Two Ways In Which You Can Reduce Your Architectural Design Costs
Lucky Balaraman

With the rise of the Internet, many kinds of work involving
only information can be done in lower-cost parts of the world.
(This awareness has a long way to go before it becomes
commonplace.) A relevant example is how you can reduce the cost
of architectural design by involving service providers overseas.


When you go to architects for developing the design of a
building, the first thing you would naturally do is tell them
about the kind of building you had in mind. You would describe
its use and its size as well as give them a drawing of your
property's boundaries and a contour map.

The architects would then ask you for your ideas on the rooms
you wanted the building to contain. You would identify the
rooms; you would talk about roughly how big each should be and
approximately where in the building you would want it
positioned. You would give this information for each floor of
the building.

The architects would come back to you with some preliminary
sketches of floor plans. You and the architects would look at
them and brainstorm, after which they would come back with
revised sketches. After two or three repetitions of this
procedure, the floor plans would be finalized.

The architects would then have the floor plans drawn on a
computer using a computer-aided-design (CAD) program. These are
known as schematic plans.

All this could cost you anywhere up to $1.35 per square foot.
However, you could save as much as 50% on this by going to
competent architects in other countries for your schematic
plans. Think of how much this would come to for a 4,000 square
foot house!

A small search on the Internet is all you need to do to locate
suitable overseas firms.

Once you have your schematic plans, the architects will put in
detailed information for your builder. This includes
information on the materials to be used as well as the design
of doors, windows, stairs and the roof. The finished set of
drawings is called the set of 'construction documents'. The
architects must stamp this for a builder to be able to proceed
with them.

The architects spend a great deal of money getting these
drawings prepared on a computer (which involves much more CAD
than schematic design production). These costs are naturally
passed on to you with a suitable markup. This leads us to the
second cost-saving strategy.

To save up to 50% on these costs, direct the architects to a
suitable CAD drafting service provider overseas. Again, you can
locate such firms by doing a simple Internet search.

Using both these methods you could save as much as $1 per
square foot in your architectural design costs. This adds up to
some real money, and it's all on the table, ready for you to
take with very little effort.

My advice you is understandably simple: Go for the methods NOW,
my friend!


About The Author: Lucky Balaraman runs one of India's prime
architecture and CAD drafting service providers, The Magnum
Group. Learn more about the Company at
http://cad-drafting-services.com