How to choose a house plan: compare before you buy

Seven things to compare

1. The floor area, and what it includes. Check whether the area includes the garage, the patio and the walls themselves. Two plans called "120 m²" can give you very different living space.
2. How much wall the house has. The walls are most of your bricks, cement and sand. A simple rectangle of 120 m² (12 x 10 m) has 44 m of outside wall; an L-shape with the same floor area (16 x 10 m with an 8 x 5 m corner left out) has 52 m. Those 8 m more need about 2 200 more wall bricks, plus more foundation, footings and plaster.
3. Rooms for the space. Count bedrooms and bathrooms, but also how big they are. Many small rooms mean more inside walls and more doors for the same floor area.
4. Your stand and its slope. The house must fit inside your stand's building lines. On a slope the foundation grows: on a medium slope our example house needs 7 242 foundation bricks instead of 4 609 on a flat stand. A steep stand needs an engineer.
5. The roof. Concrete tiles need a pitch of at least 17 degrees and engineer-designed trusses (they are heavy). Gable, mono-pitch and butterfly roofs add brick triangles at the ends; a hipped roof does not.
6. Single or double storey. A double storey uses less stand for the same space, but the engineer must design the first-floor slab, beams and stairs, and the foundation usually needs steel.
7. What comes with the plan. Ask what you get: the full set of drawings your municipality needs, the window and door schedules, and whether the plan may be changed.

Compare the materials, not just the pictures

When you compare plans on our site you see, for each house: the total house area, the bricks, cement, sand and stone for the foundation and the walls side by side (the least of each marked), the doors and windows counted, which house needs more material to build, and our advice on the best house for what matters most to you: the fewest materials, the most space for the materials, the most bedrooms, or the biggest house.

Already have plans from an architect or draughtsperson? You can compare your own plans too. And to see how the bricks are counted: how many bricks do I need for a 3-bedroom house?