For Homeowners
A barebones set doesn't save money. It hides the bill.
A permit set leaves out far more than finishes. It defaults your windows, insulation, and HVAC to code-minimum, never weighs performance against upfront cost, and ignores what the home costs to run for the next twenty years. Every one of those unmade decisions comes back to you, as a change order now or a higher bill later. Here's what a barebones set really costs.
Two Very Different Things Called Plans
A permit set and a construction set are not the same document
Almost nobody is told this before they hire someone, so here it is plainly. When you ask for plans for your home, there are two very different products you might receive, and they can look similar sitting on a table.
A permit set is drawn to get approved. Its job is to satisfy the building department, which means it proves the house is structurally sound, meets life-safety requirements, and complies with code. That is a real and necessary job. But the county never asks what your floors are made of, how the shower gets waterproofed, where the tile meets the wood, or what your cabinets look like, so a permit set does not answer those questions. It is a regulatory approval, not a set of instructions for building a house.
A construction set is drawn to be built from. Every finish, fixture, and material is specified. Cabinet elevations, waterproofing details, flooring transitions, and window flashing are all drawn. The mechanical, electrical, and structural work is coordinated so the trades are not discovering each other in your walls. This is what the industry calls construction documents, and it is what we mean by the Aleskovsky Set.
Here is the part that matters when you are choosing who to hire, and it has less to do with job titles than people expect. Either document can come from a designer or from an architect, so the thing to establish is which one you are buying. A permit set has a defined finish line, and once the plans clear review the engagement is over, which means every hour spent past that point comes out of somebody's margin and the drawings stop where the county stops caring. A construction set is priced to carry through selections, bidding, and the year of construction that follows. The two can sit on the same table looking similar and cost five times apart, because they are different jobs rather than different levels of effort at the same job.
When the builder controls the drawings, a second thing happens. Incomplete drawings keep the builder's options open rather than yours. Every decision the set leaves unanswered is one they get to make during construction, priced at that moment, with no competing bid to check it against.
This calculator exists to put a number on the distance between those two documents.
Scope, Not Job Title
The permit drawings are one stage out of eleven
The question people ask is whether to hire an architect or a designer, and it is the wrong question, because the two engagements that produce very different outcomes can carry either title. What separates them is how much of the project the person you hire is actually responsible for. Some designers deliver the whole arc below and do it well. Some architects sell a permit set and hand you the keys to the rest of it.
Read down the list and notice where the permit drawings sit. Getting a permit is one stage, and most of the money on a custom home moves after it is issued, during the stages where somebody is either representing you or is not.
Permit-only
scope
4 of 11
Full scope
of service
11 of 11
Programming and schematic design
How you live, what the site allows, and the shape of the house.
Design development
Assemblies, materials, and fenestration resolved before anything is drawn for construction.
Permit drawings
The sheets the building department needs to prove the house is safe and code compliant.
Construction documents
Wall sections, flashing, waterproofing, interior elevations, and every transition drawn.
Specifications and selections
Products named by manufacturer, series, and Florida product approval number.
Bidding and award
Answering bidder questions, issuing clarifications, and reading bids for scope gaps.
Permitting and plan review
Managing comments and resubmittals through issuance.
Submittals and shop drawings
Checking that the window, truss, and cabinet packages match what was designed.
Field questions and site observation
Written answers, quickly, and visits at the stages where mistakes are still cheap.
Change orders and pay applications
Deciding what is a real change, and certifying what the builder has actually earned.
Punch list and closeout
The last five percent, warranties, and final payment.
Every stage marked as not included still happens on your project. The work does not disappear when nobody is hired to do it, it moves to you, at the moment it comes up, usually while a crew is standing in the house waiting for an answer. Whoever you hire, ask which of these eleven stages the fee covers and get the answer in writing, because two proposals that look thousands of dollars apart are often describing entirely different jobs.
Where A Permit Set Fails You
The same house. A very different set of decisions.
- Finishes left to lowball allowances
- Windows, insulation, and HVAC defaulted to code-minimum
- Performance never weighed against upfront cost
- Sound, comfort, and durability left to chance
- Lifecycle and operating cost never considered
- The gaps return as change orders and utility bills
- Every finish specified, not guessed
- Windows, insulation, and HVAC engineered for Florida
- Performance and upfront cost weighed on purpose
- Sound, comfort, and durability designed in
- Lifecycle cost considered, not ignored
- A home that costs less to run and holds its value
The Calculator
What a barebones set really costs you
Set your project, your taste, and the performance you actually want. The calculator adds up the finish change orders, the systems and performance a permit set defaults away, and the lifecycle cost you carry for years. Illustrative estimate, not a guarantee.
Code-minimum = the builder's default. Higher performance costs more upfront and far less to run.
Upfront, over your bid
$297,575
turns your $1,000,000 bid into $1,297,575, about 29.8% over
energy, maintenance, and early replacement of the systems you didn't upgrade
That's the number a complete set protects. When every finish and system is specified and priced during design, there are no allowance surprises and nothing you have to buy back later.
When you're weighing design fees
On a 3,500 square foot home, that is the whole choice people agonize over. The cheaper set does not save you $63,765. It exposes you to $326,450 in change orders, comfort, and the years you own the home.
Modeled from your inputs to show the order of magnitude. We don't price per square foot or as a percentage of construction, so a real fee is scoped to the project. This is not a quote.
Don't believe it? Book a private consultation and we'll walk you through real numbers from homes like yours.
Book a Private ConsultationFinishes: allowance vs. what you'll actually pick
Systems & performance: what a permit set defaults away
Allowance, selection, system, and lifecycle figures are illustrative defaults that scale with home size. They vary by market and product and should be tuned to your project.
Where The Compromises Happen
Same budget. Same decisions. A very different moment to make them.
A contractor can build a home for a given number, and that part is true. The question nobody asks in time is whether that number is building what you actually pictured. Every project reconciles the vision with the budget eventually. The only thing that changes is when.
The usual way
Reconciliation lands in construction. Change orders, delays, and the architect and designer take the blame.
How we work
Reconciliation lands in design. Adjustments on paper, made together, before the price is final.
Who makes the call?
The decisions get made either way. The only question is who's holding the pen.
When the reconciliation lands in the field, someone has to decide, on the spot, what gives. Do you want that person to be your licensed architect and designer, whose only job is your project? Or the general contractor, who is also managing their own margin?
Plenty of good builders do right by their clients, and a respectable GC doesn't cut corners. But not every GC is that GC. And even the best one, forced to make a call in the field, is answering to two things at once: what is best for you, and what protects their bottom line. Those don't always point the same way. Make the decisions during design, with the team that works only for you, and the question never comes up.
The myth
Interior designers and architects blow the budget.
The truth
Design that never gets priced blows the budget.
The advice you'll hear
"Don't hire an interior designer. They'll blow your budget."
Here's the problem with that advice. A designer doesn't inflate your budget. They help you define what you actually wanted all along, and that was always going to cost what it costs. The designer isn't the risk. A vision that never got priced is the risk. Skip the designer and you don't avoid the number. You just meet it later, as a change order, once it's too late to plan for.
The whole job is setting expectations and meeting them, out loud, the entire way. Not designing cheap. Designing toward your budget, so the compromises happen on paper and not in the field. That is what a coordinated process really protects: your money, your timeline, and the vision you walked in with.
A Note From Nathan Aleskovsky
Why a bid built on incomplete drawings is really just a budget
I have this conversation with almost every client I sit down with, and for most of them it's the first time anyone has explained it. It's the single most important thing to understand before you build. So let me walk you through it the way I would in person.
How it's supposed to work
Most custom homes are built design, bid, build. Someone designs the house, the drawings go out to builders, the builders price them, and you hire the one whose number and reputation you trust. On paper it's clean, and it makes sense. The catch is hiding in one word: bid. A bid is only as honest as the drawings it's built on.
Where it breaks
When the drawings stop at what the permit required, there's nothing for a builder to price. So they do the only thing they can. They fill the blanks with assumptions and allowances, and those numbers are always conservative, because a low number wins the job. Three dollars a foot for flooring. A round figure for cabinets. A placeholder for lighting. None of it reflects what you actually want, because nobody asked and the drawings never said. The builder isn't cheating you. They simply can't price a decision that hasn't been made yet.
So the bid comes back on budget, everyone exhales, and then construction starts and the real decisions show up one at a time, each a little more expensive than the placeholder it replaced. You wanted the marble, not the three-dollar floor. Change order. You wanted the quieter wall, the better windows, the HVAC that actually keeps the second floor comfortable in August. Change order, change order, change order. The number that felt like a promise turns out to have been a wish.
A bid is not a budget
This is the distinction that changes everything, and it's so simple it's easy to miss. A budget is a guess about what something might cost. A bid is a commitment to what it will cost. Without the details, what you're handed looks like a bid and behaves like a budget.
And here's the part I most want you to hear. A price formed from uncertainty only ever moves in one direction. Up. In all my years doing this, no one has ever opened a wall mid-project, found the drawings were too thorough, and handed money back. Uncertainty isn't neutral. It always costs the owner, and it always surfaces at the worst possible moment, once the work is underway and your leverage is gone.
The three ways people walk into it
There are three paths that lead here, and I've watched all three play out. The first is going straight to a home builder who brings in their own designer. Now the builder controls the design, and a builder optimizes for the builder: their margins, their vendors, their schedule. The drawings stop at the permit on purpose, because drawings that leave decisions open keep the builder's options open, not yours. You find out what you actually bought during construction, which is exactly when it's most expensive to change.
The second is buying plans online. Those were drawn for no one in particular, with no specifications and no thought to your site, your climate, or your code. Hand the same online plan to five builders and you'll get five different numbers, because all five are guessing, each in a different direction. A set of plans without the details isn't a design. It's a suggestion.
The third is the one that surprises people most, because on the surface it looks like the right answer. You hire an architect or a designer to draw you something custom, and they might give you a look you love, something far better than a stock plan or whatever the builder had on the shelf. But a beautiful custom set is still just a set of drawings if it doesn't specify the details and never gets priced while it's being designed. You end up with a home that's genuinely yours to look at, and a bid that's still a guess. The taste problem got solved. The money problem didn't. That's the one that catches the most careful clients, the ones who did more homework than anyone and still walked right into it.
How I do it instead
I run pricing alongside the design, not after it. I bring a general contractor into the process early and keep them pricing the design as it develops, decision by decision, while everything can still change on paper. By the time the design is finished, the price isn't a reveal. It's a number that already reflects your real selections and your real budget, because we've spent the whole design reconciling the two. The point of the design phase isn't only to draw you a beautiful home. It's to hand you a price you can actually trust before anyone breaks ground.
The twenty-five-dollar floor
So when you tell me you want twenty-five-dollar floors, I don't leave a three-dollar allowance and cross my fingers. I price the floor you actually want, into the design, now. If it fits, wonderful, it's locked in. If it pushes you over, we have that conversation today, while it's a line on a drawing and not a slab that's already poured. Maybe we trim somewhere else to protect the floors you love. Maybe I find you a floor that gives you ninety percent of the look for sixty percent of the cost. Or maybe I tell you honestly that the budget won't carry that floor and this addition both, and you get to choose with your eyes open. Every one of those options is painless during design. Every one of them is a fight during construction.
The point
The goal was never a cheaper bid. It's a bid that doesn't move. A price you can plan your life around, because it was built from decisions instead of assumptions. That's what a complete set and a priced design actually buy you. Not a lower number, a number that stops climbing. The figure at the top of this page is what a project costs when this conversation never happens. My whole process exists so that it does.
Nathan Aleskovsky
AIA · Principal Architect & Founder
Your Numbers, Reviewed
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