Custom Plans in Georgia

Stock plans are cheap and usually wrong, because they were drawn for a different lot in a different climate. We draw to your parcel: how the building sits on the fall of the land, whether the slope earns you a walkout basement, where the shop door faces, how the roof sheds a Georgia thunderstorm. Plans come engineered and permit-ready.

Permit-ready stamped drawings
Engineered to your county wind speed
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How a custom plans project runs

Four stages, in this order. The sequence matters more than it looks: getting engineering and permitting settled before anything is fabricated is what keeps a build from stalling.

1

Program and site visit

We list what the building has to do: bedroom count, shop bays, RV height, covered porch, future expansion. Then we look at the actual land, because slope and access change layouts.

2

Concept layouts

You get two or three floor plan concepts with elevations. We expect you to mark them up. Most projects go through two rounds before something clicks.

3

Construction documents

The chosen concept becomes a full permit set: floor plans, elevations, sections, foundation plan, framing, and electrical layout.

4

Engineering and stamp

A Georgia-registered engineer reviews and stamps the set against your jurisdiction’s adopted design criteria. You get a licence to build the design on your parcel, with us or with anyone else.

Drawn to your land

A stock plan is cheap because it was drawn for someone else’s lot

Georgia land is not flat and it is not uniform. The same plan that works on a level middle-Georgia field wastes the best feature of a sloping North Georgia parcel, where the fall across the site is exactly what makes a walkout basement the cheapest square footage in the building. Drawing to the land rather than to a catalogue is usually the difference between paying for a foundation and getting a floor out of it.

20 cities, 18 counties

Where we deliver custom plans

Across Georgia. Which county you build in decides your permitting authority, whether the building code is locally enforced at all, and the design criteria that authority has adopted — so two places twenty miles apart can carry very different engineering. Every location we cover has its own page setting out exactly that.

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What actually decides the price

Square footage is the number everyone leads with, and it is rarely the one that moves a barndominium budget. These four do.

  • Square footage and complexity

    Drawing time scales with the number of decisions, not the floor area. A simple large building is faster to draw than a small complicated one.

  • Number of levels

    A loft, a second storey or a basement each add a floor plan, a structural layer and a stair that has to land somewhere sensible on both ends.

  • Engineering scope

    The structural seal is priced on the building, not the page count. Long clear spans, tall eaves and big openings all add to it.

  • Revision rounds

    Changes are cheap on paper and expensive in steel. We build a fixed number of revision rounds into the fee so the incentive is to get it right before fabrication, not after.

Barndominium floor plan and elevation drawings laid out on a drafting table with a scale rule.

Custom Plans in Georgia: common questions

6 questions we get asked most often about building in Georgia. If yours is not on the list, ask it directly.

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Can I bring a plan I found online?
Bring it, and we will tell you honestly what it is worth. As a starting point for layout and feel, often quite a lot. As a permit set, usually nothing, because it will not be sealed by an engineer registered in Georgia and it will not have been designed to the criteria your jurisdiction adopted in its Table R301.2. We can usually adapt the layout rather than starting over, which is the part of it you actually paid for.
Why does a barndominium need an engineer when a normal house does not?
Because of what makes it a barndominium. The residential code lets a house skip site-specific structural engineering if it is built to the prescriptive provisions of one of a short list of standards: the AWC Wood Frame Construction Manual, AISI S230 for cold-formed steel, or ICC 400 for log structures. A conventional stick-built house usually fits one of them. A clear-span rigid frame or a post-frame building fits none, so R301.1.3 requires those elements to be designed to accepted engineering practice. The constraint is the code, not our policy, and the feature that makes the building appealing is the same feature that takes it off the prescriptive path.
Should I plan for a basement?
In North Georgia, seriously consider it. On a sloping lot a walkout basement is often the cheapest square footage in the whole building, because you are already paying to excavate and retain the grade. Whether it makes sense on your parcel comes down to the fall across the site, the depth to rock, and how the soil drains, all of which we check before drawing rather than after. On a flat middle- or south-Georgia site the arithmetic usually goes the other way.
What do you need from me to start?
The parcel, a rough idea of size, and how you want to live in it. The single most useful thing you can tell us is the split between living space and shop space, because that drives the frame design more than total square footage does. Photographs of the site and any survey or plat you already have save real time.
Do the plans include everything the building department wants?
The set we deliver is a permit set: architectural sheets, a sealed structural package with the foundation and anchor bolt layout, framing and connection details, and the design criteria your reviewer expects to see called out explicitly. If a reviewer comes back with comments, we answer them. Plan review comments are a normal part of the process rather than a sign something went wrong.
Do I own the drawings?
You get a licence to build the design once on your parcel, which is the industry norm and is what you need. If you want broader rights, say so at the start and we will price it. What we will not do is hand over a sealed set for reuse on a different site, because the seal is specific to the parcel and the criteria it was designed against.

Keep reading

The pages that answer the next question this one raises.

Do You Need Engineered Plans?

Why a stock plan set from another state cannot simply be stamped here.

Read it

Floor Plans

Starting points by footprint and by feature, before anything is drawn from scratch.

Read it

Permitting

What the finished set has to contain for a complete submittal.

Read it

Ready to put custom plans against a real plan? Start there and the rest follows.

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Tell us about the land

Send the parcel ID or an address and we will come back with what can be built on it, the wind load it has to meet, and a realistic budget range. That conversation costs nothing.

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