Frequently Asked Questions

Is ICF worth the money?

ICF stands for insulated concrete forms. It's a type of home construction that provides a concrete inner core wall with Styrofoam on the outside.

ICF construction is worth the added upfront expense for homeowners who value what it delivers. You do get a tighter, better-insulated home. It's typically more energy efficient, it's quieter, it's more comfortable, and you have fewer drafts and steadier indoor temperatures.

The reinforced concrete walls also add exceptional durability and greater resistance to fire, high winds and severe weather.

When you're evaluating designers, there are a few things that I highly recommend you ask for.

Get from them a set of their design documents and a set of their construction documents. You want to actually see what it is they produce and what you're paying for.

Judge the deliverables from each of the designers you're talking to, because there is a lot of difference in them.

One of the most common mistakes people make when trying to match a stock plan to their land is whether or not the house plan actually fits the way it should on the land.

We all want just enough room on the side yards. We want plenty of room on the front and back yards, to ensure that we have, you know, a wonderful home environment. But it's often difficult for people who don't do this for a living to visualize how that house plan is going to sit on their property.

Let me tell you why we feel like you should hire your designer first.

A good-quality home designer is going to have just as much understanding of what it costs to build a house as a home builder is going to. Therefore, they will help guide you through the process of designing a home that you can afford.

This is the biggest mistake people make regarding a barndominium, and it's not what you think.

Most people approach designing and building a barndominium mistakenly believing it is going to be a whole lot cheaper than a traditional home. And the reality is that just isn't true.

While it can be a little cheaper, unless you're a DIY builder, you're really not going to experience a significant cost difference between a barndominium and a traditional stick-framed home.

There has been a stigma with barndominiums that they are basically farm buildings, that they're either converted or the design is more farm building or ag building related on the exterior, and therefore not as structurally sound as a traditional home.

Truth is, if the barndominium is designed appropriately, the only appearance of an ag building or a farm building is the fact that it probably is pretty simple. It's a rectangle or a square-type structure. It probably has metal siding and a metal roof. But a well-designed and a well-built barndominium, from the metal siding inward, is all traditional home construction.

The document set should dictate that, and the way it's built should help to ensure that it's not a barn. It truly is a well-designed and well-built home.

A barndominium can be built a little cheaper, five, ten, maybe fifteen dollars a square foot, with some prudent decisions.

Overall, however, what we typically find by the time we compare one building system, meaning a barndominium system, to traditional stick-frame construction, there really aren't that many differences in the cost.

We get asked all the time: a barndominium is cheaper to build than a traditional home, isn't that right? The truth of the matter is that a barndominium isn't that much cheaper, if at all, than building a traditional home.

Pre-COVID, steel buildings were significantly cheaper to build, and a steel building frame was a great way to build a barndominium. But in today's economy, steel is actually more expensive. The industry has really shifted away from an all-steel building to building barndominiums either as a hybrid wood-steel or as an all-wood structure.

A barndominium can be built a little cheaper, 5, 10, maybe $15 a square foot, with some prudent decisions. Overall, however, what we typically find by the time we compare a barndominium system to traditional stick-frame construction, there really aren't that many differences in the cost.

One of the primary differentiators of us being your designer is that being a home builder also means we bring all that experience: all the field experience of mistakes that have happened in the past, mistakes that we've seen others make, which are so much more costly when you're under construction.

We take that mentality into the design world, as much as we can, during preliminary design, by having such a detailed questionnaire where we walk our clients through the process and ask them all of these questions that may seem highly detailed.

What kind of bathtub do you want? Well, that matters. The type of bathtub matters. We need to know that early on, so that our documents show that it is a freestanding bathtub with a center drain and the tub filler is on this wall, not that wall.

If we don't know that until we have broken ground, and our documents only show a standard bathtub, which is really kind of the industry norm, then that means we may be busting up concrete. And that's a whole lot more expensive than changing the bathtub during the design phase.

Bringing that mentality into the design world is pretty unique, quite honestly, and I feel like that's one of our primary differentiators.

What we do that helps clients save money in construction: we help to eliminate the change order process.

Because we take so much time to work with our clients through the design process and put so much detail into our plans, when those plans get to the contractor, we've gone through everything. Every decision has been made. The contractor doesn't have to guess. They don't have to make assumptions. Everything is in our plans.

We virtually eliminate the change order process, saving our clients thousands of dollars.

Here's what actually happens from our first call to your finished home.

We want to get to know you. We want to understand what your hopes and dreams are and what your budget is, and we want to drive the design decisions based on all of those things, while keeping those guardrails up to be sure that what we design can be built.

So we go from the onboarding to your preliminary design, designing you a very efficient and comfortable home, reflecting back on what we learned about you.

Once the preliminary design phase is finished, then we move into construction documents, where all the detail and the minutiae of a set of construction documents actually takes place.

When construction documents are finished, those builder-ready plans are ready to hand off to your builder. They will then begin doing your construction estimate. That estimate will lead to a contract. That contract and estimate will go to your bank. Your bank will have an appraiser that will appraise the plans, you get your loan, and then those plans are ready to submit to your city or county for a permit.

We then love to stay involved in your project through construction administration. You've hired us to ensure you get the home that you want, so keep us engaged, so that we can be your eyes in the field and construction is carried out in accordance with the plans.

If someone buys a stock plan off our website, do they get a building permit along with it? And the answer is no, and there's a few reasons for that.

While our plans are builder-ready and certainly have all the necessary information for most jurisdictions around the country, every single municipality is a little bit different.

And so it's really the responsibility of either the homeowner, but most commonly the builder, to get their building permit.

Oftentimes we get asked how many changes or modifications we can make to a stock plan before it's just wiser to go with a custom plan.

And while there's not a single answer to that, usually one thing that definitely drives it is when we make the perimeter of the house larger or smaller, change the roof, or radically change some of the primary areas, like the kitchen, the master suite, or other primary features.

The more changes you make to more areas in the home, kind of like fitting a square peg in a round hole, there's just more changes. And it is often easier if we just start with a blank sheet of paper, develop from your program and design something custom for you.

We have an extensive library of ready-to-build homes already in our portfolio, across a wide range of genres: barndominiums, traditional-style homes, ICF-style homes, Craftsman style, Victorian style, Texas Hill Country style, your typical ranch.

We have a tremendous library, from 1,200-square-foot homes to well over 4,000-square-foot luxury homes, that we often use as a starter for your plans.

Stock plan or custom plan: most people choose wrong.

And the reason why most people choose wrong is when you focus on just saving money on design and you go buy a stock plan, but then you sit down and realize that plan isn't quite what you want. Then you end up spending more money to modify that plan.

Whereas had you just started with a custom plan, you would have gotten a plan that was literally designed exactly for your lifestyle, your goals, and how you plan to live in that home from the beginning.

What makes Fry Design Co different from other home designers is the amount of experience we bring. Between me and my team, we have approaching a hundred-some-odd years of combined experience.

What I bring forth with residential design is a mindset of highly detailed, highly accurate, highly coordinated construction plans.

Throughout our design process, we are thinking through every little minute detail to be certain that light fixtures coordinate with ceiling joists, switch placement is in the right place, and cabinets are exactly the right size. All of that functionality, we are detailing down to literally the inch, to be sure that what we deliver is a highly coordinated, highly functional and very efficient set of plans.

So my name is Jeff Fry. I own Fry Design Company. We are a residential design firm in the Oklahoma City Metro area. We're actually in the historic original capital city of Guthrie, Oklahoma, just north of the Metro.

Me and my team of very talented designers, our primary focus is helping homeowners go from "we would love to have a home in the future that is exactly what we want," helping them through the process of designing their custom homes. We also do serve a few home builders, and we'll design homes for their clients.

While our primary focus is that Oklahoma City market, we actually design homes all over the country. And I think we're up to somewhere around 32 to 33 states that we have done work in today.

We design traditional homes, and we also design an awful lot of barndominium-style homes. And we have a lot of experience in designing homes that are built out of insulated concrete forms. ICF is the acronym for that, and so we definitely design an awful lot of homes with that technology as well.

As a member of the American Institute of Building Design and accredited as a Certified Professional Building Designer, I bring over 40 years of experience.

We have several Certified Professional Building Designers in our office, and we even have one who's in the College of Fellows of the AIBD.