Every house plan site publishes a page listing what comes in the set. I have one too. What almost nobody publishes is the other half of that answer, and the other half is the half that costs you money: what is never in a set of stock plans, from me or from anyone else, and who you have to buy it from instead.
I would rather you knew all of it before you paid me than after.
What is actually in my set
When you buy a construction set from me you receive a cover sheet with general notes, a foundation plan, dimensioned floor plans for every level, all four exterior elevations, a cross section, a roof plan, electrical plans, door and window schedules, and on most plans cabinetry elevations. The full list is here, and it is the same list on every plan I sell.
That is a complete architectural set. It is enough for a builder to price the house from, and in a lot of places it is most of what goes into a permit submission. It is not everything the house needs, and no stock plan is.
What is never in it, from anyone
These are not in my set. They are also not in the set of any other stock plan you will buy, at any price, from any designer or any marketplace. If a listing implies otherwise, read it again carefully.
| What you still need | Who provides it |
|---|---|
| An engineer's review, and a stamp where your jurisdiction requires one | A structural engineer licensed in the state you are building in |
| Site plan | A surveyor or civil engineer, working from your plat |
| Engineered floor and roof framing | A structural engineer, architect, or your truss manufacturer, working from my set |
| Foundation design for your actual soil | A local engineer. Not optional on a pier or piling house |
| Mechanical drawings, duct design and equipment placement | Your HVAC subcontractor |
| Plumbing drawings, real pipe sizes and locations | Your plumbing subcontractor |
| Energy compliance documentation | A local energy rater or your builder, where it is required |
Most of that list is uncontroversial once somebody says it out loud. One line on it is the one people argue with me about.
The framing is supposed to be missing
Engineered floor and roof framing is not absent because I ran out of sheets. It is produced locally, after you buy the plan, by a structural engineer, an architect, or the truss manufacturer who is going to fabricate your trusses. They work from my construction set and size everything to your spans, your loads, and the code your county has actually adopted.
It has to work that way. A truss layout belongs to whoever is building the trusses, because it depends on their equipment and their engineering. Span and load numbers depend on the wind speed and the snow load your jurisdiction designs to, and those are not the same numbers two states away. I can draw the layout and the intent, and I do. I cannot stamp engineering for a lot I have never seen, in a county whose amendments I do not hold, and neither can anybody else selling you a drawing over the internet.
So when you read a sheet index and see framing listed, work out which one it means. Layout and intent is one thing. Stamped engineering sized to your site is another, and it comes from someone local. When you hire them, ask whether they would rather have the CAD files or the PDFs, and buy the format they ask for rather than the most expensive one.
What this adds to your budget
I am not going to publish a dollar range for any of it, and I want to be plain about why. It depends on your state, your county, the size of the house and how busy the engineers near you are this year. A number I invented would travel further than it deserves and somebody would budget to it.
What I can tell you is the shape. The structural engineering is the largest item on that list by a wide margin, and on an elevated pier or piling house it is larger again, because the engineer is sizing piles for your soil and your wind zone rather than checking a slab. The site plan is a survey cost you were going to carry anyway. Mechanical and plumbing usually arrive inside the price of the subcontractors you are already hiring. Energy compliance, where it applies, is small.
Getting the real number takes two phone calls. Ask your building department what they require, then ask two local engineers what they charge for a house of that size. Twenty minutes, and it is the difference between a budget and a guess.
Ask your building department first
This is the call almost nobody makes early enough, and it decides more than the plan does. Ask them, in this order:
Which drawings have to carry an engineer's stamp, and do you require a separate structural review? What wind speed, seismic category and snow load do you design to? Is this parcel in a flood zone, and if it is, what is the required finished floor elevation? What do you need in a submission beyond the architectural set? Are there local amendments to the residential code I should know about?
Write the answers down before you fall in love with an elevation. They are the difference between a few hundred dollars of local engineering and several thousand.
None of this is an argument against a stock plan
I sell stock plans. I think they are a good way to build a house, and the arithmetic is not close: the drawings are the cheapest part of the project and the part that decides everything after it. What I do not want is for you to find the rest of this list out in stages, each one arriving as a surprise, after you have already paid.
The gap between what a plan is and what people assume it is, is where nearly every unpleasant surprise in this process lives. It closes in an afternoon, and it closes before you spend anything.