HOME PLANS
PRODUCTS
House Plans - How to Buy and What you Get:
victoriancottageplans.com offers plans sets in both a Preliminary Down-Loadable Plan, and in a Construction Package. The preliminary form is generally intended to allow the Buyer to become better acquainted with the Floor Plan of an individual home before making a commitment on a full set of Construction Drawings. A more comprehensive description of the available options follows:
PRELIMINARY DOWN-LOADABLE PLAN - (COST $79.00) The preliminary plans consist of PDF files containing the actual floor plans of each house taken directly from the construction drawing sets. The plans are dimensioned and to scale so the buyer can get a real feel for the actual layout of each home and the value of our products. The plans can be printed on 8 1/2 x 11 paper in any printer as many times as you chose or can be taken to a print shop such as "Kinko's" or "Fed-Ex" and printed as full size 24" x 36" construction documents. Included with these PDF files are two sheets of typical furniture and fixture templates scaled to match your drawings. The buyer can cut out the template items that most closely match their own furniture and overlay such on the construction drawings to see how things might fit if they built the home. The Preliminary Down-Loadable plans are normally sent to your e-mail address with-in 24 hours of placement of an order.
CONSTRUCTION PLANS (COST $650 to $1050)- The Basic Construction Plans for each house consist of 3 full sets of 24" x 36" construction drawings showing the elements normally needed to obtain a building permit. Each set usually contains the following:
1) TITLE SHEET - An informational title sheet with rendering and description of the home
2) ELEVATIONS - A drawing showing the exterior views of the home from all directions
3) FLOOR PLANS - A drawing showing the layout at each floor, the walls, dimensions, fixtures and numerous architectural details
4) ARCHITECTURAL SECTIONS - A drawing showing the cross sections of the house in several directions with details called out
5) KITCHEN DETAILS - A large scale blow-up of the kitchen, showing cabinet sizes and detailing in plan and elevation
6) DETAILED SECTIONS - A drawing showing blow-ups of the walls and floors indicating specific architectural and structural details
7) FOUNDATION/CONCRETE - A drawing showing plan and details of the foundation and various concrete and masonry details
8) FLOOR-ROOF FRAMING PLAN - A drawing showing the structural plan and structural details of the building
9) DETAIL SHEETS - One or more drawings showing structural or architectural details necessary to build the home
10) ELECTRICAL - A drawing showing the electrical layout of receptacles, ceiling fans, lights, mechanical equipment, etc.
Construction drawing sets are normally shipped within 3 working days of the order via Federal Express.
Customization, If You have to Make a Change:
All too commonly our Buyers review a set of plans and find it is absolutely necessary to change our standard plans. If it is at all possible within time and financial constraint, we will attempt to change the plans to fit individual needs. One must keep in mind that the original drawings sets represent an investment in design time of some $15,000 to $20,000 per home. Major changes, which affect a number of different drawings and which require structural redesign can be very costly.
If you need some redesign, we recommend you print out the Floor Plan drawing from your PDF preliminary drawings, mark it up with the changes you need and fax it to us at our toll free number. We will give you an exact price to make the changes. An approximate cost for revisions on various changes are given below to give some idea of the cost to a Plan Buyer:
1) Redesign within Non-Bearing Walls within the Home - $200 to $300
2) Redesign of Kitchen or Bath areas involving plumbing and/or cabinet details but no bearing walls - $500 to $700
2) Redesign of Exterior/Bearing Walls involving floor plan, elevations, structure - $1200 to $3000
Comprehensive Estimate/Materials List Package ($250 - $850) -
NOTE: This is something you need whether you are building for yourself or hiring a contractor!
For most of our houses we have prepared a comprehensive materials, labor and sub-contract estimate which describes and prices most of what is required to build your home. One of the most difficult parts of the construction process for Do-It-Yourselfers or Owners acting as General Contractors is not knowing the actual unit costs and quantities of materials, labor and sub-contract work. Without such knowledge it is nearly impossible to prepare your financing, to compare quotes or to understand complex subcontractor proposals. It also is very difficult to know what you want to do yourself and what you should hire out. To answer these questions one needs the quantity of the items making up the project and how it is broken out into labor and materials. Our Estimate Materials Package includes a breakdown of materials with a short descriptive specification and the quantities required for each item. The estimate for each house is derived based upon a National Recognized Estimating System capable of being Updated Each Month for every Zip Code in America for both labor and materials. The basic items included in our Package includes:
1) A quantity take-off in both printed and digital format of all significant items required to construct your house, except for site specific foundations costs. The take-off is computerized and customizable by you for items you might want to include or change for your house.
2) Labor costs per item and production rates for each type of construction crew are included. These labor rates are keyed into your specific community by Zip Code via a national data base for construction costs. The data allows you to keep track of hourly paid contractors or to mange your own crew of workers efficiently. The average production rate data can empower you to tell your workers what is expected and determine when you are getting "ripped off" by per hour sub-contractors.
3) Included are Material costs of each basic item in the estimate. All items are adjusted for cost based on your community averages.
4) Included are average Sub-contractor costs per item including the average mark-up for fixtures by electricians and plumbers.
5) Estimating software on CD, as well as, a printed estimate is included so that you can add and subtract items and adjust prices as needed. The estimating system is simple and comes preloaded with your house estimate. The software is directly compatible with Quick Books Pro Software, if you want to integrate the estimate and job costing into your own accounting system.
Detail Sheets and Shop Drawings
Construction Details - Our construction drawing sets are not a "How to Build a House Book". They are more or less the drawings that the an average building department would expect to be filed if a house were being built by a Licensed Contractor who knows what he is doing. Our Construction Plan Sets are certainly more detailed than any of our competitors plans on the internet but they still are basic. There are several reasons one might want some additional drawings before building one of our homes. We will try to outline a few:
1) Our houses are special. If you like what we have built, you probably like Classical Architectural Detailing. Whether Victorian, Mediterranean or Caribbean, the homes are based upon classical Greek and Roman proportions and are detailed with entablatures, cornices, moldings, architraves, string courses and even gingerbread with classical origins. This detailing was once the norm and every journeyman carpenter knew how to build it. With the advent of modernism and mechanization, such is not the case anymore. Our homes have many details that require attention to achieve the look and feel of the classics. Whether you hire a general contractor or do it yourself, you are going to need some help with the details to achieve the same feel as the houses built by us.
2) We have been building this product for 30 years. We know how to get the "look" without wasting a lot of money. We use and specify off the shelf products as much as we can. We have spent years putting together the combination of materials than give us the most effect for the money. No contractor or home owner without decades of experience in the design and construction of classical homes could build our product as cheaply as we do. Our details will help you save money.
3) Some of the components in our homes take a lot of time to figure out. Things like stairs, handrails and gingerbread take a lot of effort to layout and plan. Very few contractors will take the time. If they do, it will cost a fortune. Details of a wooden staircases can include hundreds of parts from numerous manufacturers with very specific size and finish requirements. Our details show in full or large scale exactly how all those things go together. We indicate part manufacturers and part numbers to order, we show references to use when laying out and geometry needed to precut parts. Our drawings save time and waste, give you control over the employee or contractor installing the pieces and overall, save you even more money.
That being said, each of our homes have different details available, the more complex, the more details. The prices of each set of detail drawings are given on our individual home detail pages with a brief description of what you get for the money.
Construction Consulting Services - For the Do-it-Yourselfer the rewards can be enormous. With mark-ups for contractors and sub-contractors amounting to 15% to 30%, workers compensation as much as 40% of labor, social security at 13% there is a huge gain to be made by building it yourself. We have calculated it to be well over a $100,000 on the average size house. But the work is hard and it takes some expertise. We can't say that we will make you into a construction genius but we can offer a hand with those technical "how-to" issues, we can give you some suggestions on permitting, on contracting with subs and about hiring labor. We've done it all for a long time. We offer the service on a "pay-as-you-go" basis. The services can be based on our standard consulting contract at an hourly rate or chargeable per telephone call or e-mail. The basic rates are shown below. Contact us via e-mail if you would like us to provide such services or if you want more details.
Design or Consulting Services Involving a Registered Engineer or Certified Contractor - $120.00/hr
AutoCAD Drafting service - $85/hr
Professional E-mail Response per Incident - $45.00
Professional Telephone Response $50.00 per quarter hour or fraction thereof