Recession Buster

Are we at bottom yet? Rock bottom? Sandy bottom? Crab grazing bottom? Let's pretend we are and istockhouseplans will help you jumpstart the economy. For a limited time (probably through the end of the year, your mileage may vary) we want to offer deep discounts on our best plans (all of them). When making an order through our website, use coupon code 'bottom' to receive 40% off any order of $500 or more. As always, there is no shipping charge.

Are we crazy? We've been called worse.

Where's all those new plans you promised?

Greetings once again from your friends at istockhouseplans. The question has been asked and we are guilty as charged. Over the past year we made some promises that we haven't kept. Yet. We won't say we're never going to release some of our plans, we just haven't done it. Yet. Part of it is the busyness of our day jobs and normal lives. Part of it is that the slowness of the market is discouraging us from putting much effort towards the new plans. You'd think we'd be trying to ramp up to get as much business as possible right now. But couple that with the prior point of day jobs and you'll see that istockhouseplans could fail miserably and we'd all still be okay. So there's no HUGE driving factor to get those new plans done.

That being said, we do not have a lax business approach. We are still very much interested in continuing to design plans and fulfill your orders. We still want to help you build the best house that you can. We still want to get those several plans done.

Alot of it has to do with desiring to design green houses and we are learning much right now about that. True, while our earlier designs were pretty spectacular as far as greenability goes, we want to continue to make our plans better. Our lead designer is the sort that won't do much of anything until they think they know close to everything. On the other hand, once they get moving, they are unstoppable. So we are learning about greening our plans even more and once we feel like we have a new holistic approach we'll start banging them out like they used to do in the good old days.

In the meantime, if you have some design ideas or need a particular house, drop us a line and we'll work with you on that. We are not above drawing someone else's designs.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from your friends at istockhouseplans.com! We've been brainstorming and revamping here around the non-office and have some interesting new ideas for the new year. Stay tuned to subsequent posts for details. For the time being, here are our current projects:

• Add slab and basement foundations to as many plans as possible;
• Finish and release the Creston, inspiration for our courtyard project;
• Create 3-D renderings for our front elevations rather than flat CAD;
• Have a garage option for the Belmont series of plans;
• Fine tune and release half a dozen other plans in the hopper.

We'd like to tell you that we took the break to finish up some plans, but we can't. So we won't. Instead we all took a break and spent time with our friends and family. We started working with our builder friend again to develop three more versions of the Edgewood plan including a duplex. These should be done by the next update. Don't forget to try our search engine beta and give us feedback.

One last piece of info we picked up through the grapevine. Apparently home sales in the Northwest region where we are located have not been so drastic as the media would like us to believe. Talking to our builder friend and several real estate agents, we discovered that homes are still selling at a notable rate. Time on the market is only 2 weeks more than this time last year. The biggest factor contributing is that folks are uncertain as to whether they want to buy right now if it means trying to sell their home. The media has done a disservice to the populace by leading us to believe that the end of the world is near. In reality the housing decline is not affecting every corner of the country.

May your homes sell quickly and may your resolutions last into February. Istockhouseplans will see you in a couple of weeks.

All Quiet on the Design Front

Greetings in the name of istockhouseplans.com. It's been a quiet two weeks. So quiet in fact that we almost forgot we had a design upstart company. Actually, for as quiet as things have been here at istockhouseplans, they have been anything but on other fronts. Our dayjobs have been picking up a bit, the holiday season is here, and other generalities of life have made putting any time into plans almost impossible. We'd like to be able to offer you all of our plans with slab and basement by now, or have the original Creston ready, or any of other several projects that are on the drawing board. If you have been eyeing one of our plans but holding back because it didn't have the proper foundation, please shoot us an email and tell us what you're looking for. We're more than happy to oblige.

In other news, Buena Vista Homes of Lake Oswego, OR held their liquidation auction this last weekend. According to the news feed it was more like a circus than an auction. Many, though certainly not all, of the homes sold and some for a reasonable price. Kudos to Buena Vista for thinking outside of the box to keep themselves alive.

The question came to us recently: "Why don't you design more simple and basic homes? You might sell more of your designs." Apparently this came from a contractor's frame of mind. Just because our houses don't look like tract houses, doesn't mean they aren't economical to build. If you are asking why we don't design 1600 square foot dinger boxes with a garage, then maybe you should check out the Montavilla series. If the question needs to be further refined to why we are stuck designing classical re-creation homes, then we would like to talk about principles. Quite frankly, we will not prostitute our skills on something that we do not find to be beautiful. We will not crap out a plan just for the sake of turning a buck. We have some standards that we will not turn from, which is a good reason why we are debating about releasing the Creston series from the courtyard design contest. They don't look good to our eyes. What if we had won and they were built? We may have realized our mistake and been sorry we designed them as we did. In retrospect we would have made some changes but that's what happens when you find out about a contest halfway through. The point is that we will not spit out cheap homes in order to turn a profit. We would rather sell 2 plans a month of our unique and beautiful homes than a dozen crapshacks. And if you don't like what we design, we respect that and we don't expect you to buy from us. But if you realize that our plans are every bit if not more economical to build than many of the crapshacks, we think you might have a change of heart. Thank you for the question.

We will be all but shut down through this week and next for the Christmas holiday. Any orders you place will be attended to immediately but designing and emailing will be sporadic at best. We at istockhouseplans wish a you a Merry Christmas and hope that you will not be taken in by the hustle and bustle of the season. Slow down, realize what's important, and enjoy the people around you. We'll see you next year!

Mind the Gap

Not the clothing outfitter. We are just musing about the current state of economic affairs, especially here in the Northwest. Some might call it a slump, others might say it's an economic depression. It's really just a balancing act as the normal trend is catching up to the abnormal growth from the past couple of years. No matter what you call it, it's still causing a problem. On our side of the country, home sales are experiencing record lengths of time on the market and builders are finding it darn near impossible to secure construction loans. Whose fault? Is it the banks that lent subprime loans? Is it the builders who created a glut of inventory? Maybe. Some of the banks have gotten their comeuppance by going out of business - too many foreclosures. Some of the builders are making do by scaling their profits down to a razor-thin margin, picking up remodels, or renting their unsold homes.

Obviously this affects us at istockhouseplans too. If you don't build, you don't need our plans. We can't guarantee that folks will buy a house designed by us, but we can guarantee several things:

• Our plans are different and will at least make folks stop to look.
• Our waste reduction policy means you should end up with less than a pickup truck load of scrap.
• Our advanced framing details will save you thousands in material costs.
• Our plans are cheaper.

We can prove our plans are cheaper. When you make your first order, type in the coupon code 'intro'. This will give you 20% off your first order of $300 or more. If you would like to apply the code to several plans, send us your wish list and we'll create a Buy Now button* just for you. You'll save 20% off the entire order, even if you order 100 plans at once. Remember, shipping is always free!

In the meantime, keep your cool and we'll ride out this undertow together.

*Please note that Buy Now buttons only allow one plan purchase at a time and will use up your intro coupon on a small $300 purchase when you really intended to purchase several plans at once.

*With our new Checkout interface this has become unnecessary.  Fill up your cart and use your coupon!