Did you know that Sears used to sell and ship complete houses? http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1933-1940/1935_340...
All the listings from 1908 to 1940 are at http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/byimage.htm
Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
161–170 of 262 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Northeast USA you'll see them pretty frequently.
When I owned two cars in New England, it was a pretty big win to get both cars inside during the winter especially if a storm were coming. Always took a bunch of cleanup in the fall to deal with all the crap that had migrated out to the floor of the garage during the summer.
I feel like not having dedicated shed/storage area in the house plan is one of most common architectural mistakes, given just how often garage ends up being just that
Re: Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
#163In Hungary there is a public project to create freely accessible house plans with all necessary documentation to start to build them. The website is only available in Hungarian (but google translate manages to translate it quite well), and the houses are mostly really small compared to American standards, and their style is just way different from American houses. Anyway, let me drop the link here, maybe there is som…
Now I'm interested, why would someone in
https://www.oeny.hu/oeny/nmtk/tervreszletek/NMTK-138
waste all that space on the recessed entrance instead of just making straight wall to the roof ?
Re: Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does that have to do with this thread? The OP isn't buying a prebuilt house. Probably because they're not good houses.
Even if you're having a new house built, you get a lot less choices than you might think. To most builders, "custom home" means you get to pick the paint and flooring, not that you have appreciable input into anything structural. I'm sure it varies regionally, but where I'm at (Kansas City market) you have to be in about the $800k range, generally, to be able to work with an actual architect and build something custo…
The other option is self-built.
But that's been roughly the way things have always been.
What's changed is the creation of a middle path of "built to sell" homes.
Re: Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
#165Not open plans, but cool CC licensed construction details/manual:
https://hammerandhand.com/best-practices/manual/
e.g., retrofit windows:
https://hammerandhand.com/best-practices/manual/3-windows-do...
Re: Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
This gets said a lot - but in practice, very little housing is built that way. The mega builders that build big developments certainly don't match up house plans with the way lots are oriented, and that's where most houses are built. I'm not trying to argue we shouldn't work on that, but to just dismiss off the shelf house plans entirely because "you have to build for the site" is rejecting the reality of how things…
They just want to sell a bunch of houses quickly, not to create perfect houses. Good enough is quite literally good enough for them. There will be compromises because they build for average buyer, not for you. And people that are looking for a house usually want to move there as soon as possible, doing custom not only means you need to pay more but that you also have to wait longer and pay for the place you're curren…
I think ideally we would all live in modest, reasonably sized simple rectangular houses that are built to last, to be energy efficient, and which achieve low cost through standard designs.
The "then architect" part of the process results in McMansions that are awful to live in, are environmentally disastrous, and contribute to the growing unaffordability of housing for all but the upper classes.
Re: Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
My reference in this case is Germany, not the US, so the processes are a bit different but the point stands: it's difficult to use the exact same plans for two different houses in different places, let alone if you want to make any modifications as those may have knock-on effects you're not aware of. To be fair, a lot of those were not in the architect's plans in our case. But you're right that you can basically get…
> lengthy approval process This is corruption. The process of approval should not be lengthy of costly.
It is arguably the opposite of corruption. Everyone is treated the same and everything is checked in order. The option to pay for a faster approval would be corruption. This is just government offices being chronically understaffed.
Re: Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
#168If you want to build an original midcentury two story house, i am doing a model from a leica scan and plan to share it.
Re: Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
#169At the risk of being slightly off-topic, what are good sources to find out wether and in which conditions building your own house is financially advantageous vs buying an existing (new or old) house.
> At the risk of being slightly off-topic, what are good sources to find out wether and in which conditions building your own house is financially advantageous vs buying an existing (new or old) house.
I'd imagine only if you do a lot of the actual building yourself.
New house will just cost same or less than you trying to get a project then hire people to do it.
Project is tiny part of the cost, but for developer it's already amortized over tens of homes they've built. Workers also "know the process" and I'd imagine build it faster than some custom.
Now old house, that's interesting question, and that will heavily depend on state the house is in.
Putting some insulation on old house and doing some renovation might come out far cheaper.
Or you might get into some kind of renovation hell where every fix uncovers another problem with the house, then it turns out you not only need to re-do electrics but also water/sewage, or remove old insulation and replace it with better, or remove some rotting boards etc.
Then there is of course question about whether you like house layout or not or how much you'd want to change it.
On flip-side, the advantage of fixing up old house is that you don't need to do it all at once and so can take smaller mortgage and so pay less in cost of that.
Re: Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?
#170Are you doing all the work?
Or will you be able to give these plans to a plumber, mason, roofer, ... and have their questions answered?
Building plans are generally pretty simple but there's a designer (engineer or architect) that backs them up (and gets sued if something goes wrong)