Building a New House – Looking for House Plans

We had closed on the land and were having no success with choosing a modular. I started calling builders and looking at house plans.

I pinned about a million plans on Pinterest. I looked at plans on-line. I bought a couple of books of house plans.

We looked at more modular plans and found this one. This would do. But then no one around here could do it. We really like the idea of the cape. I looked at the plans from all of the modular companies that the local companies could work with. I figure we can get close to what we want and just live with it. What do we really want and what do we really need?

I started thinking about every house or apartment I’d ever lived in. Deciding what I liked best and what were the biggest inconveniences. I really like an entry or foyer, so anyone coming to the front door doesn’t have to come all of the way into the house. Also maybe some way to have clients into the office without going through the house. And a convenient bathroom, so clients don’t have to go wandering for any reason. We want a garage. I would love to have a laundry room. And to come in from the garage in through the laundry room, so things don’t get dumped by the door in plain site. I want the living room TV wall not to be the master bedroom wall, so I don’t hear the bass of whatever movie Cliff is watching past my bedtime. We really love the porch where we are, so we want a big porch again. We want closet space. We don’t want giant bathrooms. I would love to have a linen closet. And a big walk in closet in the bedroom. Space to set up a sewing machine, maybe in a guest room. Closets, closets, closets… A big enough kitchen, but not an eat-in kitchen. A dining room long enough for a table with a leaf and wide enough to not have to squeeze around people. A bar so people can visit in the kitchen without being in the way. The living room facing the view…

Most house plans are just so much bigger than we need. We want a small house. But the more I did research, the more I realized that most of the small houses were too small. And not practical. Not for two people running two businesses.

I also started calling and emailing local builders. No one would give me a price. I’ve had some experience with builders… everything costs more and takes longer than they say. But what is the alternative?

I was looking for ideas of how to modify some of these ridiculous bathrooms in every modular plan and I came across the house plans from Schumacher Homes. They have some excellent house plans and they give you the price up front. I googled and they have a model only 20 minutes from our house.

I looked at their plans until the model opened. (It was still very early in the morning.)

They have adorable houses starting at only $107,779.

The smaller they are, the more they cost per square foot. Which only makes sense, since a lot of things cost pretty much the same amount, no matter how big the house is. You don’t have to get that much more expensive to get MUCH bigger.

You can sort the plans by cost per square foot on their website.  They can cost as little as $83.98 per square foot. These are usually bigger, two story houses. We talked about getting one of these, then maybe only finishing the downstairs for now. Perhaps that would make it less expensive.

When they opened, I drove down to take a look.

The model was GREAT! The woman who greeted me was friendly and helpful, but not pushy. She answered a lot of questions. She took me downstairs where the selections are. The standard selections are everything I wanted a modular to have. But these are stick built.

We did the math and, once we added in the price of the garage, this was not going to cost any more than the modulars were coming out at. In fact, even less. And we were getting what we want.

Saturday, Cliff drove down and looked at the model, too. He also loved it. He wanted all the options in the model, too. The vaulted ceilings, fireplace, screened-in porch… everything. The model has a bonus room over the garage, too. Great idea!

So, we started going through their house plans. You can sort by what you are looking for. We printed out plans, wrote on them and finally narrowed it down.

The Schumacher Homes Blue Ridge Model >