nearly every home plan site offers to change your stock drawings to your specific requirements. This is a valuable service, but be careful, some seemingly small changes can be expensive and even more expensive to assemble.
One change - many drawings
There was a time when changes in the plans of the houses were made on the ground without any documentation. If you want to make the house a little bigger, you only need to inform your contractor about it - and you didn’t have an examiner of plans and a building inspector looking over your shoulder.
But as we will learn in chapter 4 " Not enough house plans “Building codes across the country are becoming increasingly stringent, and planning experts are looking more closely at house plans. When a change in a set of drawings occurs, this change must also be documented as source plans, regardless of size or complexity. This is sometimes not very important, but sometimes a lot of changes are needed in the set of drawings and costly changes in the house itself.
Consider, for example, a theoretical two-foot extension of a family room at the back of a two-story home with a basement. If you are working with a typically complete set of plans, your two-foot extension will require a change to all of the following figures to accept your local building department:
Fund plan
Ground floor plan
Second floor plan
Roof plan
Left-hand side
Right side
Rear height
Main building plot
These are just “architectural” drawings — you will also need structural changes that may require consideration by a registered architect or professional engineer. And in areas requiring compliance with energy codes, these calculations will need to be redone.
Don't let that scare you into considering changing your design - just make sure you get a solid quote from all the work necessary to ensure that your drawings are fully prepared to apply for permits. Or better yet, find a plan that does not need these changes.
Some plan services have popular “pre-designed” additions and modifications, with all the necessary drawings already completed. If one of these projects meets your needs, this is a much more efficient and cost-effective way.
Consider the impact on the rest of the house.
If you find that the change you want to make is not proposed as a preliminary design, you may want to make your own change. But do not be carried away by major changes - the trick is not to make so many changes that it was better for you to change another plan or create your own house from scratch.
Every day, my employees advise homeowners who have already made their home designs, and then added another room. Too often, we find that the final room (often the screened porch) is difficult or impossible without design problems.
If they do not consider the entire design from day one, they risk “disguise” a perfectly good home plan.
The same concept applies to pre-designed house plans. Do not buy one that has almost everything you want, and assume that your other rooms can be easily added. This one more room can spoil everything that you fell in love with the plan of the house in the first place.
Adding rooms to a completed plan can sometimes cause a chain reaction of changes — a new room blocks the bedroom window; the window cannot be moved without moving the wall; displaced wall makes the bath too small ... etc
Instead, use the “curriculum” that most services offer. Buy the curriculum kit that is closest to what you want and ask the plan or your professional to evaluate it for the possibility of the change you want. Training kits are not cheap, but they are much cheaper than reworking the entire plan.
Architects cannot print plans.
It’s written somewhere on each service plan website: "You may need to review your house plans and stamp a local engineer or architect."
Unfortunately, this is against the law in many jurisdictions - for architects. According to the statute, architects should prepare or supervise training architectural drawings before they can attach a stamp or stamp to them. In other words, this is called “plan-timping”, and this is a practice that can cost the Architect his license.
This is bit-22; you have permission from the author of the plan to change plans, but not from your state licensing license.
An architect may — in some cases — print a set of plans that he did not prepare if he made significant changes to them. What is considered “significant”? That your Architect and his State Council make a decision. If you make many changes to the plans, you are likely to be clear, although there is no acceptable legal threshold for “significant” changes. But what if the design that you found is in the order it is, and you just need to prepare it for sending permissions?
Ironically, in this situation, the best option could be a “non-architect” - a tenant-designer, developer or civil engineer. As an Architect, it's hard for me to say, but the law is the law!
For a structured review, the answer is simple - find and hire a local civil engineer to view plans, size of structural members and place your stamp on the set. An experienced civil engineer can catch several “non-structural” code problems along the way.
For non-structural problems, you can have an Architect to provide a list of standard notes that you can attach to drawings - without having to stamp the drawings. You can also get this information from your builder or from a residential designer or designer.
But again, all this can be controversial - since very few jurisdictions in the country require an architect stamp on the drawings for a single-family house!
Therefore, first contact your building department, but do not assume that the architect can always “stamp” your pre-designed plans.
minimum Code match
Plan services to sell plans that correspond to the code that operated in the place where the house was built, and at the time when the house was built.
In the United States, local building codes are based on one of four current “model” codes. Each of these codes has similarities, but each has its own differences. Each code undergoes a periodic revision, so they are constantly changing.
It is very likely that the plan for the house you are buying will require some changes to bring it to the code.
More importantly, however, the idea that the plan you are buying will be at best minimally corresponding to the building code. This will give you a plan for most of the construction departments, but leave very few specifications and parts at home.
This is the case with most of the construction drawings of the same family, even those that you receive from an architect. It is your job to work with your builder and, possibly, an interior designer to satisfy all the details needed to build the interior and exterior.
Check your service plan's list of drawings — some services include more detailed information than others. Plans are a good start, but you can still have a lot of work!
