The Long Valley

Back in the old days there was no such thing as having a plan on something called a file.

You had your plans on something called paper, big sheets of paper that had to be roll up  and bound with a rubber band in order to carry around to subcontractors and suppliers and bankers and everyone else involved in the process of getting quotes and prices and calculations and financing and permitting.

In the old days there was a lot of driving around town passing out and then gathering up the house plans.

Now days the plan is passed around with the touch of a few buttons via email to all those involved.

The Pdf is what you are buying here because it is all that is necessary for now. When the time comes and you need the plans in hand on paper, it is easy to email or hand-deliver the file to a print shop like Kinko’s and get as many copies as you need.

Printed at 100%. the plans are 2′ x 3′ and at 1/4″ scale.

Printed at 50% they are at 1/8″ scale.

I am a laborer who learned how to frame and then learned how build and then learned how to draft plans by hand and then by Sketchup.

I did not and never plan to learn CAD. When I had to make the jump from hand drafting to computer drafting, I chose to learn Sketchup because it looked fun and CAD did not.

Sketchup is fun and hugely popular around the world. Each of these designs has a full Sketchup 3d model that can be accessed with Sketchup Free and a Layout file which needs Sketchup Pro to open.

Conservatively, I would say the answer is to not count on it, but I would add there is at least a 50-50 chance they will.

I can only tell you that they all did in my neck of the woods which is Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho. For the most part, our planning departments are fairly easy-going compared to what I have heard of in other parts of the country.

In one of God’s more favored parts of America, where I live, we are not beleaguered by high winds nor shaky ground. If you live in a less tranquil region, my plans will likely require engineering, but that is not a deal breaker.

Even in our area, sometimes my client will want a design with too much glass or too high of walls for the plans to sail through the permitting process without some structural engineering.

Once we have gone through the process of coming up with the perfect design and produced plans that a general contractor can bid and build from, my client then gives the plans to a structural engineer who does their work to it. It is actually a very common step in custom home building.