“Anything Goes” with our Custom Modular Home Plans.
Make it Your Home
With Finish Werks, your “dream home” can come true. As a truly custom builder, Finish Werks will help you piece together all your design options to create custom home plans for the home that you want in your budget. It all starts with the floor plans.
Most stick builders limit you to just 5 – 10 plans to choose from, and virtually ALL modular builders limit you to just their manufacturer’s plans. Not us!
Finish Werks: DESIGN BUILDER
As a Designer and custom Builder we can Design and Build anything that the building code will allow.
How much can I afford for a home?
Virtually everyone must limit their home design, size, style and home design aesthetics according to their budget. This is also true of our clients at the upper end of the home market. Your house design will determine whether it costs $90 per square foot, or $200 per.
To determine what you can afford to spend on a house design is very easy. Simply call Tom Coronato at Citizens Bank on our resources page, or call your local bank’s mortgage department. By asking you a few financial and family questions, they can calculate, using current interest rates and your current income, how much principal you should be able to borrow for your new house design. This assumes you have given complete and honest answers to their questions. This should take less than 5 minutes, although there will be no guarantee or commitment, it will generally be very accurate, but keep in mind that interest rates can change tomorrow, and so can your income. Be sure your taxes and home insurance have been calculated in the equation. As a rule of thumb, 28% of your gross income before deductions can be spent on house payments, including real estate taxes, home insurance and association fees, if any (35% maximum for all payments including car and credit card payments).
How much house can I get for my money?
More than 20 miles from the downtown areas, house prices begin to drop.
Within the downtown areas, expect to pay more.
If you plan to build a house in an area prone to earthquakes or hurricanes, expect to pay much more, but at least the land should be cheap.
Planning Ahead With Your Home Design:
Building an Addition-Ready Home
If you must cut costs (a very normal situation), rather than give up on the space you need in the long run, consider building a smaller house for now and plan for building out your unfinished “cape” attic or basement. Or you might include a patio with a foundation suitable for a future outward expansion. By planning exactly where you will expand now, and how big the expansion will be, you can design your home in such a way as to make the expansion easy and relatively inexpensive. The foundation will already be there for you to build a house addition later.
In this scenario you should avoid installing any plumbing or heating pipes where they may have to be relocated in the future. If you expect to remove a section of wall to access the expansion, install a header at that location during the initial house building phase. A little forward planning now can save big $$$ in the future.
Start with our modular home, floor, and addition plans resources to get you on your way to a beautiful new custom modular home or addition with Finish Werks, Maryland Modular Home Builder.
