Your house plan is perhaps the most important asset in building your new house; here’s how you can get the right one.
Building a new house is one of the most critical and challenging projects you will take on in your lifetime.
It’s a huge financial commitment, and you are also creating a space where you and your family will spend a lot of your time (especially if you have a work from home lifestyle), for years if not your entire life.
And choosing a home plan is one of the most important steps in building a new house. Which is why you need to get it right.
So, in this blog post, we have decided to list out a few things you need to do before buying your house plan, to help you get it right.
Steps to take before buying a home plan
See, certain aspects of your home like area, budget, some functional requirements, exterior design and so on are taken as inputs in a house plan. In other words, you need to make sure you have a list of these before you buy your plan.
This is what we want to help you do.
We have created a step-by-step process that’s very easy to follow through which you can finalise these details and be ready to buy a home plan that meets house building and designing specifications as they apply to you.
Tip: You should go through our blog post on should you buy your house plans online to get clarity on whether you should go for buying online house plans or whether you should approach a residential interior designer to do the work.
Get all the relevant information from your city’s planning department
There would be legal requirements and obligations that your new house will need to follow. You need to know these specifications and what limitations they put on your house building before you look at plans. Otherwise you may end up buying plans that are unsuitable and you can’t use, leading to your money being wasted.
Some such pieces of information are:
- What categories of buildings are permissible in your area?
- What margins will you have to maintain?
- What conditions are there on the height and number of floors?
- What materials can be used?
- Other issues like roof inclines and so on.
Once you have these in hand, you can proceed to the next step.
Designer’s Insight: You may have to choose your building style and materials based on these conditions.
If some of these sound a little confusing to you, you can consult with a professional interior designer in Dhaka to understand your options.
Understand/Identify your home design style and preferences
Surprised that we are asking you to understand your own style and preferences?
Here’s the deal: When we sit to consult with clients, they often have a difficult time conveying their design preferences to us. What happens is that they have some abstract ideas, however those would have to be adapted into the design scenario to be useful in creating the design. This is where a lot of interior design clients struggle.
And it is this gap that we want to fill by asking you to make sure you know your home design style.
Some of the questions that will be answered here:
- Are you looking for a traditional home, modern house design or a small, budget apartment-style house?
- What kind of lifestyle are you looking to maintain in the house?
- Do you want decorative features like a spiral staircase, a space/apartment above your garage, etc?
- What is it that you want out of your new home?
Don’t worry about whether these are possible or not; just list out what you want your house to have.
You can look through our house design portfolio to get an idea of what’s possible and try to list out what your design preferences are.
List out your minimum needs and requirements
Some key specifications you need to finalise are:
- What dwelling type do you need: detached, semi-detached, multi-family and so on.
- How many people will live in the house?
- Do you need any rooms that have specific functions and/or need particular equipment (home office, children’s playroom, recreation room and so on)?
- What is your budget?
You should have all these ready when you go to meet your architecture consultant in Bangladesh for your project.
With these 3 things done, you are ready to go buy your house plan.
What will happen next?
- You search the net for house plan sellers, and go through their available plans.
- If you like available plans you can buy one of those…but we suggest getting them modified according to your needs. It will cost more but it will be worthwhile.
- Give their designers a list of everything we have discussed here, plus any other changes that you are looking for (with respect to some of the house plans that you found attractive).
- Discuss additional services like materials list, electrical plans and so on.
- The designer will present you with a preliminary plan. Once you approve, they will proceed to create a detailed and technical home plan that you can use for construction.
Ready to build your new home?
The next step will be to take your house plans to a builder or a contractor and negotiate over the project.
For a smoother process, where the entire work – from conceptualising the design to making plans and even building the entire thing – is done by a single company, you can get in touch with us.
We will sit with you to understand your requirements and aspirations, decide on a budget and timeline, and handle the entire house building project…you will walk into our office with a dream for a new house, and you will walk out a few months later with the keys to your new house!
