Becoming your own Home Designer The plans offered by CountryPlans (and our sister site PlanHelp.com) are stock or "standard plan" homes designed to be modified and customized by the owners. We not only give you reprint rights to the plans we send you, but allow you to make modifications and adjustments on the plan sheets themselves and then recopy these for your customized project plans. (You are taking responsibility for these changes, of course and we ask that you build only one house for each set of purchased plans.) Almost everyone makes some changes to the plans, either before or as they build their new house. And, this is as it should be since your combination of site, climate and space needs are unique and your house will be more alive, efficient and comfortable if it responds. We think you are better off starting out with a set of plans that allow you to make these changes and will even help you with suggestions for those customizations (see the Plans Support Forum). Many of our plans have no internal load bearing walls and the interiors can be redesigned and spaces relocated as needed. Moving windows, doors and non-structural partitions can be visualized and drawings produced with a simple computer floorplan software program like 3d Home Architect (get version 3, NOT a later version) or Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer (ver 6 or later). These programs  allow you to reprint the modified floorplans, electrical plans and elevations to scale so they can be pasted into the paper plans. Sorry, we cannot provide technical support for these programs. The PlanHelp membership site is setup to allow you to download template files into these programs and make these modifications. Read this article to understand how you can do this. Planhelp also has a library of scaled drawings for special elements and tools that can add bonus features to your house.  For larger modifications, additions and structural changes the help of a local home designer, architect or engineer may be needed. But, you can certainly start working on your own plans, get a feel for being your own designer, and then get a bit of local consulting help if you need it. This will allow you to evolve your design and know what you want to do before spending money on design help. Many of the homes in the Owner-Builder Gallery have used our plans and modified them for their building site and to get the best house layout for their specific needs. NOTE: Some people build a small library of our plans and then copy, cut and paste elements and details to make plans for their customized project. In this way you can use a part of one plan, and a detail from another plan to customize your own master set of drawings. (This is the basis of the expandable cottages people have developed using the Enchilada plans set.) © John Raabe, CountryPlans LLC, 2009

See the PlanHelp template files *  CountryPlans HOME * Our "cut & paste" plans