Busy Elsewhere - Announcement

For the last few months we have been busy writing.  Not on this blog, obviously.  All of our wordsmithing efforts have been going into creating an ebook on tiny home design.  Several designs are being created to go along with the book.  We are aiming for a Cyber Monday release.  Standard price will be $3.99 for the book in either pdf or Kindle version.  But during Cyber Monday week (Monday through Friday) we'll be introducing the book for the low price of free.  For five days only you'll have the opportunity to see our content for nothing out of pocket.

What you'll get:
Ideas, some building theory, comparisons of construction types

What's not included:
Building on a trailer (plenty of others doing that), detailed step by step construction guide.

Stay tuned to this blog or use the subscribe feature on the right to be the first to know.

*edit: if you want to add yourself to the notification list, visit http://eepurl.com/87lin

Hi, my name is Adus and I'm a blogger

Hi Adus.  If you've been following our blog for any length of time you may have noticed that the posts just aren't the quality they used to be.  Or that the posts just aren't there at all.  Due to the amount of contract work that has been happening, we've decided to take a blogging hiatus until the new year.  It's been six weeks since out last post and it may be 6 weeks until any more happen.  So we're just checking in to let you know we're not dead (yet).  We've been exploring some other design ideas, outlets, and creativities.  Hopefully we'll have some substance to post soon but in the meantime consider this a buildup and renewal.

Enjoy your holiday season.

Energy Star

Another month of silence.  Hmm... too much work?

There are a few new stock plans in the hopper that need to be finished, many ideas that need to be started but the amount of custom work we've been receiving has been incredible.  We've designed plans across the board for clients who come to us because of word of mouth.  It's all been about who we know.

And recently we were approached by Energy Star to draw energy efficient home design details for their upcoming release.  Once those are done and released to the public we'll direct you to the new details.  For those home designers that follow this blog, we hope those details will be useful in your designs.

Maybe once people stop bugging us for custom work we'll get on those stock plans, eh?

Lagging Behind

We at Istockhouseplans want to heartily apologize for not posting our usual update last week.  Some employment changes have affected the way we run our business.  The good news is that we are now able to upload more plans to more national vendors.  We are also able to take on revisions to our plans should you have a desire to have those changes made.  Though the website may say otherwise for a few days, we will make those revisions and not force you to find another local designer.  We should also be able to create more stock plans in general.  If you are interested in seeing something in particular, leave a note in the comments below, or send us an email.  We'll be happy to make your idea become a reality!

And the coup de grace is that we're working on our first plan book of sorts.  This will be an exclusive electronic offering of an original collection not otherwise available.  Look for updates in the coming months.

New houseplans added - 64 total

Quite by accident we uploaded enough new plans to put our total at 64, including our free plans. This is rather exciting to our nerdy side. Sixty-four has been a fairly culturally relevant number in many circles. What do you first think of? Maybe the Beatles, a question or perhaps Nintendo? For Istockhouseplans, 64 also marks a new house plan. More on that below.

The first of our new plans for review is the Durham B 1224B.  This plan started as a small 12x24 backyard studio.  The second iteration included an extra room.  Finally, we blew out the side and added a full garage to give you the 'B'.  The base model remains unchanged but a 20X24' garage with bonus room above was attached.  The garage is not accessible from the unit.  This allows for the garage to be accessed by the main house while the living area could be rented out.  Though if you preferred you could build this structure as the only domicile on your property.  The plan retains the single bed and bath but the bonus room offers enough space for a second bedroom and hobby space, or maybe a party pad.

Second on the block is the Houston B 2448B.  At exactly 4 times the footprint of the Durham, this is a full floor plan.  The Houston started as an answer to a contest to design affordable and efficient replacement housing for hurricane stricken Gulf communities.  This version maintains the original almost perfectly but adds a one-car garage off the utility room.  It's still narrow enough to fit on substandard lots.  The driveway is long enough for two cars to allow you to use the garage to store all your consumerism.  Behind the garage is enough space for a grilling porch.  Perhaps our next version of this plan will be two Houstons attached at the garage.

Our third offering is the only oddball in the lot.  Can you tell why?  Post in the comments if you can figure it out.  The Arleta A 2850A is merely a re-clad of our base Arleta.  The floor plan has not changed except that now the porch spans the whole front of the house.  The roof is completely hipped over the expanded porch and we've changed the windows to diamond grids.  The porch is also surrounded by a half wall instead of a railing.  It has a very 1910's feel from the outside.

Our 64th plan (and final one of this installment) is a brand new design.  The Prescott 2248 is a design with a purpose.  The most glaring difference from our other plans is the attached garage.  Barring our garage plans themselves, only about one quarter of our plans take into account automobile shelter.  A second purpose in this plan is the reversible design.  We don't mean bedrooms on the main and living up.  Rather, you could build this house with either end facing the street.  The "front" includes a garage and deep porch.  The "back" includes a full length porch and a typical swinging door.  If you are building on a lot with an alleyway you could easily flip this around and you essentially have a brand new facade!  The inside of the 1472sf contains 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, a pocket office and a typical great room setup.  We've also purposed to include loads of closet space.

If you have any questions about our plans, please feel free to ask in the comments or email us directly.  If you're a builder looking for a more specific plan (that still evokes our aesthetic), let us know and we'll be happy to discuss a custom design for you.

Addition vs. Addition

Spy vs. Spy with a twist!  The English language is such that two phrases that sound very similar can mean very different things.  In this post we will be exploring the differences and similarities of the phrases "A New Addition to Your Home" vs. "A New Addition to Your House".

I think most folks understand that a house is a structure and a home is the entity that dwells in and among the house including the occupants, behaviors, and the structure itself.  We've recently experienced a new addition to our home (which explains our radio silence for the past month).

A new addition to your house is:

• Noisy
• Costly
• Invasive
• Bulky
• Sleep depriving
• Time consuming
• May include some screaming in the process
• Requires lots of planning
• Requires several professionals
• Requires a permit and/or license
• A lovely thing five years later
• Can pay you back when you move to the next stage of life.

Whereas an addition to your home is:

• Noisy
• Costly
• Invasive
• Bulky
• Sleep depriving
• Time consuming
• May include some screaming in the process
  
• Requires lots of planning
• Requires several professionals
• Strangely, DOES NOT require a permit and/or license
• A lovely thing five years later
• Can pay you back when you move to the next stage of life.

Further, an addition to your home may necessitate an addition to your house but not vice versa.  We have already taken pains to design an addition to our house should we feel we need it.  However the cost of the addition to our home may delay costs available for the addition of our house.  Nonetheless the addition to our home will receive all the necessary attention for the payback when we move to the next stage of life.

Hey baby, what's your... sign?

One of our local builders that we team up with, Cutting Edge Homes, is in the process of building some of our latest drawings.  Clackamas County is showcasing his homes for energy efficiency and has invited commissioners, legislators, and the general public.  The idea is to show off some energy efficiency measures and help folks understand what they should expect in new homes.  In this case is improved air sealing, improved insulation, tankless hot water heaters, and one unit with ducts inside the conditioned space.

We thought the event made perfect sense to flash a little leg, as it were.  After all, SOMEbody had to design the energy efficiency into these things and make sure they were going to exceed code.  So we had some lawn signs made up and stabbed them into the dirt on the jobsite.  You can see that our design prowess is not just limited to buildings, but advertising as well.  Perhaps.

The event will be November 10th at 3p at 14848 SE Arista Dr. Milwaukie, OR.  Come out and see what things are happening and to introduce yourself.

Go Green, Go Small

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (ODEQ) released a report today on an evaluation of waste prevention practices using life cycle analysis.  The report focused on 30 different measures and the impact they could have on our environment over a 70 year span.  We thought some of these measures might fare favorably.  Such include advanced framing, using salvaged materials, drywall clips, and other such resource efficient methods.  Of all the measures focused on though, the winners were smaller homes and multi-family living.  This would make sense since the measures we favored would tend to have more of a point of use impact whereas the clear winners would have more of a lifetime impact.  You can read the full report on ODEQ's website.

In this case, smaller home means 1149sf, half the size of the national average.  Istockhouseplans finds this rather exciting since our average designed house size is tending that direction.  We noted last December that average house size has peaked and is on the slide.  While not all the chips are falling immediately into the tiny house movement, it's encouraging to see the push this direction.  We hope that large home builders will be able to reduce their house sizes by using some of the techniques that the tiny house design community has put forth.  We will continue to work on our plans adding more 700sf and smaller plans as time allows.

Countdown to Eternity

Good afternoon faithful blog followers! We want to let you know about some changes at the old istockhouseplans homestead. For a while we changed our checkout system to Paypal, but their inability to offer coupons sent us back to Google Checkout. With Google Checkout you can confidently purchase house plans from us knowing that we will never, ever see your credit card number. Now, whether or not you trust Google is a different story. We have also implemented a shopping cart feature which is one of the reasons we went with Paypal for a while. Sort of annoying to order a whole load of plans one at a time.

This calls for a celebration! In order to move some inventory by the end of the year, we are offering a coupon code for 50% off your order. Yes, half off everything in the store, right down to the fixtures and CFL lightbulbs. (Okay, no lightbulbs, apparently we aren't closing our doors). After you fill your cart up with all sorts of goodies, enter coupon code '2009' to take advantage of this offer.

Why buy from us? Three reasons: Our plans are simple to build; our plans are beautiful and functional; our plans are designed for energy efficiency.

After the end of the year, the rest of our coupons will still be available. (Hint: sort our blog posts by the 'coupon' label to see what else we might have). Of course if there are any questions or complaints, go ahead and email us and we'll try to give you the best customer service experience we possibly can.

Time to School You

With the start of school rapidly approaching, istockhouseplans wanted to be able to reach out to a larger audience than we previously had. We unveil to you our kids section, aimed at grade school students. The page currently has some fun activities. We plan to add educational sections shortly to teach kids about how houses are built. Yes, you can probably find these resources elsewhere, but we will go so far as to explain advanced framing techniques to kids. At some point we'd like to create short videos explaining building science.

But for now you can download and print some activity sheets for your kids in pdf. There is also a website treasure hunt that will grow with time. If your kids have questions about the design and building processes of houses, let us know and we will be happy to answer them. We may even post the answers on a Kids FAQ.

Welcome back to school!

Don your Helmets

Istockhouseplans has received lots of compliments on the look of our web page. We want to say thank you to everyone who has given us kudos. If we haven't heard from you on that note, we'll assume you're introverted and have meant to. We'll thank you in advance.

To that end, we want to warn you about an upcoming change. We have been hosting our sites on Google's Page Creator utility. Unfortunately, Google is discontinuing that utility in favor of another one called Sites. Now who are we to balk at free web design AND hosting AND porting? But we have read some news that some links and features have become unavailable with the transition. In the next few weeks we expect our site to make it's final transition and we want to apologize in advance for any hiccups that may occur. While we expect everything to work fine, there could possibly be some problems. If you need information, please send us an email at info@istockhouseplans.com.

We're also in the process of updating our checkout feature to a more user friendly Paypal shopping cart. Now you can enjoy secure shopping, no hard-selling, and the protection that comes with Paypal. As always, shipping is still free. If you are interested in purchasing a plan and see an old Google checkout button, please let us know so that we can convert it to the new Paypal version. If you are interested in multiple plans, remember we do offer a discount. Email us with what you are looking for and we will put together a package price for you. Since we are going to Paypal, all of our old coupon codes may not be working. We will update as soon as they do.

Extra, extra, read all about it!

As if our blog wasn't enough, we've now teamed up with www.free-press-release.com to release general noteworthy news items. Whenever press releases are sent out, we will link to them from our blog in lieu of our general istockhouseplans update. You can read our first press release here.

Golden Post

Hey how about that, we've hit 50 posts! Since June 26, 2007 we've been telling you all about our wacky ideas for building better houses. Can you believe we've been talking about 24" o.c. framing or adding exterior foam lo these 2 years now? Crazy! Ducts in the house? Ludicrous!

Not so crazy actually. All across the country, more and more builders are waking up and realizing that they are building the worst houses they possibly can without going to jail. This is called a code home. Much of this change comes from consumers realizing that there are better homes out there and that they don't have to settle for the Cheap Charlie, Get 'Em Up by Friday contractor 'specials'. Much of it has to do with the terrible housing market right now that has forced builders to either step up or go out of business. If Centex and Pulte are having issues, how are you doing Joe Q. Builder?

Just waking up? About to go out of business? Contact Istockhouseplans today and let us help you gain an edge. A razor sharp, honed, hair-splitting edge.

New linkages, transaxles, piston rings...

Istockhouseplans now offers you three more links for convenience!

First is this blog which can be found at either istockhouseplans.blogspot.com or blog.istockhouseplans.com. Either one brings you here.

Second is our new survey. Check out our site and tell us how you really feel.

Finally is our tinyurl. If the istockhouseplans moniker is a bit too confusing to remember with all the other sites out there, then use the famous tinyurl! You can reach our site at tinyurl.com/houseplans.

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.

Thanks to all of you who purchased plans in the first half of this year. As you may remember, stockhouseplans.com donated 100% of all purchases to a group who were going down to Mexico to build a community center. The trip was a smashing success. The city of Morelia, Mexico donated land to the NOE center to build a larger more comprehensive facility.

"The purpose of the NOE Center is to foster godly character, a
positive self-concept, academic excellence, creative expression, recreational
skills, and social responsibility in the young people of Mexico, to encourage
them to become active citizens with a vision for their community. There are
currently over four hundred students enrolled in various programs like English,
homework help, computer, art, music, sports, recreation, Bible club, youth group
and discipleship. NOE accepts students age nine through nineteen, most of whom
live in the surrounding poor to middle class neighborhoods."

The group visited the property and cleared endless bags of trash, dozens of shoes, tires, and bottles and prepared it for a slab to be poured. The slab will support a basketball court with a building eventually being built around it. This new center will be able to help many more Mexican young people to find direction in life and pursue a goal.

Our generous donating may be over but we are still selling plans. We are starting to go through our catalog and fine-tune some of our beauties to be even more efficient builds. Expect to see wall framing plans and suggested duct plans for those interested in using furnaces and the like. We'll keep you posted as plans become updated.

Hasta la vista.

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.

Foundational

Hello everybody! (Hello, Dr. Nick!) We missed our normal Tuesday blog due to sickness, but we're feeling well enough to make a go of it today. Whatever happened to the long expected Creston series based on our Courtyard Design? Well here's the deal. We just aren't thrilled with the look of the plans. They look fully like new homes doing an architectural nod. We could doll them up a bit, I suppose, but they just aren't striking us right now. Our goal before that is to finish the working plans for their predecessor, the original Creston. However, our first priority is to offer slab and basement foundations for as much of our existing stock as we can right now. We've begun in numerical order and the Lombard 1558 now has complete sets of plans for four foundation types. Lombard-2 shouldn't be far behind.


That's all the news from the past two weeks. To get the most recent updates you should mark istockhouseplans as your homepage and check it everyday. Or twice a day!

Brick by Brick

Happy October.  This is your general istockhouseplans update.  Portland's Courtyard Housing competition ends in 2 weeks.  We have finished design for our entry and are now compiling the data in to required submittal formats.  We are attempting a medium that has never been attempted before above the 6th grade.  Our perspective drawings and layouts were created with MLCAD, also known as Mike's LEGO CAD.  Since 3-D elements are not allowed in the competition, we created our courtyard out of LEGO bricks in CAD and then saved out the pictures.  Images will be available after the competition is over.

 

As we mentioned before, this competition generated three new house plans for us (really just three variations of the same plan).  It was all inspired by the original design which was stuck on some drawing board underneath other concepts.  We will be releasing the Creston series of plans soon.  The Edgewood series is almost complete and will be up about the same time.  We are also finishing up another yet unnamed plan.

 

However, we first need to finish clearing up the bugs in the website before we get any further on adding to it.  We are hoping to have that done by the next update.  As if we didn't have too many irons in the fire already, we are also going back through our established plans and adding slab and basement foundations where appropriate.  Being stuck in the great Northwest, those foundations don't often get built here but we understand they are the majority in other places.  If there are other variations that you would like to have plans done in (stick frame roofs, 2x4 walls, etc.), let us know and we will try to accomodate.  We do mostly 2x6 walls for the Energy Path 1 requirements and trussed roofs for cost and efficiency.

 

Talk to you in two weeks.  Or visit us sooner.

General Update

As the King of England wrote in his diary on July 4th, 1776, "No news today".  This seems to be the case right now.  No news.  You may have noticed that there was no blog last week.  We forgot to inform you that we are going to an every other week schedule.

 

A couple of tidbits:

 

The courtyard housing project is going splendidly.  We have gained a new houseplan with 3 variations from it.  This should be showing up in our portfolio soon, right after the promised Edgewood.  The Creston is a 3 bed, 2 bath, 1 car garage 1320sf +/- townhouse.  Variations are made with different facades and bumpouts.  They are free standing units, but could certainly be attached without losing their personal charm.  We hope to eventually offer a 2 and 3 unit variation.

 

We are undertaking some small building projects in order to better understand how framing works in a real world setting.  These are by no means houses, but we are planning on an 8x12 shed and an outdoor kitchen.

 

Craftsman features are sucking us in further and further.  We hope to have a photo gallery soon of some great fixtures and craftsmanship that display this style.

 

We realize that there is a small problem with the website.  If you hadn't noticed, individual plan pages seem to scroll to the bottom of the page as soon as you click on their link.  The problem has been isolated, but fixing it may take a little time.  Please bear with us in the meantime.

 

We built a good neighbor style fence with our neighbors this past weekend.  The project went great, but we started brainstorming about other fence styles that would meet both the good neighbor and craftsman ideals.  A good neighbor fence is one that looks pleasant from both sides.  It may not make your grass look greener however.  We are contemplating fence and handrail designs that are beautiful but simple (a must in the craftsman genre).  We will post these on the website in the near future and have an idea page that you can glean from.

 

 

Until next time, istockhouseplans.