How to Get a Blueprint of Your Home
Finding the blueprints for your home can be helpful if you are looking to remodel, build an addition, or work on your septic system. Blueprints can also have any underground pipes or cables that you need to be aware of if you are planning on doing any excavating near your home or repaving your driveway. Does this Spark an idea?
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Instructions
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Find the contact information for the real estate agent who helped you to buy your house. He may help you to find the blueprints quickly and easily if your home was newly built. However, real estate agents only get paid when they sell a house. They may be limited in the amount of time they can spend for fact-finding for current homeowners. If you have recently bought a house or are in the process of purchasing a house, that may be the best time for contacting the real estate agent.
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Contact the chief building inspector for your municipality or county. She may be able to look up the builder's information from the building permit. You may have to go to the county courthouse to search public records for a copy of your building permit.
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Search the Internet or look in the phone book for the contractor from your house construction. Their phone number will most likely be on the building permit, but if the phone number has changed, you are going to have to track them down. If they are still licensed as a contractor and actively involved in the construction industry, they should be fairly easy to find.
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Contact your builder. Most builders keep blueprints of their houses and even use them multiple times throughout their career. If your house is a prefabricated kit house, then you can simply contact the manufacturer who constructed your house and get blueprints from them. However, if you are contacting a kit house manufacturer there may be limitations or costs associated with obtaining a blueprint of your house since it is a part of their business operation.
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Talk to your neighbors. This is more of a last resort, but surrounding houses likely were built by the same contractor. See if they have any information that you have not been able to dig up.
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Hire an architect. Architects or other building professionals can draw up fairly accurate plans for your house if all other leads have come up cold. This will certainly be the most costly of all the options, but if finding the blueprints are essential to your remodel then it is better to measure twice and cut once than guess whether or not you know what you are doing.
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Tips & Warnings
If your house is more than 100 years old, your builder may not have drawn up exact blueprints as this practice was not followed as closely as today. Early 1900s contractors simply built from memory and convention rather than detailed, exact plans.
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Resources
- Photo Credit blueprints, plans, drawings image by Greg Pickens from Fotolia.com
