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Services & Products

What we do now:

• Consultation
• Copies of plans

What we offered since 1987 until our recent retirement:

• Renovations, additions, gardens
• Custom designs

Renovations, additions and gardens

We redesign conventional houses that are difficult or unsatisfying to live in. 

We design and build solar renovations and additions. 

And we design garden rooms that are living extensions of houses.

Custom designs

Many designers and architects begin by asking, "What do you want?" We begin with the question, "What is your building budget?"

We have designed houses for clients who have already spent a lot of money on plans that they could not afford to build. Because we build houses, we know what they cost to build.  We emphasize making a building budget and sticking to it. 

Our design fee for an original custom house plan is 4% of the projected total cost of building the house (but not including the cost of the lot and infrastructure). We calculate projected costs for building in our area of North Carolina. You may find costs are somewhat higher in some areas of the country; talk with your local builders.

For example, if you want to build a house that would cost $200,000 to build in our area, your design fee will be $8,000. There is a $1000 deposit to begin work and it is deducted from the first design phase.

The total is broken into thirds that are paid on completion and acceptance of the three design phases:

1. Floor plans

2. Elevations

3. Sections and details

These three design phases usually require a total set of six to ten sheets; they are complete prints for building our houses. If your building inspection department requires an engineer's stamp, our engineer can provide this for an additional fee, or you may wish to have your plans stamped by a local engineer.

Our design fee includes a site visit to clients who are building within a two hour drive from us. We will help you site your house in this visit. More distant site visits are billed individually. For clients who cannot have us visit their site, we supply directions for siting the house.

What Custom Plans include

Custom plans include:

• dimensioned floor plans
• window and door schedules
• all elevations of house
• detail drawings
• suggested interior and exterior finishes
• checklist of decisions and specifications for homeowner and builder
• instructions for passive solar landscaping
• foundation, floor and wall sections
• construction notes.

Our foundation, floor and wall sections, and our construction notes will save you time, money and mistakes. As builders, we accumulated many years developing clear instructions for the correct and economical building of our plans.

We supply 6 bound sets of plans; two sets are 24"x36" and the remaining four sets are 8"x11". Although we include basic specifications for plumbing, electrical and HVAC subcontractors, complete schedules are not part of our standard package. Clients and their general contractors usually prefer to work directly with these subcontractors to develop their own plumbing, electrical and HVAC plans; this consultation by subcontractors is included as part of their bid process and is usually not billed to the client.

We have developed an extensive questionnaire to focus on what a client needs and wants – and most importantly, what they can afford. We can't overemphasize the importance of sticking to a budget from the beginning. It's easy to design a dream house that is impossible to pay for. We avoid this at all costs – so to speak.

Getting Started

If you would like custom house plans, please email us with your wish list and budget, and give us a good time to contact you by phone. We will then send a design contract; on receipt of the signed contract and $1000 deposit, we will give a starting date for beginning work and we will send a detailed questionnaire.

The length of the design process varies from client to client. It seems to take most people about four to six months to make all the decisions necessary, although we have had clients who required a year!

If at any point a client doesn't wish to continue, there is no obligation to complete the design process. (This has never happened, however.)

Contact us: (Please make sure you have first carefully read our website.)

© Copyright 2006-2021 Kathleen Jardine, James Cameron, SunGarden Houses, Inc. All rights reserved.