The Design Process — and What It Actually Cost (for a 3,600 sf home)

Before a single shovel hit the ground, there was the design process — and before that, a decision. You can buy a floorplan online; there are plenty of sources selling pre-drawn plans for a fraction of the cost. We chose to design our own instead, because we wanted a layout built around how we actually live, not how a stranger assumed we might.

It started the way most good ideas start: with a hand-drawn floorplan, sketched out long before anything was official. From there, it went to our builder to be converted into an actual to-scale plan — $5,000. We worked through the site arrangement, deciding exactly where on the lot the house would sit, and had the soils report completed at $750, the same report that would later determine what the ground beneath us could handle. Once the floorplan was finalized, it went off to engineering: $9,450. HVAC and plumbing engineering followed at $4,500, then a plan review with the city at $2,500. After finalizing the true cost of building the home, we pulled permits — the largest single line item of the bunch, at $21,000.

All of this falls under what's called soft costs: everything that comes out of pocket before construction even begins, and often before you've finished qualifying for a mortgage. The upside is that once your construction loan closes, many lenders will roll these costs back in as a credit — the bank crediting you at closing for what you've already spent on architecture plans, engineering, soil reports, and permits. The exact number will shift depending on location and budget, but for our $1.5M build, soft costs totaled $43,000 — and that was before we'd even broke ground.

It's easy to budget for the visible parts of a build: the framing, the finishes, the fixtures. The soft costs are the ones that catch people off guard, because they're invisible until the invoices start arriving. Budgeting for them from day one made the rest of the process a lot less stressful.