Description
- Do you need help reading and understanding your drawing set?
- Do you feel time pressure to sign off plans?
- Weighing up different options and find it hard to decide?
- Not getting the answers you need to make your decisions from sales consultants and forums?
- Are there site conditions you think the builder is not taking into account of, i.e. trees, services, privacy, light and views?
- Would you like a 2nd opinion from someone with design experience?
The plans review consultancy by home design edge is an opportunity to discuss your site, your requirements and your plans with an independent design professional
Why plan review?
Once you have selected a design, and gone through the tender process, the next step is the plans consultation with the builder. You will receive a set of plans that show the site plan, floor plans, elevations and detailed plans for kitchen, bathroom and laundry.
Although most of the decisions are made in the tender process for project homes, there are still multiple significant decisions to make in the plans stage.
Not only is there pressure to get it right, but there may also be time pressure with the onset of tender expiry, that may put a dent in your overall budget.
There are a few areas to seek advice for project home plans
Some query their project coordinators, sales consultants, or crowd sourced from online forums and facebook groups.
The issue with sales consultants advice is that they represent the builders interest and not yours. They churn through dozens and dozens of homes at a time, and may not be patient to go through your requirements and site constraints. Their advice is 2nd hand from the builder and designers.
For online forums and facebook groups, they are beneficial to answer specific questions that previous customers have faced.
A plan review may be beneficial if your looking for a wholistic review by a design professional, that understands the joys, trials and tribulations of building with a project home builder. A design professional can help you read plans, and show you how you can optimise your plan within your site constraints.
What you’ll get out of a home design edge Plans review
This comprehensive plans review consultancy provides valuable information for people on their home building journey. It includes a questionnaire, one on one skype calls, and a plan review scrapbook with recommendations.
Plans review questionnaire
A questionnaire to go through your requirements, and what you want to achieve in the home. This informs our advice and recommendations to you.
1st call – 30 minute skype call to discuss requirements
This is a approximate 30 minute phone discussion or skype call to discuss the questionnaire and to talk through initial thoughts and understandings.
Plan review scrapbook
A PDF markup of your plans to go through recommendations for:
plan orientation, light and shading, ventilation, space efficiency, flow, storage options and the location of external miscellaneous items. The marked up PDF can be used to followup with your project home builder.
2nd call – 30 minute skype call to discuss opportunities recommendations
This is a approximate 30 minute phone discussion or skype call to discuss the opportunities recommendations in the plan review scrapbook, and to answer any additional questions you have
Frequently asked questions
Is a plans review worth the time and money?
You can get definitely achieve a project home with minimal interaction, discussion and queries. Some prefer the DIY approach seeking answers from google, forums or facebook groups.
There are large sums of money involved, several 100k’s to 1m+. Sometimes people can feel as though they are pressured into making many significant decisions in a short span. Having a design professional as a 2nd pair of eyes can help to maximise your investment, avoid stress and design mistakes you’ll have to live with for a long time.
For a very limited time, the plans review package is being offered at $497. The package represents a small % of the overall budget. If anyone is familiar with the tender stage, thousands are spent here are there without even blinking. Some people retain the services of a building inspector for approximately 2k, to protect themselves through the building process. Why not invest in design services that affect the built outcome from an earlier stage.
When is this consultancy applicable?
For the plans session, after the tender stage and before the colours appointment
I need help with other stages like tender stage, colours and electrical appointment. Is there a consultancy available for that?
The focus for now is plans reviews. Other packages will be developed in the future
What if my internet is not good enough for skype
The most important exchange of information will be by email PDF and phone discussion. This will be sufficient to communicate the requirements and recommendations
What can we do with the advice in the plan review
The review is from an independent designer from fresh eyes. The aim is to identify constraints and opportunities. You are free to take or leave the recommendations, and use them in communicating with your project coordinator in finalising your plans.
Is this package available for custom builds and/or builds outside of Australia?
Whilst we have considerable design expertise in custom design, we are focusing on this consultancy to help home builders for project home builders only. The information is generally common for other western countries, but the focus is on the Australian project home ‘volume home’ market.
If you would like to find out more about this package or other services that may assist with your home building journey, please email andrew@homedesignedge.com
Irene and Eric –
We are currently deciding on knocking down and rebuilding either a project home or a custom design home. Andrew has been extremely helpful in this process, providing us with his well-informed and unbiased opinion. We feel reassured that he has integrity and is not motivated by self-interest or profit. His expertise in architecture is undeniable, his ideas have been refreshing and innovative, and has made us consider things that we hadn’t come across before. He essentially gets our point of view but more importantly appreciates our site and wants us to get the most out of it.
Irene and Eric
Alex and Jenn –
My wife and I both had no idea about the building industry when we first embarked on our building journey. It was also our first build and we were soon overwhelmed with construction jargon, requirements and building options. We knew what we wanted, but at times we were not sure how to achieve what we had in mind. To spend such an extremely large amount of money with little knowledge and experience was tremendously daunting – especially at the initial stages of the tender where most of the decisions had to be made.
We were so grateful to have Andrew to go to for advice and suggestions. He was familiar with the building process and what builders could and could not do. He reviewed our plans, confirmed some of our uncertainties and gave us suggestions regarding layout, general design, practical elements of the plan and possible variations – some we didn’t even know were possible! He has a great eye for design and pragmatism and offered ideas based only an experienced professional industry would pick up.
He also explained to us a lot of the building jargon thrown at us and gave us tips on how to respond to our builders regarding certain variations and issues. He was generally a great wealth of knowledge and experience we could plug into at the most critical stage of our build. We now have a house which we love. Thank you to Andrew for his advice and at the early stages of the build – we now have the house we wanted and it has definitely saved us a lot of money in variations.