The method
The catalog's numbers are not a marketing position. They fall out of six design decisions, made the same way on every home, before a shovel touches the lot. This page is those decisions, in the open.
Method 01
Every catalog home is one clean volume under one roof plane: a shed, a flat, or a single gable. No valleys, no dormers, no bump-outs. Corners and roof intersections are where framing labour, flashing, and leaks live. A rectangle spends that money on the rooms instead.
Method 02
The catalog runs 980 to 1,680 square feet, with a median of 1,240. Every plan publishes its program and its area on the same page, so nothing hides. The cheapest square foot is the one you never build, and a plan with no hallway to nowhere needs fewer of them.
Method 03
One pour is the foundation and the finished floor. There is no basement to excavate, form, waterproof, and heat, and no framed floor above a crawlspace. Foundations carry 10% of the hard cost on our model; a slab holds that line down and hands back a polished floor for free.
Method 04
Posts and beams land at spans dimensional lumber already wants to make. Sheet goods stay whole: the plans hold to the sizes plywood and fibre-cement ship in, so almost nothing is cut to waste. Structure and framing carry 16% of the hard cost; stock sizes are how that number stays honest.
Method 05
A catalog is a repetition machine. The same post-to-beam connection, the same window buck, the same cladding module is detailed once and built again on every home. Crews get faster each time, and the details that repeat are the details that get priced sharp.
Method 06
The envelope is the biggest line on the sheet: 24% of hard cost for roofing, windows, cladding, insulation, and air sealing to ACH50 at or below 1.0, blower-door verified. A simple form has less surface for the same floor, so that money buys thickness and tightness instead of shape. A tight, simple envelope then shrinks the mechanical bill behind it.
Part two
Cheap to build is half the answer. The other half is the money, the approvals, and the partners that get a small home from a plan to a driveway. All four moved in the last two years.
The system 01
The 2024 to 2025 policy stack changed the math on a first build. A couple can put up to $200,000 of tax-advantaged savings toward a down payment: $40,000 each in an FHSA plus the raised $60,000 Home Buyers' Plan. A new build carries a 30-year amortization, and the new federal GST rebate takes the full 5% off a first home up to $1M, worth up to $50,000, including when you hire a builder. BC waives the property transfer tax on new homes to $1.1M. The honest number: a $300K infill lot plus a $450K build runs about $3,500 a month at 2026 insured rates over 30 years, financed in stages by a construction draw mortgage. The true gate is qualifying income under the stress test, and a legal suite, whose rent insured lenders can count, is the strongest lever a floor plan can offer. Every figure here is an estimate with published assumptions, not a quote.
The system 02
BC rewrote the rulebook in 2023. Every municipality over 5,000 people must allow three to four homes on an ordinary residential lot: no rezoning, no public hearing. Kelowna went further, pre-zoning about 11,100 core-area lots in March 2024, and now permits pre-approved standardized designs in about ten business days. The province publishes free standardized plans with cost estimates by city. CMHC publishes a fifty-design catalogue. A catalog of small homes with published plans and honest cost bands is not a fringe idea; it is how BC now says housing should get approved. What still blocks a modest home is discretionary: private covenants with minimum-size clauses, design review, leftover parking rules. Those are checked lot by lot, and they are losing.
The system 03
Soft costs, the drawings and permits and carrying time before a shovel moves, run near 30% of the cost of a home, and unpredictable approvals sink small infill projects first. A permit-ready catalog plan attacks exactly that: documented pattern-book programs cut soft costs by roughly 7 to 11% and take months off the timeline, and a crew that builds the same connection, the same window buck, the same cladding module again and again prices it sharper every time. That is the partnership on offer. The catalog brings the repeatable plan and the cost discipline; builders and developers bring lots, crews, and delivery. Kelowna's own fast-track program is this model working. The missing piece is plans worth repeating.
The system 04
Home ownership among Canadians aged 25 to 29 fell from 44% to 36% in a decade, and millennials own at lower rates than any generation before them at the same age. In Kelowna the median detached house clears a million dollars, so the first rung has moved to a condo or out of town. This catalog exists to put a real house back on that first rung: small, honest, tight, at the price of a starter condo plus a fair lot, with a slab pad waiting for the wing you add when the second kid arrives. That is the whole point of the movement.
Figures in part two: Statistics Canada census ownership rates (2011 to 2021); BC Bill 44 (2023) and City of Kelowna MF1 pre-zoning and Infill Fast-Track (2024); federal Bill C-4 GST rebate (Royal Assent 2025); FHSA, Home Buyers' Plan and 30-year insured amortization per Department of Finance (2024); CMHC Housing Design Catalogue (2025). Monthly costs and shares are estimates with stated assumptions, not quotes.
The proof
Every home page publishes the same seven-line hard-cost sheet, built on a $310 per square foot Okanagan 2026 basis and stated as an estimate with a ±8% band. The shares below are the model. As House No. 1 gathers real supplier and trade receipts, receipts replace estimates, line by line.
Model v0.1. Excludes land, design and permit soft costs, and GST. Sources and live data on the receipts page.