First time builder?Time for a change?This is what everyone thinks when looking for a “free” house plan on-line.Why not get an on-line house plan and take a miss on the expensive architectural costs and time-consuming waste of nerves.All this and more is only a click away…but …it’s not that easy.

It all started with my friend Mike calling me with a tight nervousness in his voice.He was tired of his rented “dream house” and had the need to build his own. He then requested me to find free house plans on line.  I called on my old friend Google to assist me, typed in free house plans and was amazed by the number of search results, realizing that my friend was lazy,he could have done it himself. Little did I realize that the word free and house plans are thrown around on the internet like politician promises before an election…unable to deliver, as were these sites.

Why is there so little house plans available?

The reason for the unavailability of free house plans are cited as deviations in building codes in different countries,s tates and provinces, slopes and elevations on the property needs to be measured, technical know-how needed to be given and various other factors. One thing that scared me about the “buying” of the plans on the internet, is that in buying a plan on line, you are not much further that having bought a sketch, and would probable have to fork out more money to get it tweaked to perfection.

Our Top Find:

Our top find was tucked away between searches 1050 and 1150: floorplanner.com.
Floorplanner is the easiest, quickest, and best looking way to create and share interactive floor plans. Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, you can make your house plan in minutes, and rearrange it as often as you want. Then you can save, send, and print your designs to share them, or place them on your own website.It is easy to use and works in any modern browser, no extra downloads required.

The one draw-back is that it will not export plans for you, but will be good in your preparation in seeing a proffesional as it gives a detailed idea of your expectations.

Limited free house-plans available:

www.freegreen.com functions as a semi-opened source site where designers can upload their home designes and make their price,although there is a limited list of designs available that cannot be reconfigured.

http://josephkenyon.com offers a service where he make available as he calls free plans to your tiny dream home or house.The plans are quite detailed,but as he says it’s for tiny houses.

Free software:

The first site which offers free software for designing your dream home is german and is www.cycas.de.They make their software available with few limitations for non-commercial use. Some people reported it easy and others hard to use but it all depends on your personal experience of the site.

Another free software is qcad from www.ribbonsoft.com. It seems quite technical and most people will find it very difficult to use.

The cheapest software option is the home design package from punchsoftware.com, which is about $100.

Most of the available free plans that we found were on individual sites, and were difficult to read and of low quality, making us realize once again,that free on the internet does not always mean free.