Springtime Home Plans

It’s Spring! Time to Develop your Home Plans

Remember last Fall when you were all gung-ho about getting your new home plans designed? Well, it is now Spring and it’s time to get going again. Your home plans are a necessary part of what it takes to establish the design, size, location, and features that your builder uses to construct your next house.

It Takes a Lot More to Build a House than just Home Plans:

Some people may believe that “plans” just means the floor plans. While floor plans are a vital part, that is not all that goes into a set of “home plans.” There are roof plans, building sections, exterior building elevations, structural framing for your floors and roof, wall sections, details of vertical and plan conditions, structural engineering drawings, specifications for architectural mechanical, plumbing, electrical, and structural systems, and more. Often people elect to have electrical plans, as this will establish where all of your electrical outlets need to be located and the switches and light fixtures, data outlets for internet connections, phone outlets, security sensors and system controls, Wi-Fi router equipment, lightning protection locations and details and more. Your interior finishes need to be described, usually in the form of a Finish Schedule, on which each room of your house is listed, along with the finishes for each surface in the room, along with the wall base and other special wall and ceiling treatments. A Door Schedule is usually included describing the locations, types, materials, finishes, and sizes of all of the doors in the project.

In addition to home plans, there are site plans, project drawing indexes to organize the drawing set, project location maps to assist the contractors in finding your building site, and other administrative and cover sheet information to manage your project.

Some rare few residential architects, like Rand Soellner, include standardized bid forms for your General Contractor, so that you can compare apples to apples when your project is bid competitively. So, home plans include quite a lot more than just the floor plans, don’t they?

It’s Not Important if You Call them Home Plans. What is Important is that You Start Now:

House architects don’t care what you call them. But now that you understand just how involved they are, shouldn’t you get your residential architects going now? Home plans are not created overnight. This process should stop and start from time to time, in order for you to have input on the developing design. After all, you are paying for it; you need to keep track of the project and make sure you are getting the design you want. This all takes some time, to give you review days during the course of the project which, in turn, extends the total length of the design phase. So you may want to give some serious thought to starting the project now.

Why? You will probably never see a better economic climate for building your new house. Contractors are being very competitive right now. Our housing market has been in the doldrums, but now it is starting to recover; according to Warren Buffett, the savvy Wall Street investor with hundreds of millions of dollars invested in his own residential construction companies.

Enjoy Savings on the Construction of your Home Plans if You Begin Soon:

What does this mean for you? As the present housing over-built market is absorbed in the coming few months, new construction will resume. According to Buffett, the housing market problems should largely be behind us by early 2011 (February), which means it is in the process of recovering right now and should largely be recovered later this year. These things do not happen over night. So, you would be well advised to engage your house architects to have them begin designing your home plans as soon as possible. This way, by the time you are ready to build, the deals that exist now for your new house will hopefully still be available to you. There will come a time in the coming months when the housing market will get back to normal, so take advantage of the situation now: start your springtime home plans now.

Residential contractors will treat you like royalty right now, but this will not last forever. The normal state of affairs, as the housing market recovers, will be that contractors will get busy again and when that happens, you may be lucky to receive a phone call back when you try to contact builders. Now is the time to begin your project. It can take several weeks or months to have your design drawings and specifications prepared, so it is important to have this accomplished as soon as possible, to avoid the rush that may ensue as the housing market reestablishes itself.

It appears that the overbuilt situation is spread out over the USA. And what is happening right now, in towns and villages across America, is that these houses are being bought. This is why not much new housing has been built during the last year or so. That is why the housing market has been largely silent for the last several months. But! As soon as the current abundance of built homes sitting out there is finally absorbed, at the rate of 1.2 million per year (according to Warren Buffett), new residential construction will resume. Be prepared for this. Now that you understand the situation, make it work for you. Be there on the upswing, enjoying the economics of starting now.