Get the BOok: PREPARING TO BUILD
Getting the Right Church
Building Plans
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.
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Once a needs and feasibility study
has been carefully performed as part of a church building planning, it's time to develop
building plans and
site plans for your new church building program. Your church will have
two primary options when it comes to
church building plans:
-
Design your
new church from scratch, or,
-
Buy existing church building plans
from previous building programs.
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.