Making your building plans and blueprints with cost effectiveness in mind
Building your home takes many steps. One of the first things you do is to create your blueprints for the house. Most people who build their own houses don't want to spend a huge amount of money, so here are some tips when you are drawing up your building plans and blueprints that will keep cost effectiveness in mind.
Before you sit down with your architect, go to the hardware store. Take a notebook with you and write down the sizes of wood, drywall, tile, and the other materials that you will be using to build your home. You don't need to buy anything yet, just get the sizes and bring the notebook with you to your design meeting with your architect.
When you sit down with your architect to design the house, take into consideration the sizes of the materials. You don't want to have tons of excess lumber or materials so try to design the rooms to fit the materials.
For example, when you decide on what size to make the bedrooms, see how long the planks are that will be used in the bedrooms to build them. If they are 10 feet long, make the room 10 feet by 15 feet. That way you can use one full plank and one half of a plank to build the house. You won't have to throw away anything or use a bunch of small pieces of wood, because the wood is but in half every time. You can of course make it a 10 by 20 room, or a 10 by 10 foot room and use either two planks or just one.
Don't forget to also use the width of the planks of wood. If they are 5 inches long each, then make the room a multiple of that. You don't want to have to bother with excess materials or have to spend a bunch of extra money making it a strange shape.
Most of the other materials that you will use, like hard wood flooring or tile are also in similar sizes but make sure that it will be easy to use the flooring materials as well. You don't want to have to cut tile into the shape of the floor instead of the planks used to build the floor, so if you have to make a choice between the tile or the planks fitting better, choose the tile or consider using a different flooring material. If you have to cut some tile for a different room anyways, then it will probably be a better idea to choose the planks that fit the room.
If you do have scraps, use them. You won't be able to use every scrap for something, but use the extra planks to build somewhere else in your house. If you aren't finishing the basement when you build the house, then keep all the scraps that will help you finish the basement whenever you decide you want to. There's no point in throwing them away when you will need them in the future.
Don't design your house and then decide what materials and sizes that you are going to use. Find out the sizes and then design your house around them. It will save you tons of money and from wasting lots of materials. You don't have to buy the materials before you design the house, just realize that the sizes and shapes of the rooms you design for your house, will dramatically impact the amount of money that you will spend building your house.
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Tags: Building home building plans blueprints cost effectiveness hardware store plan sizes of materials
