Who Will Draw Our House Plans?

Reader Contribution by Jennifer Kongs
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The Small Home, Big Decisions seriesfollows Jennifer and her husband, Tyler, as they build a self-reliant homestead on a piece of country property in northeastern Kansas. The series will delve into questions that arise during their building process and the decisions they make along the way. The posts are a work in progress, written as their home-building adventure unfolds.

Tyler and I found a basic passive solar house plan online and made some modifications to make it our own.  In order to get final approval for our mortgage, the bank requires a set of house plans, complete with an estimate on how much the house will cost to construct, and proof of our contractor’s certification. We had several options at this point, ranging from trying to find other plans online that we could pay a fee to use, to hiring a passive solar architect to draw up final, customized plans. Our builder suggested that we have the plans drawn by a designer at the lumber company we would likely be working with. If we paid to have our plans drawn by the lumber company and then we purchased our lumber from that company, the cost for the final plans would be taken off the cost of the lumber. In essence, the plans would be almost free.  Because we already had a basic house plan in mind, we decided we didn’t need to hire a specialized architect, and that hiring a designer at the lumber company sounded like a smart move.

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