When you start an ADU, one of the first things you need to do is hire a designer. Their job is to create a floor plan for how your ADU will look. This can be quite costly since the designer is working from scratch. To save money, many people wonder, “can I just buy ADU floor plans?”

Buying An ADU Floor Plan

There are many ADU floor plans available for purchase. Buying one speed up your development process since one does not need to be drawn from scratch. It also saves you money since you do not need to hire a designer to create it, you just have to pay a one-time fee for the design. In the long run, it saves you time and money.

Many ADU professionals offer ADU floor plans for sale that can be customized to meet your needs. So, you buy the basic design and then pay a little extra to have it altered to meet your design choice. This is much more cost-effective than drawing from scratch.

As with any floor plan, it will need some tweaking to match your land and the orientation of the unit, but again, this won’t take too much time to do.

Free ADU Floor Plans

If you do not want to purchase a floor plan, you can find a free one to use. Many cities like San Diego and Santa Cruz offer free floor plans that you can choose from. These floor plans are not customizable, but they are free.

Many free floor plans from cities are also pre-approved to make the permitting process go quicker. They do this to encourage ADU development by saving people money and time during the design and planning phases. A pre-approved plan receives its permits at a much faster pace.

This is a huge perk to using a free floor plan, but you lose the ability to customize it to meet your wants and needs. If you have a dream ADU in mind, you may have to give it up to save a few hundred dollars. In the long run, if you have a specific design in mind, it may make more sense to sacrifice a few hundred and buy a floor plan that can be customized to meet your wants and needs.