How to start designing your new panelized home

What this episode covers

Show Notes: Planning and designing your new home is the most important step.  Where to start.  Are standard plans or online plans usable?  Can my friend design the plans?  Fitting the home to your building site.  Taking our conceptual ideas and getting them into usable plans.  Benefits of a one stop shop for plans, engineering, energy codes, and site plans. How proper plans help your project, permitting and budgeting.   Transcript: Interviewer: Hey everyone. Welcome to the Landmark Home and Land Company’s Panelized Home Show. With us as always is the President and Founder of the Landmark Home and Land Company, Steve Tuma. Steve, how are you doing? Steve Landmark: Excellent. It’s a nice day. It’s a busy day today. We had a lot of people calling in, asking how to design their homes and get projects going. The season is coming up and I guess people are excited. Interviewer: I wanted to ask today about plans for a new panelized home. Let’s just start with this. How does one go about drawing up plans for a new panelized home project? Do I just get out a pencil and a napkin and start designing plans myself? What’s the best way to get started? Steve Landmark: Well, there’s a variety of ways to start. But generally it all starts with a concept. Someone may not have thought their whole plan process through. But they know what they want. They know that they want a ranch home with a two-car garage and three bedrooms, two baths, a big great room for the family to get together or maybe if they’re in a – building in a mountain area. They need something to take advantage of a view or if they’re building a lakeside, they want another place that has access to bring their toys, kayaks, canoes in and out of the house and have the home properly designed for it. So generally it starts with a concept and people will have a rough idea of what they need. I think what we’re talking about is how do you take that idea from someone’s mind and get it on a piece of paper. Stephen, it has been pretty interesting. We’ve had people that just call us up and say, “Hey, I want a house about 40 feet wide, 2 bedrooms, 3 baths.” We draw a sketch-up and get it to them. Some people have literally been out to dinner, draw it on a napkin. They take a picture of it and text it to us or they fax it or email it some other way. So there’s a whole variety of different ways. The key to it is that we have the capability of listening and looking at what you want and then drawing it into a set of preliminary plans. So everything is sized properly because you can have walls that are a certain thickness. Windows have to be certain sizes. There are just certain code details that when you draw it on a sketch or with a pencil, the dimensions and things don’t work out. But our people will draw it up to make sure that it works with the codes. It works within the setbacks. It works within the ceiling that you want, the window locations, how you want a kitchen laid out, where you want your garage, how you want your basement crawl space, whatever it is, what type of roof lines if you want a porch. So I think the best thing to do is get in touch with us and let us know what you’re thinking and then you can email us the details on the plans and we would take it from there and we do have the capability of getting preliminary plans going and even out for preliminary concepts, developing budget ideas so that people know that they’re working towards a project that makes sense for what they intend to do and the budget that they want to stay within. Interviewer: Now, what if I already have a set of plans from my own designer or say from like an online plan service? Then what? Steve Landmark: Well, that’s an interesting concept because codes are getting tighter. Building departments are getting stricter. So it all depends on the quality of plans.