Stock Home Plans…Are They Worth It?
With the wide world of the internet being a seemingly endless ocean of availability, why shouldn’t we be able to find stock, pre-drawn house plans and alter them to fit our every want, need and desire, every aesthetic, style and size? There are several reasons why this should work, but we should be very careful about grabbing a set of plans drawn by an unknown person in an unknown place. So let’s dive in and see if stock plans are actually worthwhile. Being a designer myself, I will admit my bias, but I will also do my best to be as objective as I can. For the purposes of this argument, we’ll assume that these plans are drawn by a designer, and not the dreaded AI, the results of which can be seen hilariously here.
The Good:
Cost
The number one benefit is most certainly cost. The designer has drawn the floor plans once, and is hoping to sell them over and over again. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about doing this myself, but for reasons we’ll discuss throughout, I couldn’t in good conscience do it. As a result of hoping to sell these multiple times, they can offer them at a discounted price, so cost is huge factor here. A client looking for a 2000sqft home with garage, may be looking at between $8-25k for a custom designed home (depending on the designer) and a quick google search for stock plans reveals that the same can be found starting at $1100 and heading north from there. These will give you a full 3d rendered view of the home and its rooms, beautifully laid out and decorated, with floor plans and elevations, and these certainly give the illusion of incredible value for dollars. But unfortunately, that’s not where the story ends.
Browsing thousands of styles from the comfort of your home
Certain websites that sell stock house plans have thousands of options, clients can browse by home size, price, style, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, number of floors, footprint size, the options are seemingly endless. There is a certain jolt of electricity one gets when sitting down to review these, as possibilities seem endlessly exciting. And that’s maybe an achilles heel. I whittled down my search by style, size, and number of bathrooms, and there were still 70 different homes I could choose from, and that’s only on one website. If I know anything about clients, and I think I do by now, too many choices is as frustrating as too few. With no expertise, it can be overwhelming trying to pare down the list.
The Bad:
Illusion of Cost Savings
Quick story, when reviewing quotes with a client for a medical building, our company had received three bids for the external cladding. One was for $90k, one was for $53k, and one was for $32k, which is a disconcerting gap for me. We talked to the client and advised him to select the $53k bid, it was a contractor we had worked with previously, and had success with. The client was interested in saving money, and saw the opportunity to save $21k by selecting the low bid, his exact words were “how bad can it be? Even if we have to spend money fixing their mistakes, it probably won’t be for $21k.” That logic is fine, but knowing the industry, it didn’t make me any more comfortable. I think you know how this story ends. The cheaper contractor was terrible, didn’t have enough experienced workers to do the job, and risked us being able to complete the project. We fired them, and they sued us for breach of contract. We had to use our own forces to finish the job, which ended right around the $50k mark.
The point of this story, is that the illusion of cost savings by using cheaper products is just that, an illusion. This is certainly the case with stock house plans. These plans certainly won’t be good enough to build from, and they won’t be good enough to even submit for building permit. They lack the detail required by municipalities that are specific to the client’s site, building bylaws, and region that will be required to even submit for a building permit. More on that in a moment, but there will be some alterations required, and they’ll need to be made by someone with knowledge of local building and planning bylaws, and there will be costs incurred there. So now our costs begin to creep up toward our projected costs for a custom designer. This is a theme we’ll visit again.
Code Compliance & Engineering
Every region in the world has their own building bylaws and engineering standards that buildings are required to adhere to. Some are defined by their city/county/regional district, some are defined by their province/state, some will be national governance, but the nuances of each region vary widely. Permitted soil conditions, roof loads, permitted floor/roof spans, headers/lintel spans, accepted building materials, acceptable floor/wall/roof assemblies & insulation (just to name a few) will all vary within each region or subregion, province or country. A building requiring hurricane resistance in Florida will not comply with the seismic restrictions in San Francisco. The frost protection of footings in Georgia will not be the same as Toronto. Without expert guidance, there is no way of knowing if the house plans purchased comply with your local standards. These drawings will need to be assessed and marked up by a designer to ensure that the drawings comply, adding more cost.
Site Analysis
A properly designed home will have a detailed site analysis completed. Prevailing winds, sun path, vegetation, habitat, landform, and many other factors should inform the building’s design, but when we order plans from the internet, all these nuances go out the window. These factors will ultimately decide how thermally comfortable the occupants are, how efficiently the space is used, and how hard the building’s mechanical systems need to work in order to keep the building at a reasonable temperature. Not to mention the orientation of the building relative to the view. The secret to great design lies in the smaller details, which aren’t considered in stock house plans.
Most stock house plans are drawn for a flat site, so any variation in the lot size or slope may required additional alterations.
Liability
Without a initial designer, the alterations will need to be made by an additional designer, and that designer will (should) never take on liability for the initial design. If there are any monetary damages or losses due to design flaws, clients will need to try to sue the internet, and good luck with that.
Style, Baby!
When you hire a designer/architect, you are paying for their expertise. They have years of experience in their field, and they’ll synthesize all that experience into your design. Knowledge of building materials cost, availability, resilience, durability etc are large factors in material selection, and non existent in stock house plans. If you want a farmhouse style build, they’ll harmonize that aesthetic throughout the project, not just putting board and batten siding on a generic home. Getting a designer that takes time to understand the client and their hopes, dreams and intentions for the project will pay off immeasurably in the project for decades to come, from the massing down to the details. Otherwise you’ll just get a normal vanilla home, blegh.
Constructability
So far we’ve just discussed requiring alterations to bring the plans up to building permit quality, but there is still another step to go in level of detail to develop the plans into Issued For Construction (IFC) plans, which enable a builder to build the structure. If you want to learn some new words on a jobsite, listen to a builder trying to build or estimate from a set of stock plans.
Design Change
By now, you’ll have realized that there are no stock set of plans that won’t require alterations. So the key question is: Are there still cost savings to be had after making the required changes? My answer is no. Knowing what designers will charge to bring stock house plans up to code or better, I am willing to bet a great deal that the cost savings will be minimal just to get to building permit stage. And because designer’s fees are such a small percentage of the overall project value, and have a disproportionately large impact on the project, I don’t believe it is worth the perceived cost savings to buy and alter stock plans. When clients pay a designer to get a product that’s created with the user in mind, the value created is exponential.
