How to Save Money on a Custom House Plan
In this post, we shared a few reasons why we decided to customize a premade house plan versus starting from scratch. (more cost effective, checked our WHY boxes) but the biggest reason is that we are both very visual, so being able to look at renderings not only from a design perspective but building out the heat/hvac/plumbing plan was big for us.
There are lots of companies who offer done for you house plans that help take the guesswork out of designing your dream home. We knew what we wanted and spoke with an architect and he confirmed it would be cheaper to work with pre-existing plans versus hiring him to do something from scratch. So, that’s exactly what we did! After A LOT of pinning, we landed on Architectural Designs plan #12315JL It checked all of our boxes and wasn’t going to require any major changes.
Once we found our plan, we started making a detailed list of all the changes we wanted to make. Architectural Designs has a “modify this plan” directly on each plans page which made it super easy to submit our request. You can also submit attachments which we did, and recommend doing since it helps to streamline the communication and ensure everyone is on the same page. Below is the EXACT email we sent to AD so you can see how we broke down the changes:
Hello,
We are looking for a modification quote for the changes we'd like on plan 12315JL. Please see attached for sketches, details below. We understand that as our sketches are rough and dimensions may need to be adjusted.
Foundation:
Full basement with access to the garage. Main basement will have 8' ceilings with two 4' crawl space areas (see attached sketch)
Garage slab with 4ft frost walls
Changes to base plan: Please see the attached sketch, the major changes are to the garage and inlaw suite.
Expanded garage length to accommodate 4 cars
Inlaw suite will be bigger to be in line with the larger garage
Entrance to the inlaw suite now located in the garage instead of inside the house
Layout of inlaw suite is reconfigured and now has a screened in rear porch, access to porch is from the master bedroom
Patio access for the inlaw suite is from the future studio/office
In the main house
added stairs to access basement underneath the stairs to access 2nd floor
Master Bath-moved sink because access to master closet will now be through master suite, added area for linens. Bathroom door is a pocket door, also use pocket door for water closet.
Master closet-move door to bedroom wall, push this wall 1ft into master suite. Would rather have one large master closet with room for center dresser
Add patio door to backyard in breakfast area
Move door from great room to covered porch to center of the wall.
Bedroom 2 and adjacent bathroom will be turned into an office. See print, door in between offices will be a floor to ceiling glass door
We will need a door to the 2nd floor because that will not be finished until a later date.
Exterior-no exposed rafter tails and vented soffet, most likely will use vertical vinyl siding.
Additional Questions:
Can we vault the ceilings in the great room without any major changes to exterior roofline?
For our sketches, we took a screenshot of the floorplan AD listed on its website and uploaded it to Canva. Canva is an AMAZING (and FREE!) design program for non-designers. In Canva we were able to white out the spaces we wanted to make changes to. Then, we printed the pdf and penciled in the changes so the AD design team could visualize the changes on our list.
Here’s the drawings we sent in:
The AD team then worked on our quote with the designer. The quote came through and we purchased our plans! Overall a very easy process for semi-custom plans to get the home exactly how we imagined it.