LINEA’s mission is to provide professional licensed Architecture and Interior Design for the residential market.

 

Design Simplified.

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Have you found the "perfect" plan online, or in a magazine, but just need a few revisions to it?  We are here to help.

 

In the state of North Carolina, residential plans are not required to be sealed by a licensed Architect.  You DO have the choice to hire an unlicensed drafter or “residential designer”.  Steven’s architectural license guarantees an elevated level of detail, experience, and LIABILITY.  Steven is also a licensed general contractor and can consult you on constructability, feasibility, code compliance, and conceptual budgeting.

 

There are hundreds of websites that offer pre-designed home floor plans for purchase.  We affectionately refer to them as “plan mills”.  They often sell the plans based on their size and are careful to provide CYA terms that may leave you high and dry when you go to submit them for permit.  They often do not include foundation and framing plans that are specific to your local jurisdiction (the AHJ = authority having jurisdiction).  This requires you to do one of two things: pay them a customization fee to include these details; or hire a local engineer, architect, or draftsman to add the details to the drawing set.  They also make a lot more money on the “extras”.  The extras may include upgraded fees to provide you with the digital drafting files they used to create the plan and they offer hourly or flat fees for making modifications to the plans including interior plan changes and/or exterior elevation changes.  Other “extras” include additional drawings that you probably don’t even need, like electrical plans, HVAC plans, or plumbing plans.  In most jurisdictions, your General Contractor’s licensed trades will pull their own permits and they do not require these extra drawings, they simply build to code and have them inspected when they are done.  Let’s be clear, there is nothing WRONG with any of these features or extra costs.  There is a market and need for it, and we respect that.  But, we do it better.

 

We offer our “re-draw” services to do an end-run around your dependency on “plan mills”. 

 

The process:

 

1. Do not buy the plan.  I mean, you can, if you want, but we don’t require it.  Note: if you DO buy the plan, you are effectively buying their copywrite to make revisions, and that is not always necessary.  With our process, you will not need their drawings if you bought them.  In fact, using their drawings will cause our process to take longer.  Their drawings are often poorly drawn, full of errors, and often to drawn in the same software we use which  make the conversion process even more laborious.

2. Instead of buying them, simply provide us with a link to the website that has images of the floor plan you like.  As long as it contains some basic room dimensions, we can take a screen shot of the image, import it into our Auto CAD software, scale it correctly to match the dimensions given, and then simply draft right on top of it.  Our fee to re-draw the plan is based on the size of the home (chart is below). 

3. The drawings will include fully dimensioned floor plans, exterior elevations, foundation plans, framing plans and necessary wall sections and details for permit.  We also include complete room schedules, door schedules, and window schedules.  We have never seen a plan mill provide those.  You know what we also provide that they do not? We design the foundations and framing plans based on the current residential building code using “stick framing” and traditional masonry foundations.  This will get you or your general contractor a permit in any jurisdiction with no extra steps.  If your home design requires spans for the floor or roof that exceeds the code maximum spans, we will note those on the plans and require the general contractor to hire an engineer to size those members.  In many cases, that additional engineering can be free or of minimal costs, we will touch on that next.

4. Even if we can design all of your foundations and framing based on building code, that may not achieve the level of quality and efficiently you desire, and we get that.  If you want to go the extra step and upgrade from code-compliant “stick framing” to more-efficient and more-sustainable engineered wood products (called “EWPs”), our drawings can be used as a basis for design for that engineering work.  This could include I-joists, laminated beams/girders, roof trusses, or other laminated vertical framing systems.  You can give your engineer our drawings (we will give them the digital drafting files too, that makes their job much easier) and they can base their EWP engineering on our “stick framed” basis for design diagrams.  Often, your general contractor will have relationships with the EWP vendors who sell these engineered systems and they will perform the engineering for free, or more accurately, they will bury the meager engineering fee in the cost of the materials.   This is also applicable to the foundation.  We will show a vented crawl space, concrete block (CMU) basement walls, or a concrete slab-on-grade base on what you want and it is largely dependent on the floorplan of the house, topography of the site, and your budget. Foundation designs will be based on code compliant design.  If you want to upgrade the vented crawl space (which are AWESOME), a poured-in place concrete basement walls or a prefabricated concrete panelized basement system (even MORE awesome), or a slab-on-grade with stem walls or under-floor heating, our drawings will be the basis for design for the vendor who will engineer and install those systems for you.

5. Exterior elevations and roof plans.  As part of our re-draw fee, we will also draw the exterior elevations and roof plans of the home based on the images provided on the website.  We often have to “interpolate” some elevations and the roof plan because they are not always provided on the website.

6. We will provide typical wall sections that are specific to your plan.  This is unique – all of the plan mills will give you ALL of their details regardless if they are applicable to your home or not, and that often causes confusion with estimating, construction management, and the permitting process.  Its like buying a new car and them providing a user manual that includes instructions for EVERY car they have EVER built.  It is bad enough they often include all of the trim levels for your specific car, but can you imagine buying a 2 door coupe and getting a manual for a diesel pickup?  We don’t do that.

7. We will also place your home on your property boundary map (this requires a professional surveyor).  This is required for a building permit.  The plan mills do not do that.  You often have to pay the surveyor to do that for you, and they don’t like doing it.

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At this point, you have an architecturally sealed floor plans ready for construction. Here is a sample of some drawing sets:

 

• https://www.dropbox.com/s/w8bw1cw7a542atg/SJA%202028%201357%202BL.pdf?dl=0

• https://www.dropbox.com/s/f36xpd47pcnz5tl/SJA%201823%201075%202BL.pdf?dl=0

• https://www.dropbox.com/s/rnkdp747a6uedu7/SJ%201916%201918%202BL.pdf?dl=0

 

The customization process:  Nearly every “re-draw” we do requires some customization or modifications.  If it is something as simple as moving a door or window or changing the size of an interior room a couple inches we will do those modification for free as part of the re-drafting process, as long as we know about them before we start drafting and the modification doesn’t have a “domino” effect through the other drawings.  However, many customers come to us and say “we love this plan … but”.  Often the “but” involves a customization like adding square footage, moving walls around, redesigning kitchens and baths, turning a 2-car garage into a 3, putting a bonus room in the attic, adding entire rooms, changing the elevations, adding more decks/patios/sunrooms/screened in porches, or adding or deleting basements.  Often customizations to the plan will result in the domino effect of further customizations to the elevations, roof plans, and foundation/framing systems.  We will be happy to make these customizations based on our hourly rate: Elizabeth: $150/hour, Steven: $180/hour.

 

We will simply keep track of the additional time needed to make the customizations and bill you for them in 5 to 10  hour increments as we work through the design process.  We will provide you with an estimate for the amount of time that is needed for the customization before we start the work.  Note: it is these customizations that make the plan “unique” to you, and therefore no longer subject to the original copyright on the plans.

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Contact us for a complimentary consultation.