OMAHA, NE, (January 5, 2005) –Recognizing that women make 80% of the home building and buying decisions, Design Basics, Inc. has introduced forty “Her Home Value Engineered Home Plans,” that cater specifically to women.

Her Home Plans also incorporate the best principles of Value Engineering making a home more economical to build. Design Basics layered its research of women home buyers, designers, builders and realtors with information on how people live and what makes them happy in creating the design plans. Changing lifestyles are reflected in some of the women’s responses including:

• Space to regroup and de-stress from busy lives and the demands of others
• Space saving/storage and organization features that also reduce stress
• Rooms that can be “flexed” for other uses such as a mother-in-law’s room, a piano room, etc.
• A larger garage to accommodate today’s mini-vans and SUVs

The plans also feature value engineering design to make construction more economical such as: streamlined structural systems requiring fewer steel beams and structural headers; lower pitched, simplified rooflines which are easier to truss; standard-size building materials (i.e. floor coverings) that minimize waste and on-site labor; and a minimum number of window sizes to allow the homebuyer to purchase in quantity.

Design Basics, the nation’s largest home plan design firm to the building trade, offers nearly 1,500 home plans that are marketed to 98% of the national home publications and in lumber yards and featured weekly in newspapers across the country. The company produces a variety of home plan catalogs and publications which are distributed via direct mail, consumer and newsstand publications and on the Internet. Design Basics’ Her Home magazine is the first with editorial based solely on critical decisions female consumers need when building their homes. For more information see: www.designbasics.com and www.herhomemagazine.com.