Thank you for your interest in Don’t Buy A House Plan Until You Read This. My goal is to help you to be sure that you’ve found the perfect house plan– one that’s just right for you, your family, your lifestyle, your tastes, and your budget.

There’s no hidden agenda here; this website isn't trying to sell you house plans or recommend one house plan service over another. I don’t really care where you find your perfect house plan; I care about whether you find it and how much time you spend in the process. To be fair, you should know that I do own a Residential Architectural practice and we do sell house plans, but I hope you'll use what you learn from Don’t Buy A House Plan Until You Read This to scrutinize the plans on our website just as you would any other.

There are hundreds of "house plan" websites on the internet, easily found through search engines. But while you’re at it, you should also consider looking on the shelves of your local bookstore for the latest collections of house plans. You’ll also find them on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and at home improvement stores like Lowes and Home Depot.

Which brings us right to the crux of the problem once again – with so many house plans to choose from how do you go about making a wise decision?

There’s no magic formula here; I can’t pick the perfect plan for you. It’s going to take some work on your part, but it’s going to be a lot less work than you’ll have to do (and a lot less risk) if you don’t take advantage of what I have to teach you in Don’t Buy A House Plan Until You Read This.

It’s easy to get fooled by how simple the house plan websites can make the process seem – just enter the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, preferred architectural style, and poof! – out of thousands of possibilities, your perfect home plan appears.

But what’s really happened is that you’ve just been pigeonholed into a pre-defined market segment. Just as cars are designed and marketed towards groups of consumers, houses are designed with popular consumer preferences in mind. House plan services play the odds – with enough plans that appear to satisfy the requirements of enough market segments, you’re bound to find one that appeals to you, right?

That’s fine for some people, but you’re here because you’re more interested in how the house will support your personal lifestyle than you are about how many other people like it. If you don’t find a house plan that’s perfect for you, what’s the point of looking?

House Plan Marketing

Plan service companies know that you probably don’t understand much about architectural drawings. You might be learning terms like “plan” and “elevation” for the very first time. They don’t want you to get bogged down in details you don’t understand – details that might get in the way of you choosing to purchase a house plan.

Plan services also know that buying a house plan has a very strong emotional component - and that’s how house plans are marketed to you. It’s done in a couple of ways. The first is through the “plan selector” (or something similarly named) an online form where you enter the criteria for the kind of house you want. There’s an undeniable emotional reaction when plan selector presents you with forty or fifty plans that “match” your request.

The second emotional marketing “hook” is the color rendering – the drawing of the exterior of the house. Since the average homeowner might not really understand what a floor plan drawing is showing them, house plan services can’t count on the plan drawings to close the deal. But everyone knows a pretty house from an ugly one, don’t they? Showing you an attractive rendering of the house (usually the first thing you seen when the plan selector has done it’s job) is intended to get you excited about the look and feel of the house, since you probably won’t get all fired up about that black-and-white floor plan drawing.

There are plenty of “best-selling” house plans that owe more of their popularity to the skill of the artist that does the rendering than they do to the designer of the plan.

But you can find the perfect house plan for you if you take the time to learn a little more about houses than a house plan website or plan book can provide. And that’s what Don’t Buy A House Plan Until You Read This is here for.

So are you ready to become a more educated house plan consumer? Great! Let’s get started with Chapter One: House Plans Are 2D; Houses Are 3D.