Before you Build

Here are some important things you should know before you select your house plan

Why are you picking up modern house plans from the web, rather than directly going to an Architect?

Don't get cheated with house design software

There are websites that tell you that they will provide you software with which you can design your own home or draw your modern house plan yourself. Don't get cheated. A really elegant modern house can only be designed by a clever architect who has years of experience and who use extremely sophisticated and advanced design software such as 3D Studio MAX. Auto CAD and Micro Station etc. These professional software are extremely expensive and require lot of learning and training to operate. There is no magic software that is very cheap and need no skill or training and still anyone can make wanders with it.

What is NOT a detailed drawing set?

A detailed drawing set is a set of drawings that gives you all the required information to complete the construction of your modern house. Many websites will give you a Schematic Drawing set saying it is the detailed drawing set of your modern house plan. It contains plans, some elevations, one or two sections showing materials and heights, a schedule of the sizes of doors and windows and some foundation details. This drawing can be used for rough calculation of costs and to submit for construction approvals. This is not enough to construct your modern house.

The best way to get a modern house plan for you is to go to an architect and get it designed specifically to suit your needs and the location. However, a really skilled and qualified architect may charge you 10 to 20 percent of the construction cost of your house only for the design of it. There are people who charge much less, but a real international standard Modern House Design will never come out from them. Even if you select a quality architect, what happens if what he designed is not what you wanted. Still the architect has done his job of designing your modern house spending his resources and time and you have to pay for it.

Therefore it may be much cheaper and safer for you to select your modern house from a readymade set of house plans. But always think twice, the best design is always the design evolved from the context - the location, climate, levels of the site and your needs.

You can't construct a house without detailed drawings

You can't construct your modern house just by downloading it free of charge from a website. Everybody that invites you to come and download modern house plans from their website free of charge, do so as a marketing gimmick. The house plan and a picture of a modern house they give you free of charge is actually the bait they use to catch you. What they want is to sell you a detailed drawing set of a house.

If you want to construct the house of the selected modern house plan, you must get the detailed drawing set of it. There is no website on earth that gives you essential details to construct a modern house design free of charge. To construct a house you require sections, height details, material specifications, connection and joint details and lot more things. Architects design these things using lot of skills, experience and time. Most probably it involves the services of other professionals such as structural engineers, Mechanical and Electrical Engineers etc.

Quality of the detailed drawing set is the key factor of the quality of the house you are going to construct. Only with the detailed drawing set done by the original designer of the house, you can construct the real elegance of the picture of the house you have downloaded.

What is a detailed drawing set?

A detailed drawing set of a modern house plan is preferably a set of drawings of approximately twenty pages of A3 or A4 size. Detailed drawing set of a modern house design provides in depth details of

how to setout the foundations of your house
how to construct the walls leaving correct sizes of openings to fix doors and windows
levels of each step, floors and slabs, placements of slab drops
how to make doors and windows, frame sizes, panel construction details
staircase construction details
toilet arrangements with correct positioning of fittings, gullies and slopes
roof construction details, position of each rafters and battens and sizes
rainwater disposal system details
position of light and lamp fittings
balcony construction details
tile layouts and ceiling layouts of each room
pantry cupboard construction details
and much more things that are essential to make sure that your hose is constructed properly and elegantly.

Be careful when buying detailed drawing sets

When you are buying a detailed drawing set of your selected modern house plan you have to be careful because before buying they are not showing it to you. If the architects have not detailed it properly and carefully, your construction is at a trouble. Use this guide to identify quality websites where you can buy a quality product for sure.

Don't buy detailed drawing sets from websites that give you thousands of house designs. When the weight of the content of a website is high, search anginas rank them high. And if your website have more quantity of stuff, you have the chance of coming to the top of the list of a search engine. For the very same reason many web sites just concentrate on presenting a large number of Modern House Plans. They are collecting any bad stuff from anybody and putting them forward to you.

A detail design of a Modern House Design you buy from such a website, most probably can be of very poor quality. Select your Modern House Plan from a website that you feel for sure are qualifying architects and their designs and do not present you poor quality stuff. A website that gives you a quality service will always have a system of quality controlling and maintaining standards and for the very same reason will present only a fewer number of house designs.

Make sure to take the softcopy of Auto CAD detailed drawing set of the modern house plan from the original designer.

Don't forget that after selecting your modern house plan you must get the design adjusted to fit in to the land, to fit into the local building regulations and to fit into your specific needs. Therefore, what you can do is to download the modern house plan you like and take it to a drafting person or company to get the adjustments done. The drafting person need not to be highly skilled or qualified because his job is just to do few adjustments.

However, it is very important that what you take to the drafting person ( CAD operator) is Auto CAD detailed drawing set of the modern house you have selected. Most people get into trouble by taking only the plans and a picture of the house design to the CAD operator. The concepts, forms and details imagined by the original designer will never be thought and designed by some one else in the same way. At the end of the day you will find that what is shown in the picture of the modern house plan you downloaded is one thing and what you have constructed is some other horrible thing.

It is not good for you to carry a print set of the detailed design of the modern house plan of the selected house design to the drafting person. The drafting person will then have to redraw everything from the drawings and most probably he will not do it as good as the original designer has done. On the other hand it will cost you a lot to draft the same things again. When you take soft copies of Auto CAD drawings, the task of the CAD operator is simple and the mistakes will be minimal.

Construction supervision is important

No matter how you are planning to construct the house, it is important that you get occasional visits of a qualified person to read drawings and supervise construction. Detailed drawing sets of Modern House Plans are usually require a qualified technician to read them. Careless mistakes and misinterpretation of drawings can cost you a lot.