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Building a house starts with an idea which becomes a house plan. Online catalogs of house plans offer the best way possible to browse many house plans and build your idea library. Search functions on house plan sites allow you to focus your search and review many plans vs the old way of looking at plans in magazines. Your house design is improved by browsing many house plans and studying plans, comparing plans and deciding on what are your design priorities. Searching for your house plan can be narrowed if you know what type of architectural style you prefer. The popular architectural styles are country, ranch, modern, craftsman, farmhouse, cottage, colonial and beach. Online house plan catalogs offering the ability to search by architectural style. Architectural design blogs are a great place to get ideas. Dan Gregory PhD was the senior architectural editor with Sunset magazine for 20 plus years. His blog is a great place to start. A Cost to Build Report Cost is a good tool in getting your budget together. It is based on building cost by local areas. Online catalogs of house plans are a very cost efficient way to get your house plans. They typically run 10% of the cost of hiring a local architect and designing from scratch. The better online house plan sites offer the ability to customize any plan whereby you end up with a custom plan for as little as 20% of the cost of hiring an architect. Many of the online catalogs create collections of house plans around a theme. For instance a collection of plans that have open floor plans and kitchen islands is a helpful collection to browse where you can develop ideas about open floor plans and what is important in your house plan.
