Was it in writing?

Oral statements while valid for some purposes are very difficult to enforce.

Just wondering what drawing cost averages are?

What do you mean by drawing cost? Architect fees? If so, there are a couple of threads around here with information on what others have paid. If you don't mean an architect, then what qualifications does the person you are going to have? And is he designing from scratch or is he modifying an existing plan from your builder?

When we built our house we hired a draftsman instead of an architect to rework and merge two house plans that we liked into one. We liked things about each of two different plans. It was about $1500 for the plans plus draftsman to modify them. The plans were by Frank Betz. We loved the Stephen Fuller designs mostly for their exterior aesthetics but we found there was always some little something about the floor plans that were just not practical for our needs. We wanted a master on the main and at that time most of SF plans were two story with master on 2nd. This was quite a few years ago though and I am sure he has many more plans now. I love his nod to the neighborhood styles of old Atlanta and dearly would have loved to build something like that. In the end we decided to put the money on the inside and not the outside of the house. All of the things we love had to go by the wayside for the exterior such as stone and wonderful trim additions. Our house is still pretty and has lots of nice elements on the exterior but big porches and other details we found can really cost a lot of money! In the end we sacrificed the exterior for upgrades on the interior. We had a pretty strict budget that was blown right off the bat by the unforeseen greater costs of grading the lot.

The biggest regret we have is not putting on architectural shingles. It was going to be about $1000 more and our builder advised us against it saying that if you make 10 decisions that it's "only" a thousand dollars more you will be $10,000 over budget and since the grading came in at about $10,000 over we were already in the hole right off the bat. In retrospect everything our builder advised me NOT to do is a special irritant to me now such as not putting hardwood floor throughout the first floor. It would have been only one more room of hardwood as we have it everywhere on the first floor except in the living room off the foyer. It bugs me to this day and if I want to add it now I would have to refinish the entire first floor. This is not an easy fix to do later. The other thing is not getting the pocket doors in that same room. There are these huge 36" double doors that open into our bedroom as the living room doubles as a sitting room off the master. So now I can never change them out without redoing drywall in the room. Errr....it bugs me every single day.

Now we are in the process of getting rid of the brass in the house. Luckily we don't have a ton of it. When we built our house it was right on the beginning edge of there being more choices for hardware but it was pretty limited. So we ended up with some of it in the bathrooms. We have been in the house for about 14 and 1/2 years so it looks like all that was popular at that time. There is so much more now to choose from. Not sure if that is a good or a bad thing! It makes it so much harder to make all of those choices. I was on decision overload by the time we got to the end.

I looked up your plan and it's beautiful! I love it. I am wishing you a wonderful time of building and to enjoy it. It will get done and before you know it you will have been in your house for a long time! I never thought it would be over when we were building but now it was so many years ago. I still think of it as the new house and can't believe we are already having to replace and update some things in the house. We just redid the master bath and some updates to the upstairs bath. But all in all it's still looking pretty fresh and current with some minor updating. Good luck!

So sorry! I guess I was reading through the threads and put two questions together to answer. Oh dear.. Wish there was an edit or remove button! Again, please forgive me! I put the Stephen Fuller house plan question and your question together. I really have to get more sleep!

lol, I was wondering how you saw our plans! No problem.

The man is a draftsman. We found a plan on line that we mostly liked but had him resize it, mirro it and change several things.

I sure wish we could of found plans we liked that he already had because it would of only been like $800.

So true. It seems like there is always some little thing that doesn't work with one set of plans. For us it was our lot size. We had to downsize the house because the lot was not wide enough to handle it with a boat door with it's own driveway on one side and the side entry garage on the other. Ended up changing a lot on the interior from the downsize. Good luck with your house!