The house plans

We are drawing up the house plans ourselves. Fortunately, I am somewhat familiar with Autocad or else I do not know if we could do this part of the process. Our floorplan and elevations have changed about 50 times since we first began. We started off the process by making a list of what we like and dislike about our current residence. We also made a separate wish list of things we would like the house to contain or how we would the house to be designed. From there we did some rough sketches on notebook paper of the basic floor plan. Once we got the rooms arranged how we wanted, then came the tedious process of laying out everything to scale. For this I used ¼” graph paper. It worked great. After what seemed like years drawing and erasing and then drawing again , it was finally time to get everything entered in to Autocad. I would have drawn this up in cad from the beginning, but it would have taken me too long. I found it easier to first draw it on paper and then enter it into autocad. We have been through the drawing/AutoCad process about 5 times now. Hopefully we got it just how we want it this time. We also constructed a couple of model houses to make sure we got everything right. At one point we even steaked out a life size floor plan to see how big the rooms would be.

I have found the bathroom layout and window placement to be the two most difficult things in this process. Not to mention finding a window manufacturer. I will probably dedicate a posting later on describing all we have learned about windows. Thursday of last week received our quote back from the window manufacturer we are going to use. We were quite surprised to find they came back about 4K under budget. They were not our first choice (appearance wise), but they manufacturer is a long time member of the BBB and the windows are very energy efficient. The manufacturer really seems to stand behind their product.

Back to the house plans. After we got the plans just about how we wanted them, we needed to get some estimates on how much it would cost to build. Most materials you can pretty much figure out for yourself and get a rough estimate. However, seeing we were building our house with steel, changed things a bit. If the entire house was to be constructed with light gauge steel, I could have ball parked the materials needed and then made a quick call to a light gauge steel stud manufacturer and got some pricing. But since we decided to use SS to support the house, this complicated things a bit. If anyone is curious to learn about SS, I encourage you to visit the AISC website. Recognizing I was completely unable to even come close to engineering the structure myself, I turned to a structural engineer. With their help (and a nice fee), we were able to determine what size columns and beams we would need to support our house. Having this information allowed me to get some material quotes on the correct size steel we needed.

Up to this point we knew exactly how much house we could afford. That being said, we also new how much we actually wanted to spend on the house. Being a realistic person, just because the bank says we qualified for a loan for X amount, did not mean we wanted to spend X amount. You have to leave room in your monthly budget for unexpected expenses, retirement, and kids (if we ever have any). So we took the number the bank(s) gave us and divided it by 2…almost. I like to live well below my means. From this point, we could begin to add up the material and labor costs. Of course there will be things we will accidentally leave out of the budget, some that will go over budget due to the material estimate being a bit short, and the cost of some materials will increase between now and then. Even will all this factored in, we are still forecasted to come in under budget. I probably just jinxed us by saying that. I think I can handle 5 or 10%... I will be pretty mad if it ends up being 20% or more…

Next – A little info about the house we have been so diligently planning.