Due to our long time involvement in church building consulting, we have have relationships with church architects who are willing to provide copies of existing church building plans from other projects at greatly reduced prices! Let us help connect you to these great resources. We are not aware of a service to provide churches access to so many church building plans anywhere else in the Internet!
The definitive guide to church design and construction.
Preparing to Build is the church construction book that will keep your church from becoming an unfortunate statistic in the process of a building program.
Available in either eBook or Paperback format.
An already difficult task becomes quite painful when your church does not understand and adhere to a good building process. It does not matter whether you are baking bread, building a rocket ship or trying to develop plans to build a church; you get better with practice because you discover and apply the best practices that make the job easier and your effort more effective.
Architectural fees typically range from 6-12% of your church building costs, depending on scope of work and where you live. Pre-developed plans can save the church as much as 50% of the church design fees, while customizations provided the church creative control.
In as case, the efforts placed in needs analysis begin to pay off in this phase of the church building program. Due to this quality due diligence, the church will have a very clear picture of how big of a building they need and can afford, and will have a very good understanding of the mix of space it will require. This provides a very clear definition of the church plan the should buy or create. Without this objective understanding, design or plan selection is based on aesthetics and emotion instead of objective criteria.
Pre-developed church building plans provide many benefits if you can find the right floor plan. For a lot less money, time, and effort, you may be build your church with pre-developed church plans. While these are not free church plans, they are available at a fraction of the cost of new church building plans. In addition to the savings in time and money, your church gets a set of building plans that have already been built. Someone else worked the kinks out of the building plans, so you don't have to!
Depending on the where your church gets its building plans, the architect should provide a reasonable amount of customization for very little cost. Most likely you will not be able to change the footprint of the building, or move load-bearing walls, but resizing interior space and changes like rearranging classrooms and moving restrooms should be included.
In summary , it's probably in the church's best interest to investigate pre-developed plans. If the church can find pre-developed church building plans that approximate the size and space requirements that came out of a needs analysis, then they are probably a great way to save the church both time and money.
Once you know the full cost for a complete and sealed set of working construction drawings using pre-developed building plans and "designed from scratch" church plans, you will be able to see what difference exists and the value proposition each presents.
