For English speakers who own a Dutch house

Where are the drawings of your house?

If your house was built with a permit, and almost every Dutch house was, the original drawings are still in a public archive. We find the right archive, request the file in Dutch, and send you what arrives with a reader's guide in English.

Liever in het Nederlands? Ga naar de Nederlandse pagina, waar u het archief ook zelf kunt opzoeken.

What you get

The documents, and a guide to reading them

A Dutch building file is not one drawing. It is every permit ever granted for the address: the original construction, later extensions, a dormer window, sometimes the structural calculation. You receive all of it digitally.

With it comes a reader's guide of about one page, written in English:

What is in the file. Which years, which permit, and what is drawn on which sheet.
Where the structural information sits. The floor joists and their direction, the cross section, the foundation drawing, the steel beam above an opening.
What is missing. Archives have gaps. Knowing what you do not have is worth as much as knowing what you do.

One real example, from a terraced house built in 1963: four permits between 1963 and 1974, thirteen documents. The oldest permit covers the whole block of six houses and is filed under a street name that no longer exists. The document the archive calls a structural calculation opens with a list of twelve changes the municipality required before granting the permit, and those changes are what was actually built. None of that is visible to someone searching their own address.

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 different counters: a regional archive for the oldest permits, the municipality for the middle decades, and a regional environmental service for anything recent.

On top of that, older files are often registered under the plan for an entire block, and under the street name as it was written at the time. Search your own address and you find nothing, and you conclude there is nothing.

And the archives work in Dutch. That is the part we take off your hands.

What it costs

We request the file for you

Give us the address and we do the rest.

€ 100 per address, including VAT.

Rather call? +31 6 1590 2335

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

Have us do the structural calculation afterwards and this amount is deducted from it.

Your name

Email address

Phone number

Address of the house

Which year is this about?

What do you need the file for?

Agreement

I authorise Cox Constructieadvies to request this file from the archive on my behalf, agree that the work starts right away, and understand that my right of withdrawal ends once the request has been submitted.

On the next page you pay by iDEAL. Nothing is requested from the archive until the payment has come in. How long an archive takes differs per municipality, from a few days to a few weeks; we 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. We cannot guarantee that the file exists or that it is complete; archives have gaps, and sometimes only the front elevation survived. And this is a document service, not structural advice: whether that wall can be removed is not in the file. That is a calculation, and we are glad to make it separately.

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. We will of course explain them to you in English.