Wow. I scanned through this entire thread, and haven't seen an automatic house plan generator. I saw one comment with a request, and no responses.
The architecture industry is enormous. Real estate is enormous. There's no automatic drawing, electrical, plumbing, insulation, ect... generators given specifications? I'm kind of amazed no one's trying to disrupt that. "Hi Stable Diffusion, please draw me blueprints for a 2000 sq. ft. house, with two stories, given this landscape. Thanks Stable Diffusion."
I work in construction management and I think you’re underestimating the complexity of generating a set of construction plans that meets code, passes inspection, and has coherent aesthetics.
There isn’t just one set of building codes for every jurisdiction, different jurisdictions adopt various sets of code.
Different geographic regions require various things that other areas don’t require. My state doesn’t have earthquakes or hurricanes, but we do have to have stronger roofs for handling snow load. Buildings in Florida need specific methods to handle hurricane force winds. Buildings in California need specific methods to handle earthquakes. And so on. How a building is designed is highly dependent on where it is located geographically.
You’re also underestimating just how many different materials/fixtures/fittings get installed in a house. Plumbing fixtures and light fixtures, electrical wiring devices, floor/wall/ceiling finishes, doors and door hardware, siding (type, color, trim color), windows, woodwork, cabinet, cabinet hardware, countertops, bathroom vanities, appliances, rain gutters, garage door, driveway/sidewalk material and color, deck material and color, etc.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that designing and building a building is far more complex than it seems.
> underestimating just how many different materials/fixtures/fittings get installed in a house
This is one of the reasons why I would believe Lowes or Home Depot or another construction supply place would 52 such a piece of software. They have those zillions of "something" that get installed, and the lumber. They already know what all those people buy.
At least for a construction company: pick a general house, gives you adaptations for common landscapes, choose interior finishing(s) / style(s), gives you plans (with adaptations), already has them approved for your area (with variants), gives you parts list, gives you plumbing/wiring, gives you button to put it all in your "cart," drive to store, pick up house worth of stuff, Lowes/Home Depot make a quick $50k-100k or so.
If you build a development, you say, give me 10 of that. Build it again, say I'd like my old order.
Visually, its supposed to be a heart shape. Such as "I (heart/want/like/upvote) this" What I would describe as mild 1337 speak, using limited ascii art when it shorthand's an idea. "I 52 this idea."
Depending on how much you like symbology, since it's 52, it also carries playing card connotations, with "makes a good hand", "hearts the card game", "want this to shoot the moon."
> my state doesn’t have earthquakes or hurricanes, but we do have to have stronger roofs for handling snow load. Buildings in Florida need specific methods to handle hurricane force winds. Buildings in California need specific methods to handle earthquakes.
If you tried to accomodate all of these methods now, your looking at much higher costs. But if your open source plans include all these methods, and people can produce kits that are shipped to you (either raw, or partially assembled) because they are identical, the costs would quickly start dropping..
There also seems to be shortage of cad tools avable to inspect a building plan.,like as a consumer you would home you would get a plan of the house when you buy the house
CAD is used to create construction drawings, but once they’re created, everyone works off of a PDF set of plans. You only need the CAD files and software if you want to change the plan yourself.
> I work in construction management and I think you’re underestimating the complexity of generating a set of construction plans that meets code, passes inspection, and has coherent aesthetics.
Why is that surprising? It's like why AI art is a running joke to real artists, and LLMs are a joke to good software engineers etc.
Random text/image generators have no intelligence, no knowledge of design, building regulations, engineering, physics. A fun little tool to set up boilerplate is its peak usefulness.
If this is aimed at me, its not that I believe the act of creating generative architecture software is trivial. Perhaps too flippant above. I believe it is probably quite challenging. Which is an excellent reason to create such a software, because it's much harder for someone to quickly steal or release a competing product. I was only surprised someone was not immediately using this thread to advertise their house generator.
“Quite challenging” is an understatement. The problem is far too big for the tech startup model. You would need to get a bunch of expensive skilled engineers, and a bunch of expensive domain experts (from many domains, since “building houses” is a massive problem space with thousands of sub-domains), and work on it for probably years before you had an MVP. It’s not the type of startup that easily attracts investment.
Even if you could find investors,I'm not sure you'd find any customers.
Firstly, only a tiny fraction of people are interested in building a house. And the number that build 2 are a rounding error.
Developers already have architects on staff, already have libraries of plans, why would they pay for this?
Then, every detail of the generated plan would need to be checked. Every. Single. Detail.
Most people who build a house do do because they want to make a mark, or they need something they can't find. They are all literally edge cases. They'll sit with an architect for hours trying to get that dream out of their heads onto paper, adapting to limitations of budget, planning approval, local regulations, budget, site, budget and so on.
That's been the Holy Grail since I was a kid (AutoCAD jock, mid '80s). I think the best we'll achieve is some themed parametric models. For stuff like massing, space planning, budgeting, and presentations.
Or an app with some dials and checkboxes for a constrained design space. Like for micro homes. Or vertically integrated companies like Lindal Cedar Homes. Kind of like buying a customized airplane or RV.
But for general purpose construction documents? I'd bet no. So many different construction codes. Site planning. Construction tech and products are constantly changing. Customers are psychotic. Etc, etc.
Disclaimer: I was just a drafter working misc A/E/C jobs. And I wrote add-ons for arch and civil engr. But mosdef am not an architect. Would like to be proven wrong.
Probably commercial BIM plugins for something like AutoCAD are doing stuff like this, although it's probably more like classic constraint solving than stable diffusion. Anyway BIM has been around for years, so that's the training set you'd want for doing other things.
I built a house (or more correctly I paid a company to build one for me).
The initial design could be done using an interactive tool that you can use. This is not different from web tools used to design a kitchen. I also think IKEA uses one.
I live in Scandinavia so it is probably different from what you know.
The company designing the house took our drawings and ideas and created drawings and an excel sheet they used to calculate the price of the project. A tool to do this would be valuable and same the customer some time ad I would be able to do most of the work designing the layout.
After the contract is signed the company would make proper plans used for building the house etc..
The complexity of the whole project is enormous but the initial planning would be a good fit for an interactive tool.
Its best to take and use the principles of it in another house. I personally don't want a bunch of tires breaking down and leaking chemicals and fumes into my house over a couple decades. Also much of the savings are from using your labor or volunteer/intern labor rather than paying someone else.
Its such a shame that a great sustainability project is ruined by some weird drive to "recycle" something stupid like tires. Just buy the effing bricks, have a construction company do it, have a factory safely recycle the tyres, and we can all save the environment. It strikes me as a very, for lack of a better term, misguided "hippy" commune kinda thing.
Yeah, and it will never get approved in any of the 10,000 zoning districts in the US. You should grab a random township zoning PDF and read the entire thing before even thinking about building something under 1600 sq ft, and that doesn't use materials from your local building supplier.
If its worth it for you then thats great. But at least the original earth ship requires packing like a hundred or two tires without power tools. There are machines that make bricks out of earth and there is probably a way to use recycled material to hold those to together in the same way as tires
I think it's worth noting that the inventor of the earthship plans does not himself live in an earthship. I have seen a lot of anecdotal accounts of people living in earthships developing health issues because of off-gassing from the tires. Also they are really optimized for desert environments, they don't preform as well in high humidity.
When they filmed Garbage Warrior, Reynolds and his wife were occupying what he described as the first one "because it works". Have they since moved out?
Here's the thing: The idea of planning a house without taking into account the site where it will sit will never produce a good house.
Would a pre-existing plan account for the sun exposure of your land? Would it have a roof that makes sense for how much it rains or snows? Would getting sunlight in the bedroom also mean facing traffic? Would it take advantage of elevation for views or make sure to block a nearby neighbour? Would it deal well with moisture, or fires, or access roads? Would you build a porch where you can laze away late summer afternoons and feel everything's just right with the world, or a place to dry laundry where nobody goes?
If you really want to design your own house (a great idea), look up materials around A Pattern Language instead. Learn what makes a great house, then design a plan incorporating those ideas but customised towards your plot and your needs.
> The idea of planning a house without taking into account the site where it will sit will never produce a good house.
There's a free software tool from National Renewable Energy Labs that lets you make a rough sketch of your house, including orientation and try alternate features to determine if adding more insulation would be worth it. Or a more efficient furnace. Each airport (at least in the US) measures weather (temp, wind speed/direction, humidity, cloudiness, etc) every hour. Local climate files will have the past 20 years of weather so you can evaluate the costs/benefits of different systems with your actual records.
Love BEopt! It’s definitely a favorite in the “construction nerd” community (such as https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/). I used it quite a bit in making design choices for an extensive renovation on my own home.
Thanks for sharing! While the original query was in regards to building a new home, this seems like a great tool (and is advertised as such) for checking out existing homes (especially older homes) as well.
This gets said a lot - but in practice, very little housing is built that way.
The mega builders that build big developments certainly don't match up house plans with the way lots are oriented, and that's where most houses are built.
I'm not trying to argue we shouldn't work on that, but to just dismiss off the shelf house plans entirely because "you have to build for the site" is rejecting the reality of how things are done.
At the very least, a repository of plans that was categorized simply by the orientation it was optimized for would be a step ahead of how most housing is planned and built today.
Anyone who has driven through a bunch of tract homes knows this to be true. The homes are built to maximize the number of homes in the available space and nothing else.
If you really don't believe me just survey home owners in those now 2-year old tract homes. Even if the actual houses have excellent construction you'll discover the builder completely declined to take into account things like drainage of the lot or how maintenance can be performed.
I duno if I agree with this. They might not go lot to lot but a big developer also is the one who orientates the lots and selects the designs ... I think it is all relative to how they do business / organize lots.
It's more general than lot to lot, but still seems to take into account the general lay of the land, the city's codes and etc.
I'm around Kansas City. The biggest builders here will be in multiple subdivisions at once, with varying topography, and they may or may not have been the ones to plat out the lots.
They will absolutely sell you any house plan in their catalog to go on any lot, so long as it fits. You might get a walkout basement instead of a full in-ground basement, but that's about how much it varies.
The only variability is that smaller plans would be available in nicer subdivisions (that require bigger/expensive houses) and larger plans won't be available in subdivisions where they don't physically fit on the lots.
> The biggest builders here will be in multiple subdivisions at once, with varying topography
You are ignoring the tens of thousands of hours pre-built builders put into streamlining designs that can be put on almost any plot of land. Think of it as downloading a piece of software and saying "oh it just works everywhere" while ignoring the engineering time that went into testing and bug fixing on every platform.
Regardless of what you see as a casual outside observer, an architect and civil engineer are putting their stamps on each set of blueprints for each construction site.
> Regardless of what you see as a casual outside observer, an architect and civil engineer are putting their stamps on each set of blueprints for each construction site.
Hard disagree on this wishful thinking. I've literally seen the submitted plans for my house - there was absolutely no architect or engineer stamp on them. The true mega-builders might do this, but smaller operations (say, 25 to a few hundred houses a year) don't.
In my subdivision (which will be a few hundred houses built by one company) the plans are all new to this subdivision, designed by the head guy, and there aren't enough houses of any plan to amortize "tens of thousands of hours" among them (they've built 4 copies of my house so far, for reference).
You don't need an engineer or architect involved in building a "normal" house or developing plans in large parts of the country. There's no calculations required, for the most part, either. The codes allow a prescriptive path to compliance, so if you fall the span charts in the codes, it's good to go.
The only real notable exception is in truss design - but that's never designed by an architect either. The builder sends the house design to a truss company along with required loads in the area, and the truss company sends back trusses that cover the space and hold the required loads.
Threads like this are peak HN - people who "know better" how the world should work (and hey, I wish I worked like that too) telling people who have actually experienced something their experience can't possibly be real. I actually have had a house built recently. I did a ton of research, and this builder was the best I could do in my area and at my price range (about $600k). The options get a LOT worse as you spend less on new constructions.
> Threads like this are peak HN - people who "know better" how the world should work (and hey, I wish I worked like that too) telling people who have actually experienced something their experience can't possibly be real.
"Engineer's Disease" -- the idea that deep domain and problem solving skills easily transfer over to other areas in anything but a superficial sense.
> Threads like this are peak HN - people who "know better" how the world should work (and hey, I wish I worked like that too) telling people who have actually experienced something their experience can't possibly be real.
> Threads like this are peak HN - people who "know better" how the world should work
Peak self own. I literally asked an architect before posting.
> there was absolutely no architect or engineer stamp on them.
Did you review the copies on file at the planning department? While there are exemptions in some states for simple or stick built homes, larger planned developments or construction financing (which all big builders use) will require it.
> While there are exemptions in some states for simple or stick built homes,
The vast, vast majority of single family homes built in the US are simple, stick built homes, without anything going on that requires any more engineering than consulting the span charts in the codes.
You are ignoring the tens of thousands of hours pre-built builders put into streamlining designs that can be put on almost any plot of land.
No they aren't. This thread was started by someone saying "The idea of planning a house without taking into account the site where it will sit will never produce a good house.".
Both of you (and everyone) is saying this isn't true.
I'm actually taking issue with that assertion - mid-sized builders absolutely don't have that kind of time put into the designs of their house. They build one and iterate on the problems - it's not so different from software. I know - we've had quite a few problems related to being the 2nd iteration of a new house plan for a builder.
Just think of how shitty it would be to be #1. There is a lot to be gained by being house #10 or 100 in terms of design cleanup. Achitecture houses that are one off will always have weird quirks because its the first of iteration or cost a ton to address those issues .
I think the "good house" would need to be defined first.
Like, going by objective measures like "how well it is insulated and how much it costs to cool/heat it", or "how well it uses the space of the plot" most of them fall well within "good", partly because at least on insulation level most countries require them to be at least decent.
But how well that fits the new owners ? Now that's where there would be actual benefit from either customization or doing it from scratch.
They just want to sell a bunch of houses quickly, not to create perfect houses. Good enough is quite literally good enough for them.
There will be compromises because they build for average buyer, not for you.
And people that are looking for a house usually want to move there as soon as possible, doing custom not only means you need to pay more but that you also have to wait longer and pay for the place you're currently living extra year or two.
Ideally all would start from some common plans then architect would customize it based on the future home owner input but that's frankly expensive.
I think ideally we would all live in modest, reasonably sized simple rectangular houses that are built to last, to be energy efficient, and which achieve low cost through standard designs.
The "then architect" part of the process results in McMansions that are awful to live in, are environmentally disastrous, and contribute to the growing unaffordability of housing for all but the upper classes.
Ideally people would have a variety of options for size and style based on what they like and can afford rather than being forced into your personal preferences. There are more important factors than energy efficiency for most buyers. While I don't have a McMansion myself, they are actually quite livable for the target market of upper-middle class suburban nuclear families with children. The major homebuilders literally hire sociologists to do field research on such families and then design house plans to fit their lifestyle.
Architects don’t design McMansions. The lack of an architect is actually how they are produced. Less than 10% of housing in the US was designed by an architect.
> I think ideally we would all live in modest, reasonably sized simple rectangular houses that are built to last, to be energy efficient, and which achieve low cost through standard designs.
In an ideal world yes, in the real world you'll get run out of town being called a "communist", or no one will buy the houses because actually built-to-last homes are waaay more expensive than the cheap drywall and wood stuff that one sees go up in the air with every tornado video.
Those might not be common in the US or in your place but are very common in others and are at least in the country I live in, because they are just an investment.
The entire purpose of designing your own house is to take these things into account. If you're looking for a cookie-cutter generic design, just let a mega builder use one of their templates and they'll get what you're talking about here.
You're missing my point - it's that less people have access to the type of "use an architect and build a custom home" experience you're talking about.
I was shocked when I was looking to have a new home built a few years ago how much you have to spend to actually get into a "custom home" and not a fairly templated house.
Even if you're having a new house built, you get a lot less choices than you might think. To most builders, "custom home" means you get to pick the paint and flooring, not that you have appreciable input into anything structural.
I'm sure it varies regionally, but where I'm at (Kansas City market) you have to be in about the $800k range, generally, to be able to work with an actual architect and build something custom - and that's just plain out of reach for most people.
I know, but I was assuming the OP already knew they had the opportunity to dictate the architecture of their house, since that's what they were asking about. Either they have money or they have volunteer labor and low expectations.
I’ve worked in construction, maybe this was true for post-and-beam and perhaps some other methods where you are using what is available from nature.
Historically, for example, log cabins are popular in the woods because logs are plentiful and adobe was used in desert environments because of the abundance of sand, lime, binders, etc. I would not build a solid wood home in the desert of New Mexico for the same reason why I wouldn’t build a masonry house in the forests.
Today, we have all but perfected the manufacturing of, developed logistics for, and codified laws governing building standards focused on raw building materials that you can order from a lumber yard or even Home Depot.
Modern building construction, at least in North America, is based around the “balloon framing” idea that the walls support subsequent floors and the roof, maybe with a load bearing wall in the middle somewhere. With 2x6 framing members, you can go up to 3 floors in some jurisdictions without additional engineering sign off. As long as there is a flat platform to build the first floor, you can build up.
The foundation is the only thing that would require custom construction, with a pier and beam, you need to drive your pier 1-3ft below the frost line and with a slab or basement foundation, you also need to reach below the frost line, but requirements differ between codes.
Drainage is another area that needs special attention and is 100% custom for each project.
One nit, what we do today is platform framing. Balloon framing fell out of favor for probably two reasons, one it is not very fire safe (vertical channels in the walls), and two it's cheaper to build with shorter lumber.
> Modern building construction, at least in North America, is based around the “balloon framing” idea that the walls support subsequent floors and the roof, maybe with a load bearing wall in the middle somewhere.
I think you're getting balloon and platform framing mixed up.
> Historically, for example, log cabins are popular in the woods because logs are plentiful [...] I wouldn’t build a masonry house in the forests.
Why not? Perhaps the US is different, but in mainland Europe you'll find plenty of brick houses in the forest.
Yes, historically you'd build a log cabin out of materials found on-site, but is anyone doing that anymore? Presumably you'd want logs shipped from elsewhere, if only to get ones that have dried out already.
At that point, why would it be prohibitively expensive to choose other building materials?
> Would a pre-existing plan account for the sun exposure of your land? Would it have a roof that makes sense for how much it rains or snows? Would getting sunlight in the bedroom also mean facing traffic? Would it take advantage of elevation for views or make sure to block a nearby neighbour? Would it deal well with moisture, or fires, or access roads? Would you build a porch where you can laze away late summer afternoons and feel everything's just right with the world, or a place to dry laundry where nobody goes?
Would you, the first-time-house designer be able to accommodate for all those issues? Or even know they exist in the first place?
> If you really want to design your own house (a great idea), look up materials around A Pattern Language instead. Learn what makes a great house, then design a plan incorporating those ideas but customised towards your plot and your needs.
Horrible idea. By all means be the input in the process, but pick someone that actually knows how building works and that can instantly point out any misunderstanding or lacks of knowledge you have.
Reading "A Pattern Language" is, frankly, a waste of time for anyone looking to design and build a house where people can actually live on a reasonable budget. A few of the patterns are decent, but most are outdated for modern lifestyles or appear to have been contrived to push the authors' biased opinions on how people ought to live. Many of them would be ridiculously expensive and consume an unreasonable amount of space for minimal utility. If you were to actually design a house the way they seem to recommend it would end up being 8000 ft² (including outbuildings) and looking like some weird cross between an ancient Roman villa, a Victorian mansion, and a Hobbit hole. The market for rich eccentrics who want that sort of thing is pretty small. There is a reason that book is held in higher regard by software architects than by real residential architects.
I think it's hyperbolic to call it a waste of time. I think the book (and the related books and principles) deserve a critical reading. In the first section titled "Using This Book" he mentions several important details that I think you are missing in your critique.
One, it is meant to be read alongside The Timeless Way of Building. It is not simply a how-to manual.
Two, it comes from experience gleaned in the field working as an architect and builder. It is not simply highbrow art, mysticism, or eccentricity.
Three, the patterns are separate from implementation: "[You] can use the solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice." He goes on to distinguish patterns in which he believes an invariant property has been established from those in which more research is needed. He even states that some patterns are just a guess and shows how to identify those in the description of each pattern.
Lastly, he states there is a danger that people will assume that this one pattern language should stand for all time: "Is it not true that there is a danger that people might come to rely on this one printed language, instead of developing their own languages, in their own minds? The fact is, we have written this book as a first step in the society-wide process by which people will gradually become conscious of their own pattern languages, and work to improve them."
The purpose of the book and its principles is not to recreate an aesthetic through pastiche. You are meant to use the principles in the book to create your own language that works for your context. A pattern that works for me in my environment may not work for you. That fact doesn't nullify the value of the pattern. The purpose of the two books together is to acknowledge that humans have deep feelings about the environments they inhabit. Whether those feelings can be explained or not is beside the point. The point is that we have them. These feelings happen across cultures and time. When we apply those feelings about our environments to the built world, several patterns seem to emerge. Hence, you get the concept of pattern languages.
Alexander takes the bold step of not only acknowledging human feelings but centering them in the discussion about how the world should be built. This point should interest those who are sympathetic to the Agile Manifesto, or to principles of user-centered design, or to product design and product management. This fact is also likely why certain interests are uncomfortable with his work. Powerful interests do not, in general, like to lose power, and change is expensive.
Later works, including his series on The Nature of Order go deeper into his exploration of these principles, even the possibility of an objective evaluation of beauty. And yes, there is a bit of woo going on which can make some people feel uncomfortable. We are all capable thinkers. You can decide for yourself which ideas resonate and which do not.
Personally, I found that his ideas changed the way I experience the world, including giving me the ability to evaluate the kind of home I want to live in and how to optimize that home to increase my own happiness. I may not ever get the chance to build my own home. But I have a voice. I participate in society. I believe the world could and should do better than optimize itself for money. I believe I am not unique in finding the books useful.
As a practical matter none of that stuff is actually useful to a middle-class person who wants to design and build an affordable, livable, code-compliant house in the real world. If you want to read it for entertainment as a piece of literature or philosophy then go ahead, but it's not going to help the OP at all.
> If you really want to design your own house (a great idea), look up materials around A Pattern Language instead. Learn what makes a great house, then design a plan incorporating those ideas but customised towards your plot and your needs.
I get this is hn where diy ethos runs deep, but please don't do this. Hire someone to design it and oversee construction for you.
Nearly every new home that has been developed in my town for the last 5 years looks exactly the same, with the exact same floor plan. These new houses replace old houses that also looked exactly the same with same floor plan. It's a fugly two-family townhouse. Good houses don't matter to buyers in a seller's market. Poor architecture, poor execution, poor everything and yet they're selling.
It's very rare to be in the position to build your own home, as you'll never do it cheaper than a mass market/spec builder. It's almost always cheaper to just sell your property and buy something already existing.
If you do end up building custom, it's almost a waste to find free plans, as you'll want to customize to your liking as much as possible.
Pretty much. Even if custom costed exactly same money, it still means someone would need to wait 1-2 years before it is built vs just moving in to new house within a month
Also, don't forget local building codes. They vary a lot from location to location. You might theoretically be able to spec out a house that complies with most building codes, but it would probably look really funny and be hilariously expensive.
A roof pitched for heavy snow with storm shutters for hurricanes would stand out like a sore thumb in Arizona.
While you are not wrong, those requirements are the same for all houses.
Your typical signal family neighborhood has the following requirements: There will be room to store at least 3 cars, and at least 2 of them will be indoors. The path from the street to where the cars are stored will avoid hitting things with the car. All this means that every house will have a 3 car garage up front with a straight driveway to the road. A 3 car garage defines how wide your lot will be. All houses look the same because the car defines so much about how the house must look.
It rains everywhere, so you will account for that in all houses so you can take any plan knowing rain is accounted for. Views are the only thing that might be different, and most people don't live where the views are worth worrying about - unless you live in a rural area your view is the other houses in your neighborhood.
My house has no garage, but a semi-circular driveway plus a spur that means that we could park 9-10 full sized vehicles. There are basically no houses here with a 3 car garage, and rather few with a 2 car garage. Houses without garages are fairly common.
It rains here, but it also snows here -- so a roof that can shed water but not hold the weight of 3 feet of snow is not suitable. Putting our roof on a house in Georgia would just be a waste of money.
Some ground can deal with basements. Most of Florida can't, so they build on slabs. Then they need to put the HVAC and plumbing somewhere that isn't the basement.
A house in Florida should be designed to withstand hurricanes and floods. A house in California should expect frequent minor earthquakes.
My backyard view is great. My front view is of a road. Planning for those in the wrong direction would be bad.
Parking in the sun is an option. Everything else is something most houses can be adjusted to handle without changing the layout.
It turns out that a roof built with the basic standard components can handle a large enough snow load for most locations. Even if it can't, the roof it generally engineered separately and placed on top, so you can interchange a different one without changing the house plans.
If you don't have a basement you delete the stairs down and get a closet which is also used for a tornado shelter.
A house in Minnesota is designed to withstand hurricanes and floods - It turns out storms can momentarily get as bad as a hurricane and so houses everywhere need to handle it. Likewise MN gets minor earthquakes - it is rare, but still happens enough that unless it greatly increases costs (it doesn't that much) you take in the earthquake work someone else does.
No California does have major earthquakes that Minnesota houses probably cannot handle. California is on their own code system. However Minnesota shares codes with states that get hurricanes and floods - those states put in a little more insulation than is needed, while they build for hurricanes - and both states get better results for it. Meanwhile those designing building components can scale better (cheaper!) knowing that once their parts work in one state they can sell to others.
> Some ground can deal with basements. Most of Florida can't, so they build on slabs.
Around here every house has a basement. Flooding is an extremely minor concern given the terrain and you want the foundation to be below the frost line. The provincial building code requires a heated basement on clay soil (all nearby soil is clay) to a depth of max(1.2m, frost line).
> While you are not wrong, those requirements are the same for all houses.
Not every house needs triple-pane windows and R25 insulation in the walls, sitting on a 8-ft deep basement, with a steep roof pitch for snow to slide off of. Generally, you want to cut corners, because building to code in New York would be overkill in Texas.
You could have unique plans for each climate zone, but then the slope of the land and the shape of the lot also matters. Ideally, you'd want to be situated on a southward facing slope, beneath the road, so you could have huge windows towards the back of the house to taking in winter sun, natural insulation from the hill, and smaller windows facing the street. If you can't, you'll have to compromise on something that makes the house less pleasant to live in and/or harder to heat/cool.
At this point, we might actually have 100 distinct home designs, for each climate zone and slope. If you're lucky, these standard might actually be compliant with zoning for your lot, and maximize the allowable use of the lot. Every town is different, and who knows what silly rules your town requires.
At this point, you still need a design that local builders know how to build. Builders talk about "communities of practice", where they know how to build a certain way in response to how all of the other contractors in that area will also build, so that a subcontractor doesn't ruin another subcontractor's work. If you hire builders to build in ways they're not familiar with, they'll make mistakes. Most mistakes will be fine, but they could add up to failing to meet the code or standard for which the house was designed.
Ideally, you want to find an architect and a builder who have worked together before, to design and build the kind of house that you want using the techniques appropriate for that design, with the builder having crews of subcontractors that he/she has worked with before. If you've reached this point, you might as well take the extra step to building the perfect house for you, and customize it just a little more.
>Ideally, you'd want to be situated on a southward facing slope, beneath the road
If you casually assume everyone lives in the northern hemisphere.
Don't worry, we're already used to it with you all decorating websites with snow-themes in December, and saying "releasing this spring!" when what you actually mean is "April".
Very good points. Though I would point out that insulation is still very important for Texas houses to keep cool in the summer. I’d also add that local soil and ground conditions are going to affect how you build the house’s foundation.
> Not every house needs triple-pane windows and R25 insulation in the walls
Yes they do. Cooling is a large energy cost. Besides, you end up with that much space in your walls anyway just because for material strength reasons you need wide walls.
> sitting on a 8-ft deep basement
A basement is a line item that can be added or deleted at will. If you don't have stairs to the basement you still need that space except it gets a floor and is marked tornado shelter.
> with a steep roof pitch for snow to slide off of
They still build the same roof pitches so rain runs off.
> you want to cut corners, because building to code in New York would be overkill in Texas.
Not really because much of house design that matters is about structural matters where thickness matters. Other parts are about standard parts, you can buy a 2x4 off the self. While 2x3s exists, they cost more than a 2x4 and are generally lower quality.
> A basement is a line item that can be added or deleted at will.
If you already need a deep foundation and basements are common enough in the area so people know how to do them well, maybe. For other areas, it's a significant expense, a lot of work, might require design changes, and it'll probably leak.
Basements are always expensive. They are common where the soil demands a deep foundation as when you already need to move a lot of dirt you may as move more and get something useful out of it. Realistically though even in places that need deep foundations you are probably better off building a floor up and no basement.
Either way though, they are easy to remove from plans if you don't want one.
> you end up with that much space in your walls anyway just because for material strength reasons you need wide walls.
For material strength, walls are fine with 2x4 framing. However, 2x4 framing is limited to R19. So this is actually not true. The reason builders went to 2x6 framing is entirely to allow for a larger insulated cavity.
> They still build the same roof pitches so rain runs off.
Roofs do not require the same pitch to dispel snow as they do to shed snow. Roof pitches are genuinely steeper in areas that see particularly high snow loads.
Builders have gone back to 2x4 in cold climates. They put 2 inches of foam outside. The wood of studs is r5 even though the insulation is r19, so the continuous foam is better.
And in warm climates there were going to 2x6 as well as air conditioning needed the r value.
In most of Texas, the air outside is humid, you need a moisture barrier between your structural wall and your rainscreen/siding.
In Calgary, cold winters will have very dry air, so the humidity will be much higher inside the house. So the moisture barrier needs to be on the other side.
In either case, you don't want the insulation layer or the structural layer to be collecting condensation from the humidity / temperature differential, or you will get mold.
Disclaimer: not a builder, just deal with humid climate.
Snow and cold vs. sun and heat as the primary environmental issues to deal with, as a quick example.
But also humidity, local ordinances, matching the style of surrounding buildings, the relative value of land favoring single story (texas) or tall (Calgary) houses
Relative value of land and matching style is semi valid. However none of that prevents you from take a house from one area and building it in the other. In most cases local ordinances will allow it though it will cost slightly more as builders are not familiar with some details and some materials might not be readially available. However the design itself will still work if you want to.
Our house will have a space for one car (under a roof but not in the garage) a motorbike and some bikes (all bikes in a shed). If some of the kids will have their own car before they move out (IMHO 40 % chance), they can park on the street.
Or the town. It's very common in places that get snow for on-street parking to be prohibited during 5 or so months of the year because of the potential need for snow plowing.
Not to dispute that but just for another point of view, I've lived in four different towns, varying in population from 1,300 to 120,000, all with very long winters, and they've all allowed on street parking all winter (usually alternating sides of the street to accommodate plowing).
I've seen that as well--more commonly in cities where there otherwise just isn't enough parking if you force everyone off the streets. Suburbs, where most people have garages and driveways seem more likely to just disallow parking in the street period.
In our city, that's the responsibility of the city council and their traffic signs.
Actually, there is only an equivalent of HOA for apartment blocks. House owners are usually only bound by law and personal relationships with neighbors (I'm in CZ).
Yes, it's a nice area. The houses are very large so there usually are 2 - 5 apartments and they share the garden. That's a very interesting compromise for living with a garden close to the city center.
Where do you get this information from? Three-car garages are quite rare in Texas, and I am struggling to recall if I have ever seen a household use both carports for vehicles. At max, one car is stored in the garage while the other half is used for storage.
My wife is from Texas, and I have other family there. While older houses lack a garage, new houses all have them. It took longer for indoor parking to catch on, but it is common. Though "rednecks" are more likely to use the garage for storage of other things and park outside.
My college dorm is the only place I've ever lived that didn't have at least a two car attached garage. That's five of five houses with two or three car garages.
When I owned two cars in New England, it was a pretty big win to get both cars inside during the winter especially if a storm were coming. Always took a bunch of cleanup in the fall to deal with all the crap that had migrated out to the floor of the garage during the summer.
I feel like not having dedicated shed/storage area in the house plan is one of most common architectural mistakes, given just how often garage ends up being just that
On the other hand, I've often thought of adding a shed and it would invariably end up being a case of crap expanding to fill the space allotted to it. I don't need another 10'x13' shed to store more stuff. (I admittedly already have a workshop that sticks off the side of the garage.)
Right but separate room at least gives you a barrier. "This is place for crap, this is place for car".
And if you have house with any kind of garden, you will need a place to store some basic tools, and maybe a grill, if house doesn't come with that it will naturally clog the garage.
- buying some architectural books. Many (good ones) have plans in them from excellent architects. A sample from a good one is at [0]. If your tastes are not so 'architecture school' there are others.
- looking at the development approvals in your local area. Plans are often open to all. And they will (assumedly) be up to code in your area today.
Imo the concept of 'open source' doesn't translate to houses as well because regulation, construction approaches and tastes can be so locally specific and also change over time.
> Imo the concept of 'open source' doesn't translate to houses as well because regulation, construction approaches and tastes can be so locally specific and also change over time.
I think that's the biggest problem. You can draw up a house in free apps in a couple of minutes or hours but that doesn't mean it's structurally sound or that the walls will have the right dimensions for the pipes and cables that need to run through them or that they're the right size for the kind of insulation you want or that the windows meet your country's/state's legal regulations or that the house meets the code for where you want to build (which can literally depend on the part of the road the building will be on).
We approached our architect with pretty much a full floorplan in hand but it still took us months to pin down something that would get fast-tracked for approval and even then the floor plans had to be modified by the construction company to account for the placement of things like toilets and showers. Even without changing any of these details we couldn't take the floorplans and just submit them for a different part of town as they would likely not match the requirements there.
A large part of differences between towns is pure corruption! Material strength is physical facts. Water runs down hill. Many other such things. Many towns are in one of a couple national form based codes plans where if you follow the rules as laid out there is no need for approval as the engineering was already done for any generic house. If your town/state is not, or is but provides extras on top it is corruption: either the industry is trying to create a local monopoly via legal means; or your town board is trying to increase their power. Either way it is only making housing more expensive without serving any public good.
Not all houses need to meet the form based codes. If you want to do something different then you need a professional engineer to stamp and approve the plans - once stamped the town needs no more input.
Apartments and commercial buildings start to get more complex (but even then many meet form based codes as it is cheaper than calculating out all the stresses). However again professional engineer needs to approve the plans not the town.
My reference in this case is Germany, not the US, so the processes are a bit different but the point stands: it's difficult to use the exact same plans for two different houses in different places, let alone if you want to make any modifications as those may have knock-on effects you're not aware of. To be fair, a lot of those were not in the architect's plans in our case.
But you're right that you can basically get a permit for nearly anything if your pockets are deep enough and the restrictions are often arbitrary. That's why I mentioned fast-tracking: the area we built in had fairly strict requirements compared to houses only a few blocks away and any deviation would have required a costly and lengthy approval process (measured in months rather than weeks) so staying within the requirements was primarily a financial decision.
It is arguably the opposite of corruption. Everyone is treated the same and everything is checked in order. The option to pay for a faster approval would be corruption. This is just government offices being chronically understaffed.
Well, the problem is that putting a price tag on government services makes them exclusionary to those who can't (or can barely) afford it while making no difference to those who easily can. It's like the old saying about fines: if you punish a crime with a fine, you only make it illegal for poor people.
That said, the processing time is probably more costly than the direct expenses because having to wait longer means you likely already pay a part of the mortage rate (most banks have start-up costs on these loans and you are generally expected to secure the loan before you have the approval). The entire process is expensive enough for the actual fees not to be a meaningful issue.
I would add that an architect’s job is to find the little details that make your big investment better. One thing I associate with off the rack house plans in big developments is having the shades drawn all day because otherwise the sun will shine right in your face. An architect looks at the site and the sun and adjusts window heights and overhangs to suit. Amongst many other details. A house being such a big investment, hiring an architect seems wise.
Your last sentence is super important, having a sketch of a house is far from enough. Googling "construction detail drawings" will bring up endless drawings of all the small, but critical, things you need to take into account.
Otoh, if your house was built by a developer, the plans on file may have only a vague relation to the as built.
My first house was a Seattle skinny, garage off the alley. The plans on file were for a garage in front, different upper floor layout, and a different roof shape.
We do have prefabs. They tend to be built in a way that's compatible with a lot of jurisdictions (some would say better than traditional homes because of this).
Planning applications in the UK are publicly available and many have architectural drawings/site plans attached with varying degrees of detail.
There are millions of applications and each local authority has a different database so it may take a bit of digging to find what you are searching for.
Same in Denmark, you can either look them up on https://weblager.dk or if a house you interested in isn't available there you can normally request the drawing from the city, for a small fee.
In Hungary there is a public project to create freely accessible house plans with all necessary documentation to start to build them. The website is only available in Hungarian (but google translate manages to translate it quite well), and the houses are mostly really small compared to American standards, and their style is just way different from American houses. Anyway, let me drop the link here, maybe there is something interesting to be found there: https://www.oeny.hu/oeny/nmtk/mintatervek
Okay but why not separate small roof over entrance? This design is making wall more complex (now whole roof overhangs over entrance) for not all that much gain.
There are so many things you notice while living in a particular house which would have been trivial to fix in planning stage, but impractical after it's built.
I'm not sure where you're located, but here in the US you can build the building you're describing (a square house with a gable roof, without eaves if you want the roof to terminate at the wall) pretty easily with regular dimensional lumber framing.
Barndominiums generally imply steel framing and requires heavy equipment, at least to hoist the steel beams into place. They are less easy to build and maintain than a stick-framed home, in my opinion. A simple incarnation of a latter could be thrown up by two hobbyists, if it's small enough.
Lstiburek's "perfect wall"[0] may be of interest to you. Simply put, layered from the inside to the outside, it's drywall, wood studs (with batt insulation), sheathing (plywood or OSB), plastic house-wrap over the sheathing to serve as an air and vapor barrier, some depth of external insulation on top of that in the form of boards, then finally the exterior cladding.
Yeah, the perfect wall is definitely part of it - and I want eaves that overhang quite far because that protects the walls something fierce - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPUvfTipgyg
That's essentially what I designed for myself, to reduce budget while (IMO) still looking pretty and historic. It's a 30x38 foot box. I've wrote a bit about it:
The envelope on your house is the least complex part of it. How are you going to insulate? Where are vapor and air barriers? How will your framing interface to your foundation? What will your foundation design look like depending on soil conditions, moisture, frost heave, etc? What kind of plumbing, mechanical, and electrical components and infrastructure are required according to local code?
Any GC (General Contractor) in Massachusetts (US) can build one of those for you. They are called "Ranches" and "Raised Ranches" depending on how deep the foundation is at your front door.
Any GC should have a huge stack of these plans sitting around, or has worked with a designer that can quickly edit a pre-existing plan for you.
FWIW: I grew up in a Raised Ranch built into the side of a hill. One side had the basement mostly buried, the other side had the basement wall mostly exposed with a garage. The front door was at the point where the basement as 50% underground, so the entry has a very high, and impressive ceiling. At the end of the day, it was still a box with the roof you want.
I have wanted to build something similar for a long time, but I would like it to be a passive house as well. I gave up on ever finding a premade plan. Instead I have been using fusion 360 and sweet home 3d to design it myself.
If you’re willing to make your final result available I’d certainly take a look!
I realize that actually building it will require customization for local codes, etc, but I’d love a place to start - and I want to integrate building science instead of building spectacle.
The big thing is the detailed blueprints. The “look” is just the start of it.
Yeah, that's it (gable or a-frame, maybe possibly consider a Gambrel but I don't know if that "bend" greatly increases the possibility of various forms of failure).
What I'm really looking for is someone who has taken a basic "square/rectangular" house and though out interesting and intelligent ways of arranging the rooms inside.
Loads of people on YouTube building those, usually as cabins. Bushradical has several small ones, but there are plenty of examples out there. Haven't found any plans, per se, but I haven't really looked, either.
It's a modular design system based on the dimensions of commonly-available construction material, intended to be both cheap and easy to construct without (too much) assistance.
The gotcha is that it's based on dimensions of materials commonly available in the 1960's, so I have no idea if something you bought today would fit.
His design system doesn't try to get anywhere near modern levels of insulation and overall thermal performance, though I suspect that is fixable and even at the time he modified the system as locally available materials changed. I think it would be really interesting to do an update, everything is sort of on a grid system so it should be relatively amenable to building software tools to help with the analysis and generating complete sets of plans. Even if I had those tools and the time to do my own build I think I would want an experienced architect involved with input into the design.
It's apparently possible to do it to Passivhaus standards, but I don't know what you need to tweak to get there. It would be an interesting exercise to try, though.
It's the sort of thing that's got me thinking that the next time I need to build a garden shed I'll give it a go. Anything that doesn't need foundations, like a deck with a roof on an existing concrete pad, or similar, I'd give it a go to get some experience with it. Round here that wouldn't need planning permission so it's comparatively low-risk. Just need to make sure whatever I did to replace the ties into the foundation blocks was suitable, but that doesn't strike me as beyond the wit of man.
I looked at some similar ideas a while back. Screw piles are a good option for a stable base on uneven ground. Insulation requires coming up with a compatible design for the exterior walls to accommodate 4-6 inches of insulation and then rain screen on top of that. Top and bottom not so hard. Air sealing is quite a trick to do without compromising on disassembly-ready construction by using tape. Picture windows are a challenge, there's nothing really suitable available at least at US hardware stores. Not a problem for a shed but kind of in conflict with the motivation behind the system.
I've been curious about this sort of thing ever since I first read about the Sears kit homes from the 20th. I mean, if anyone has those plans, then you'd think they'd have been scanned and uploaded to IA. I guess no one ever took Sears up on the "we'll send you the plans for free" page that was in the catalog.
I can say that the places that sell house plans, they want anywhere from about $3000 on up for the paper version, and they're usually numbered and watermarked. Digital ends up costing you several more grand on top of that, and I'm not sure exactly how they lock those down. On top of that, they're often missing important things like the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing plans. Your contractor is supposed to do that on the back of a napkin or something.
Ideally, any plans you'd find would have the following:
Truss manufacturers will usually provide structural drawings for your house using their trusses, if you talk to the lumberyard that sells them. You bring floorplans, and they'll design the trusses to support it.
I know this is a little buried - but I own a truss manufacturing operation and I'd totally recommend finding one to talk to. If you can find drawings, or sometimes even just sketch out a floorplan (we frequently build out barns or other simple structures based on literal napkin drawings) we'll give you a layout of all the trusses, joists and beams that you could take and just stick frame it yourself based off. Naturally we're here to sell trusses, but I think most plants like us are always down to help out folks in the community if we've got the time.
Is the price of a truss fairly linear or is there a length where the price starts to really accelerate? I'm considering building a 30'x60' pole barn with 18" or 24" eaves making the trusses 33' or 34' long.
It's fairly linear for the same kind of truss, like say a 15 foot span to a 20 foot span - just think bigger triangle. Past a certain point, in order to support the shear/wind/snow loads across a span requires increasingly higher grades and width of lumber and you start getting into non-linear territory. Pole barns are an extremely common order for truss plants, and that size should be pretty standard. In single family houses, though, you start getting into "features" pretty quick which affect the price quite a bit, think ceiling trays, HVAC platforms and so on, so you're pretty quickly into some nonlinear territory there as well.
In Australia at least we need to submit development approvals which are public for some time.
As part of these approvals there will be floor plans and architectural drawings. They won't be enough to build off (usually), but they're a great source of inspiration it you're looking for ideas, costings, and what your local council is willing to approve.
This is true in most parts of the USA as well. In the State of Florida where I live, all drawings and plans become public record and these would definitely be enough to build. This is because all drawings used to build are required to be submitted. This includes details like engineering drawings and calculations and roof truss layout.
They are still protected by copyright but I'm not sure if it's relevant in the context of using the same plans to build a house. Copyright is meant to protect against copying and derivative works not how the information is used.
It's not free as in speech, only as in beer, but d100d.ru is a complete set of plans for building a house. It was specifically designed so that people who can't afford an architect can have a complete set of documents and architectural decisions to build a house on their own or hire a contractor without compromising on quality, as they can't afford to fix errors either.
Unfortunately, it's practically unusable in the US, as the ground floor is built from AAC, very popular in Russia and practically unheard of in the US. It's probably too small for American tastes, too.
At the risk of being slightly off-topic, what are good sources to find out wether and in which conditions building your own house is financially advantageous vs buying an existing (new or old) house.
Get an itemised estimate of the cost of land, cost of construction (include permitting and utility connect fees), and cost of housing while under construction, convert those to net present value, and compare to the all-in purchase price of the house with taxes and fees.
If you think future taxes or maintenance will be significantly different, you can estimate those in net present value as well.
IMHO, building your own house isn't usually about financial advantage, it's about getting a house that fits more of your needs and wants with less compromise than picking from what's available. But there might be exceptions if you have access to land, labor, or materials at a significant discount to market rates. Or if you want a much smaller house than is usually marketted.
> Get an itemised estimate of the cost of land, cost of construction (include
permitting and utility connect fees), and cost of housing while under construction
That's the thing: getting these estimates is not simple, especially for a hypothetical build.
In any case, I take it as a matter of tradeoffs. And the financial side of it is one of the tradeoffs. I probably would not build my own house - despite all the benefits - if it cost me double compared to a house readily available for sale, for example.
I just moved into my semi-custom build. Nothing crazy, economical design (basically a big box), and it came out to ~$190 / sq ft which is crazy cheap, but still at least 25% too high compared to slightly older comps in my area.
This should be our home for at least 15 years though since I have a good track record of remote work, family in the area, and young kids. So hopefully the extra expense won't matter as much in the long run
I don't think building is ever cheaper unless you put years of your own labor into it and you are really good at that kind of stuff
> At the risk of being slightly off-topic, what are good sources to find out wether and in which conditions building your own house is financially advantageous vs buying an existing (new or old) house.
I'd imagine only if you do a lot of the actual building yourself.
New house will just cost same or less than you trying to get a project then hire people to do it.
Project is tiny part of the cost, but for developer it's already amortized over tens of homes they've built. Workers also "know the process" and I'd imagine build it faster than some custom.
Now old house, that's interesting question, and that will heavily depend on state the house is in.
Putting some insulation on old house and doing some renovation might come out far cheaper.
Or you might get into some kind of renovation hell where every fix uncovers another problem with the house, then it turns out you not only need to re-do electrics but also water/sewage, or remove old insulation and replace it with better, or remove some rotting boards etc.
Then there is of course question about whether you like house layout or not or how much you'd want to change it.
On flip-side, the advantage of fixing up old house is that you don't need to do it all at once and so can take smaller mortgage and so pay less in cost of that.
At least in America, with the massive increase in material and labor costs and greater building codes, a newly built home identical to an existing home will cost more than the market price of the existing home.
For my amusement, I presume you're from US or UK.
How much do you usually pay for a house project?
For comparison, I've paid around $2000 for whole family house project, it's not just plans but also heat-loss computation, heating systems plans etc.
Country CZ (EU).
It's two story house made of "bricks", with gas+wood+heat pump heating systems. I would say pretty classical here. For ~$270k, not counting the property.
Also soon there is starting another round of EU subsidies in range of $50k paid upfront for houses with solar panels, green roof etc.
In Canada you are typically looking at approx 10-15k for drawings and to build the home you will spend anywhere from 400-Plus CAD per sq/meter depending on what kind of finish you want. This price is for a brick home, wooden frame, asphalt shingle roof. Nothing fancy. Typically drawings don't include any of the rough in like plumbing and electrical. That is designed on the fly by the contractor who does the work. House are typically built like shit since people only want to invest in the finish and don't care about the mechanical piece since it is out of sight and out of mind. If you can GC your own house, you can pick the contractors and supervise the construction and the quality of work will be better. If you hire a General Contractor, they will typically charge cost/plus 15% -20%. Most folks in Canada and the US buy houses that are built by large corporations where they have no control over the quality, etc. They just pick a model from the handful offered when there is a new development.There are few incentives or subsides. The US is very similar.
Because these are most common materials used for building houses, (in CZ).
And wanted to distinguish I don't mean classic house made of classic bricks.
Because if American see a brick house, they think this, right?
https://st.hzcdn.com/simgs/afd1745b0164c256_14-6933/home-des...
And this type of house is very rare here. Maybe you can't even build it here, because of bad heat insulation etc.
- Are you going to act as the general contractor? OR
- Are you going to have a builder build it?
I just finished the lattermost process. In that case, you can get ideas from open source plans, but getting a builder to build your plans will be a full-custom build with the corresponding costs.
We looked at the plans several builders offered, modified one we liked, and then had them build it. From what I can tell, this route saved a lot of time and cost (assuming you are going the builder route).
Related but the International Building Code is freely available. Its point isn’t to restrict you. It’s to do the engineering for you so you don’t have to.
Log Home Builders Association https://www.lhba.com/ is not free open source but is very cheap to take a course and get a cookbook for building so called butt and pass log homes. Many self builders have built amazing homes with this method but it is not for the faint of heart and takes most people several to many years to build their home. Worth knowing about since the building technique uses big whole logs carefully graded for taper and diameter stacked in a rectangle and "nailed" together with rebar nails driven vertically down into 1/2 inch holes drilled in the logs. Finished houses look amazing check out the website gallery pages.
app.sketchup.com is the AMAZING web app version of SketchUp. In the 3D Warehouse, there are millions of homes & buildings already made. You can download all for FREE and then easily take them apart & make them unique. NOTE! When you first get to the 3D Warehouse area, you'll default be in & searching the "Products" area, this is just for official Products that manufacturers have uploaded (super cool!) but you must click "Models" button/area right next to that, this is where billions of models uploaded by random people are found & 99% of the time the only place to search. Some Models are insanely detailed. Keep searching different words to find what you want, search here is picky. Good Luck!
However building any house is about 10 times as much work as you think it will be. Once the main structure is built and roofed in you are about 10-20% done.
For my money this fold-out tiny house on steroids with a base price of $85k is way more cost effective than self-building a house from free plans.
We recently built a house. Of course, we spent endless hours drawing on paper, considering budget restrictions, the building site, etc..
You know what made the biggest difference? Looking at actual houses. Plans on paper, or even the (universally crappy) 3D simulations are nothing like walking into an actual house and seeing what works, and what doesn't.
What "works" is ultimately very subjective: a mix of your personal requirements and your personal taste. Abstract drawings are too dry, to objective, and just don't convey how a house actually feels, when you are inside the structure.
TLDR: Talk to a highly experienced general contractor (GC) who builds homes. The good ones will have plenty of plans that you can edit to your heart's content. All three GCs that I interviewed immediately showed / emailed me plans they thought I would like to start from.
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I built a house in Cape Cod (Massachusetts, United States,) a few years ago. A few things to consider:
When I started working with my GC, he had a whole filing cabinet full of designs. They weren't "open source," (as in copyrighted under GPL/MIT/Apache,) but he scanned the design we started from.
I then used (shockingly) preview on Mac to cut and paste it up to move some walls and rooms around. (Basically, we took some space out of the master bedroom to make one of the other bedrooms larger. The master bedroom still has a lot of extra space.)
He then sent my changes to a professional designer who brought the design up to something that the contractors could follow, and made the garage deeper so we had extra storage and a garage door for a riding lawn mower. In 2017, in Cape Cod, this cost me a little over $1000.
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But, if you really want to get creative, I suggest hiring an architect. They have the experience that you, as an untrained novice, don't have. A good architect should be able to weigh your desires and give you something that'll be better than you could imagine.
Considering that redos are very expensive when building a house, spending a few thousand on an architect will be much cheaper than spending tens of thousands on a "redo" after the fact.
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Furthermore, if there is a house you like, at least in MA, it's easy to find the dimensions online. Just google "[town name] GIS", and you will find the town's database of all homes. Enter the address (or street,) and you will be able to find room layouts (with sizes) used for assessments, and even the assessment of value for the home. These are all publicly available records.
It's also useful to pull the GIS data of any land you're planning on buying (in MA.) This will tell you who paid what for the land going back as far as the records are available. You can use this in negotiations. (I knew that my GC overpaid for the land before the 2008 crash, so I adjusted my negotiation style accordingly.)
I would still advise you to use an architect. Different home structures and styles work better in different conditions. You should first consult a specialist and seek confirmation before doing if fully DIY.
In general house is a big investment. If someone is already familiar with construction then DIY is probably fine. But if not … I would like to know the rationale for not hiring an architect. I’m sure there are many who will draw a bog-standard gabled house in no time? Plus, if they are familiar with the region they should be aware any gotchas in building codes and permits.
Polish government has released free plans for special <70 squared m houses that do not need permission to be built. I'm afraid you have to fill in the form with fake info to download them.
https://www.gunb.gov.pl/projekty-architektoniczno-budowlane
May I assume that you want a DB so that you can see similarly sized houses/flats and get ideas on laytouts, balconies, etc?
Someone already wrote: ads. Go to your house/flat hunting website of choice, use the appropriate filters (house/flat) floors, sqm/sqft, etc. Usually the photos and the layout are there, and if you put a price range you can also see the cheap ones vs the expensive ones.
A very surprising number of housing listings don't include a drawing/diagram of the floor plan. Just photos of the interior taken with a wide-angle lens that distorts the size of everything.
I'd disagree that the terms are synonymous. Free plans probably could mean printed out single sheet plans with renderings. Open Source usually means the legal freedom to change, update and share whatever it is. To me, the source of the plans is provided so that someone could change/update the plans as they wish. In the context of architectural plans this could be the files in something like Fusion 360 if that were actually used for full house plans (I don't think it is).
Edit to add: I doubt an architectural firm would give their source files to plans away for free. They put a lot of effort into creating them, its their business after all.
I've been interested in this concept and mulled it over for years. I can't find an incentives model that leads to success. Nonetheless, group deliberations with fresh perspectives could lead to interesting new ideas. I'm open to connecting with others.
Just browse the myriad of floor plan sites and find one you like.
Any plan (at least in my area) is going to require an licensed Architect stamp and engineering to match local code.
It's also worth it to spend the money up front to get a house designed that fits your lot (terrain, light, elevation, etc) - you'll more than make up for it in final home value.
If you’re going to go through the trouble and extra expense of constructing something that is brand new, you might as well hire a professional architect.
Why go through the trouble to build something if you’re just going to get a mediocre building plan someone is willing to give away for free?
You need to think architecture instead of software development.
The same way an architecture would be wise to converse with software developers to start building a mental model of their industry, so should you in the reverse.
I want to respond here because I actually built (am still building) my own house. I looked around for this type of thing back when I started, which was 2008. At the time I didn't really find anything. My wife and I ended up drawing it out ourselves, and my dad and I ended up sort of winging it during construction. As in, "These plans don't quite work here, so we'll make these adjustments right now." It should be said also that neither I nor my wife are architects. At the time I would have said my dad was an extremely experienced and proficient amateur builder (he also built his house around 1980), and that I was just an amateur. After 15 years of working on this project, I will call myself a proficient amateur as well. I know that we could have done better at planning - I did not know enough about building before we started and relied too heavily on my dad during those times. If I had the opportunity to do it a second time, it would be better, but I'm not doing it! (Probably).
Here are some of the benefits of building your own house:
1. You know everything about it. Well, some things you forget, but most of it remains in the back of your mind. "Didn't I run some extra wire here just in case?"
2. You learn all of the skills that you will need to maintain your home, if you don't already have them. This means you never need a handyman (but your weekends are shot).
3. Just like nobody will watch your money like you, nobody will build your house like you. There are a lot of really crappy houses being built in 2023, and for the last 75 years or so. The reason for the crappiness, of course, is money.Being able to make the decision to use quality building materials instead of collecting 10% more profit, for example, can result in a really big improvement over conventional building.
4. It's really satisfying living in your handiwork. I'm sure there are more reasons - I can't write all day.
Now the pitfalls and reasons it sucks:
1. It's really frustrating living in your handiwork. For me, every time I walk past something that still needs my attention, it's a little stressor. Of course that's not too different from regular homeownership, I think. There are also a lot of times that I wish I would have planned it better.
2. Regulations (and financing) are really, really not in favor of building your own home. Unless you are a professional builder as well. Permits will expire way too soon, you won't understand their processes, they won't understand your processes. Assuming you need to borrow money, the bank won't know what the hell to do. They will literally freak out and nobody will be able to help you. This is too far outside of their routines.
3. It's a lifetime commitment. I mean, I guess it doesn't have to be, but for me it definitely feels that way. I built too big, and now I'm stuck working on it for what feels like forever.
Also, I'm in a temperate climate (Georgia, USA) where I don't have to worry about cold weather too much. I'm back in the woods where people don't ask too many questions. I have the support of my family, which I couldn't have done without. Overall, I'm happy with where I am. I usually enjoy the work, and at this point I don't mind taking time to do other things as well.
It won't work - not because it's bad idea but because people from most of industries/crafts different than IT are not interested and even very hostile to the idea of sharing their knowledge, projects, work for free.
Earthships are also said to be open source, but the plans are (definitely) not free https://earthshipbiotecture.com/
You can also check Open Source Home, by Studiolada (those are free, but the plans are in french) https://www.countryliving.com/remodeling-renovation/news/g46...
Open Source Ecology is now listing a house in their list of builds https://www.opensourceecology.org/extreme-build-of-the-seed-...
Open Building Institute is also promoting a configurable house https://www.openbuildinginstitute.org/