Building a House in 7 Steps | Step 3: Plans and Design

Step 3 of the series: how we get plans drawn that a builder can actually build and a buyer actually wants.

Step 3 of the seven step series. Plans are where first time builders quietly lose their margin, because a plan you love and a plan that sells are not always the same drawing. Ruben designed a custom plan for his own house once: curved walls, 20 foot ceilings, and a lumber package that came in $50,000 over what he expected. The house is beautiful. The lesson stuck anyway.

Build the plan that is already selling

The safest plan set is one that has been built before. It is already value engineered, the layout is proven, and the budget attached to it is real. Ricky, a member building in St. John, Indiana, came from landscaping with no construction background. The move that made his first build easy was asking his builder two questions: which plan sells the fastest, and which plan do you pre-sell? The answer was the plan with a two story great room open to below and the primary suite on the first floor. The builder already owned it, already engineered. All that was left was an hour of an architect’s time to draw the site plan.

How to read your market in ten minutes

Open Redfin or a comparable portal, filter to sold in the last three months, and set year built to 2022 or newer as a minimum, not a maximum. Now you are looking only at new construction that actually sold. Then move around the map. Downtown will show one product, a pocket 15 minutes out will show another, and the higher end suburbs will show a third. If the area is building 2,000 square foot three and four bedroom homes, do not build a 3,500 square foot five bedroom.

Get into character

Design to your buyer’s life, not your taste. In dense infill units near retail and transit, buyers are not cooking every night. They come home, drop their keys, sit in the living room, and change in the bedroom before going back out. So the living space and the closet matter more than a large kitchen. Fifteen minutes outside the city the same buyer wants a real driveway, a two or three car garage, a walk-in closet, a yard for the dog, and two sinks in the primary bath.

What five years of sixplexes taught us

The sixplex we design today is not the sixplex we designed first. Buyer feedback from walkthroughs kept naming the same three things: no parking, no closet space, bedrooms too small. A heat pump water heater eats storage, which is exactly the square footage a buyer notices missing. The fixes are almost free. Take half a hallway and recess the bedroom door into it, and a 9 by 10 bedroom becomes fully usable. Add a foot to the closet. Make the closet deeper. Small moves, big difference in how a unit shows.

Big windows and tall doors are the cheapest upgrade there is

Compared to national builders, we always spec larger windows and taller doors. Eight foot entry doors, 6 by 6 sliding window panels, and at minimum an 8 foot tall slider door to the yard, 6 feet wide, or 9 or 12 feet wide when it fits. Even a 900 square foot unit gets a 9 foot wide, 8 foot tall slider. Natural light makes a small space feel large, and nobody has ever complained about too much of it. On one 2,500 square foot build the entire window package ran about $6,000, and on the higher end home about $10,000.

Who is on the team

Three parties. The architect or designer draws it. The structural engineer the architect works with makes sure it stands up, and if your architect does not already have one, that tells you something. And the builder, who brings plans he has already built, budgets attached to those plans, a schedule, and the field experience the owner builder loan requires you to show. That is covered in step 5.

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