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A two-storey duplex, read from two plan sheets and rebuilt as a massing model. Four answers in order: can it be built, what it would cost, what is driving that, and what could change. Every number carries what it rests on.
Yes, as a conventional wood-frame house, at Class D order of magnitude. Every room the drawings let us check passes Part 9. Seven checks cannot be verified because the set has no sections, no elevations and no schedules, and about — of the estimate rests on decisions that are not drawn yet.
A Class D figure is an order of magnitude with its basis showing, not a price. The basis here is a published 2026 Okanagan benchmark for this building type, split into elements by the NAHB survey, with general requirements, fee, contingency and escalation from the ResonAi basis-of-estimate workbook. Nothing below was generated; every rate has a source.
The figure below is the derived floor area of your drawing, sq ft, times the midpoint of the published Vancouver production band, /sq ft. It is a benchmark, not an estimate of your design; the band underneath shows how wide that is. Wall areas, and everything that moves with them, are measured from your sheet.
Set against the published Vancouver bands, this design lands above a production house and well below a custom one. That is where a two-dwelling, two-storey wood-frame with ensuites on both floors ought to land, and it is the first sanity check a QS would run.
The building, rebuilt from the two sheets. Every wall was read from the vector geometry and measured to a quarter inch; its colour is what the drawing knows about it. Amber is a height nobody has drawn. Click a wall for the chain back to the printed dimension that calibrated it, then "Show on sheet" to see it on the plan.
Region: drag on the sheet
Distance between your two clicks: —
22'-7 1/2" is 22.625 ft. A metric plan: enter metres or millimetres.
Scale: ·
Upload the other floor afterwards with the same steps, or use the model as a single storey.
The elemental split, against this design. Amber bars move when you change a plate height or a material below; the rest hold to the benchmark. Exterior enclosure and partitions scale with wall area, which is measured length times the height in the model.
Nothing in the set states a plate height, a floor structure, a slab, a roof, a window count or a glazing ratio. These are the assumptions the estimate and the model are standing on. Drag one and watch both; press confirm when it's a decision rather than a guess.
Part 9 checks, run on what the plans contain. "Cannot verify" is an answer, and it is usually the useful one: it names the drawing you haven't produced. Articles cited from NBC 2020 / BCBC 2024 Part 9; the numeric minimums are the same in the Ontario edition used as the reference source.
The checks and the critique below were run on the sample duplex set. Room bounding on an uploaded drawing needs a person in the room editor, which this prototype does not include, so they have not been re-run on yours.
| Article | Subject | Rule | Found | Required | Result |
|---|
Beyond code. The angled 22'-7 1/2" exterior wall makes Ensuite #1 an irregular room and costs more per foot than the same wall run straight. Five crawlspace access points on the lower floor say the site steps; that is a foundation cost the plans cannot show. A half-height wall with glass above on the main floor is a detail that needs a section before it can be priced. None of these stop the building. All of them are money.
Materials with published installed ranges, against quantities read from the drawings. Pick one and the estimate moves by the mid-range difference against the base. The plans specify none of these, so the base is a mid-market assumption; the line for each option shows its own range so you can see how wide "roughly" is.
Written from the readings, measurements and notes above, and nothing else. Each sentence points at the finding it came from. This is a design-development check, not a jury.
This is a disciplined set of plans. The door openings are consistent at 2'-11" across the lower floor, the sheets calibrate to the same 18.003 points per foot, and the room areas that can be checked clear Part 9 by a wide margin: Bedroom #1 at 17.7 m² against a 9.8 m² minimum, Bedroom #2 at 15.9 m² against 7.F4
The plan is generous with circulation. Only 77.5% of the lower floor's printed area is room; the rest is walls, an unbounded corridor, the stair and five crawlspace accesses. That is within range for a split-level plan on a sloping site, but every square foot of it is priced at the full rate and returns nothing to a bedroom.F1
Two things in the notes matter more than they look. The ensuites carry a printed 8'-0" ceiling under a plate that is not stated anywhere; if that is a dropped ceiling for services, there is a foot of enclosed, heated, framed volume that no quantity in this estimate sees.F2 And the half-height wall with glass above on the main floor is a detail that will need a section before anyone can price it.F6
The angled wall is the design move on the lower floor and it is also the expensive one: it makes Ensuite #1 irregular, it costs more per foot to frame and flash, and its length comes from a printed dimension rather than the geometry pass, which is the only place in this review where the drawing is trusted over the measurement.F3
The largest thing the set does not say is height. The two plate assumptions carry roughly $420,000 of the estimate between them, and a single section through either dwelling would resolve both.F8 Behind that sit the roof, which is not drawn,F7 and the windows, which cannot be read from a plan and so leave bedroom egress unverified and the glazing ratio assumed.F5 Draw the section first. It is the highest-value sheet you can add, and the model will turn green where it lands.
Geometry read from the vector PDFs with pdfplumber; sheets calibrated from grid bubbles against printed dimensions at 18.003 pt/ft (stated 1/4" = 1'-0" is 18.000), median error 0.21% over 26 checks. Walls detected as parallel line pairs resolving to 4.00, 6.00 and 8.00 inches; doorways closed across gaps under 4 ft, every gap logged. Rooms bounded by ray casting and checked by eye. The estimate is the ResonAi basis-of-estimate workbook; the option rates and benchmark bands are the public sources below, with their dates. The model appears in two places only: reading the notes on the sheets, and writing section 06 from the findings.
A student wants to hear "yes, you can build it." The useful answer is "yes, and here is what you haven't decided, and here is the one drawing that would settle most of it." The amber is the lesson.