My husband are I are looking to build and we are having a real problem finding home plans that incorporate a business in the home. I am a marketing consultant and work from home. My clients are all over the country so I rarely have clients here. I do have a college intern part time.
My husband is an professor/accountant/tax consultant/writer. He just took an early out from the University and is working from home. He sometimes has clients come for meetings, has an assistant during tax season, and sometimes has a 2nd accountant here as tax season gets hot and heavy. So the problem is that we no longer have an “office in home”, it’s more like we have beds in our office. We live in an old (though remodeled) Craftsman cottage that I love, but when we have clients in, they have to march right through the living area and kitchen to get to his office. There is no room to remodel further on this lot. We have 4 bedrooms which is now more like 3 offices and 1 bedroom. We use the dining room as a conference area when more than 2 people show up at once. We are being overrun with filing cabinets in the garage. We are committed to working from home. There are no covenants in this area prohibiting the businesses as long as we have no signs up or have more than 50 cars show up in a day, neither of which is an issue.
I’m thinking we should build a home with a wing, or some sort of courtyard arrangement with office to one side and our private spaces to the other. I’m looking to give us more privacy in our living quarters. A 2nd entrance to the office area also looks to be necessary. We would prefer not to do a 2 story (unless we install an elevator) because of husband’s knee problems. I have been all over the Internet looking at plans and can’t find anything that addresses this particular situation – plenty with dens or offices, but nothing where the residents are seriously doing full blown, full time work from home. Anyone seen anything like this? Or do I have to find an architect? Help!
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I think you have good ideas and may not need an architect. As far as plans, you could look at plans for duplexes, since the concept of separation would be similar.
A separate wing would make it easier to figure the in home office tax deduction thing, since the tax code demands it to be totally separate. A second entrance is also a very good idea. Both would also give you privacy.
My brother wants to build a retirement home and his wife has a business (sewing lace gowns) and he is planning a room just for that--so far he has resisted my attempts at a second, public, entrance for this area. One good idea he had was a separate stairs to storage in this area.
Maybe you could sketch out your ideas and bring them to a good builder and work with him. Most builders now have a guy that does plans using a computer program. You could also ask at a community college and get the name of a promising architectural technology student to help you--when I was younger I got a job designing a house through my teacher at a community college when a couple asked him about a house plan.
If you lived in Michigan, I would offer to work with you. You can email me if you have further questions by replying to this post and clicking the email option at the bottom.
As a design build architect I would say that you would not want to use a student for what you are considering. The price would be very attractive however you would be asking a builder to assume a great deal of risk in doing so, you may be hard pressed to find a reputable builder to assume using such plans. Additionally, in the past couple years, most municipalities have begun requiring architectural drawings as well as structural to gain building permits. You may want to call your city planner and/or building inspector for further information.
I agree, forget the student. This is too big of an investment to bet on an unknown. Go to an architect. You don't have to get full services from an architect if you don't want to. You can hire an architect to do preliminary schematic plans, and then if you like and your local municipality permits it, have a builder or a drafting service complete the drawings. An architect probably will charge you around $3,000 to do preliminary floor plans, a site plan, and front elevations. (that's what I charge, anyway.). A drafting service can do a basic 'builders set' of drawings for another $2500 or so.
Keep in mind that you want to satisfy your current needs, but also make the home easy to sell in the future. If you insist on buying already existing plans, look for plans that have a 'mother in law suite', or a guest house that you can adapt to offices. If your zoning permits, you may want to consider something like a guest apartment above or attached to the garage that you can use for an office now, but in the future, you could rent it out as a separate apartment, or a relative could live there. Depending on where you live, you might want it to be designed as a separate building close to the house that could be used as a pool house if someone in the future wants a swimming poool.
My biggest problem is finding an architect. This is a very small town and the house will be in the country. No zoning issues at all because it is out of town. My adventures in finding a kitchen designer (a real disaster) are what led me to wonder if I could find stock plans that were "kind of close" and could be adapted. I absolutely don't want a completely stock plan. It's kind of a Catch -22. Because there is not much, to no business, for an architect here, there are no architects here.
I would love to have someone do preliminary floor plans and site plan. It would be well worth the investment. Our builder is an older gentleman, very experienced, who is well able to draft the building plans from a good set of preliminary plans and elevations.
When we were planning a major kitchen renovation ($50K) I unfortunately used the yellow pages to find a "kitchen designer". We spent a fair amount of time discussing our ideas, how we used the space, what we needed, our style and everything we needed stored. The designer came back with a VERY ultra modern kitchen design (we live in a 1939 Craftsman cottage) with poor storage and lousy flow. We paid her fee, scrapped the plans, bought some design software and did it ourselves. It took over a year and many changes on paper, but when it was finished, it was right for us. When the room itself was finished, the design worked well, and the room was beautiful.