Free tool

Where are the drawings of your Dutch house?

If your house was built with a permit, and almost every Dutch house was, the original drawings are still in a public archive. Enter your address. I look up the year it was built and show you which archive or counter holds the file.

    Type street, number and town the way the Dutch address register writes them, then pick your address from the list.

    The search above covers every municipality I have worked out. For these, the whole page is in English:

    Liever in het Nederlands? Ga naar de Nederlandse pagina.

    Hand it over

    Or I request it for you

    I collect what there is to be had about your address, read it, and write down what is in the file and what is missing. For a higher amount I also map the load-bearing structure of the house: the walls that carry load on each floor, the roof, the foundation and what keeps it stable.

    € 95 without the archive (the address report), € 145 with the file and the reader's guide, € 295 with the load-bearing structure, including VAT.

    Request the file Rather call? +31 6 1590 2335

    Have me do the structural calculation afterwards and this amount comes off it. If the archive holds nothing, you get your money back.

    An example

    What such a file looks like

    This is a real file, requested for a terraced house from 1963. Four permits, thirteen documents, twenty-eight pages. On the right is the reader's guide I wrote to go with it.

    Twenty-eight scanned pages from a 1963 Dutch building file, side by side with the reader's guide that belongs to it
    The address, the names and the plot number have been left out. Not a letter of the scanned documents is legible on purpose; the guide on the right is my own text.

    Three things stood in that guide, and they are exactly what you would not see yourself in that stack of scans:

    • The 1963 permit is not about this house but about the whole block of six, and it is filed under the street name as it was written then. That name has since changed. Search your own address and you find nothing.
    • The 1963 document the archive index calls a structural calculation opens with the municipality's list of objections: twelve points that had to be changed before the permit was granted. The drawing shows purlins of 8 by 18, that list says 8 by 20. What was built follows from the drawing plus the list. The document with the same name for the 1964 dormers is a brochure about roof panels.
    • What is not in it: the calculations of the concrete beams and lintels, one excepted, and nothing at all from after 1974.

    For € 295 you also get the load-bearing structure of the house: a floor plan of each storey with every wall marked as load-bearing or not and the archive document that shows it, plus the roof, the foundation as far as the file shows it, and what keeps the house stable. Where the archive does not settle it, the plan says which photo will.

    Whether a load-bearing wall can come out, and what replaces it, takes a calculation. If you want to remove a wall that the archive shows as not load-bearing, send me that photo first. I confirm it before anyone starts.

    Why this is harder than it looks

    The archive does not know your address

    Which archive holds the file depends on the year the permit was granted, not only on the municipality. One address can have three counters: a regional archive for the oldest permits, the municipality for the middle decades, and a regional environmental service for anything recent. Municipalities have also merged. Search for Lekkerkerk and you end up in Krimpenerwaard, while the old files sit at the district archive in Gouda.

    That is why the tool above looks up the year your house was built, from the national register of addresses and buildings. That gives you the file of the original construction, which is usually what you want. For a later alteration, the year of that permit counts.

    Requesting it is not the hard part. An archive delivers what you name. Ask for the building drawing and you get the building drawing. The structural calculation is often a separate document under a different name, and the situation as altered sits in a file from twenty years later.

    And the archives work in Dutch. The search screens, the index terms and the documents themselves, including the handwriting on a 1930s drawing. That is the part I take off your hands.

    Request

    Knowing you have all of it

    Working it out above is free. This is what you get if you hand the requesting over.

    € 95 without the archive (the address report), € 145 with the file and the reader's guide, € 295 with the load-bearing structure, including VAT.

    Rather call? +31 6 1590 2335

    What you get for € 145:

    • The building file. Every permit granted at the address, from the original construction to the last alteration, with the drawings and, where they survive, the structural calculations.
    • The reader's guide, in English. Drawings and permits are only paper without context. For each document, what it says, what it means for your house and what to watch out for, in plain language.
    • The foundation. What the file says about it. For houses from before the war that is often little, and the guide then says so.
    • The list of what is not there. This is the part you cannot produce yourself, because you only know what is missing once you know how such a file is supposed to be put together.

    And everything in the address report of € 95:

    • The building and the plot. Year of construction, floor area, how many homes share the building, the cadastral boundaries and whether it is a monument.
    • The ground and the neighbourhood. The soil tests nearby and the risk of pile rot and differential settlement from the national climate atlas, with the caveat that those figures describe the neighbourhood and not your house.
    • The timeline. Aerial photographs year by year, so you can see when something changed, including solar panels that rarely appear in a building file.

    For € 295, also:

    • The load-bearing structure. On each floor the walls that carry load and the direction of the floor, the roof, the foundation as far as the file shows it, and what keeps the house stable. If the file holds no usable floor plan, I mark it on your own, for instance the estate agent's.

    Have me do the structural calculation afterwards and this amount comes off it. That applies to the same address, within twelve months.

    If the archive charges for searching or scanning, up to € 10 is included in the amount. If it comes out higher you hear about it first and you decide whether to go ahead. If the archive holds nothing, you get your money back.

    That does happen. Buildings from before permits were required have no file, and part of the older archives was lost in the war or destroyed before it was ever scanned. You then get from me, in writing, which archives I consulted and why there is nothing there.

    What would you like?

    On the next page you pay by iDEAL, and the request goes out the same day. How long an archive takes differs per municipality, from a few minutes to three weeks; I keep track of it and tell you where it stands. What happens to your data is set out in the privacy statement, which is in Dutch.

    Two things so you know where you stand. I cannot guarantee that the file exists or that it is complete; archives have gaps, and sometimes only the front elevation survived. And you get documents with their source and their date, not a verdict on your house. Whether that wall can come out follows from a calculation on the situation as it is now, and that is separate work.

    One more thing worth knowing. If that calculation follows, the report and the drawing are delivered in Dutch, because that is what the municipality needs for a permit application. I will of course go through them with you in English.