Tim,
My wife and I are starting to plan the building of our new home but we disagree on where the blueprints should be acquired. She thinks that it would be best to hire a professional architect to design the home and I believe that is would be easier and more affordable to order pre-drawn blueprints from an Internet house designs site. Do the plans off the Internet work as well as they are advertised? Do you know of any problems that can occur by choosing this method?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ken in Louisiana
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Ken,
I am not going to score any points with either you or your wife with my answer. You are both right. Many of the blueprint services offer superb plans. But they are not always suited for exact geographic locations. What's more, they almost always need to be tweaked to make the perfect home for you and your wife.
The preliminary planning process where you and an architect dance until you both discover exactly what you want can often take weeks and months and cost thousands of dollars in design fees on the part of the architect. Once he knows what you want, he starts to draw actual construction drawings.
If you and your wife pick the nearly perfect home from an online desing/plan website and buy just one set of plans, you can save many hundreds of dollars, perhaps more. Since you paid for the plans, you can build that house or modify the plan to suit your tastes without violating the copyright on the plan. This is where your wife's point of view is right on target. A local architect needs to use the online plan with your suggestions and his input to develop the perfect plan for you.
Tim Carter
www.askthebuilder.com
W3ATB