Designing Your Own House Plans
How to Design Your Own House Plans — Free Online Tutorials
Welcome! Designing your own house can be a wonderful journey of self-discovery and creativity. This website contains all the tutorials and reference material to assist you in designing house plans.
The site is here to act as your guide as you design your own house from initial site planning, through to drawing floor plans, understanding residential structural design and creating blueprints either by hand or using home design software.
We've been through the house design process from start to finish and our family of four is now thoroughly enjoying our custom designed home. It would have been hard for an architect to capture so many of the small details in our home that reflect the way that our family lives.
We have great respect for architects and the beautiful and practical designs they create. But for some of us, the urge to create our own homes is too powerful to hand it over to someone else. People have been designing and building their own homes for centuries. If you have the desire, the time and the perseverance, you can too.
Designing House Plans Tutorial
The free Designing Your Own House Plans Tutorial will guide you through a detailed step-by-step effective house design process. During this online tutorial, you will design your own house plans starting with analyzing your building site, moving through to creating bubble diagrams before creating floor plans, learning about structural design and finally drafting your house blueprints.
You can start with the tutorial introduction or select a topic using the tutorial site map.
Designing Your Own House — Our Story
When my husband and I set out to design our own house, I searched high and low for good information that actually detailed the steps for how to design a house. I had hoped to find some kind of online (or offline) tutorial on designing your own house that would walk me through the process. Instead, I found a handful of house design ideas books and started down the tough road of trial and error.
After creating dozens of floor plans (and at least four house plans with a complete structural design), I began to figure out a design process that really worked. And I noticed design elements that needed to be decided very early in the design process—things like where the main entrance, stairwell and fireplace would be. These elements wreaked havoc on the design if not incorporated early enough.
Now that our family of four is happily living in our custom designed home, I have the time to organize and share with you the secrets of house design that I discovered throughout our journey. In creating these tutorials, I have consulted with many others who have designed their own homes to come up with a "best practices" method of home design that really works.
How to Design a House
You can follow through the Designing Your Own House Plans tutorial from beginning to end or you can follow the navigation buttons in the left-hand margin of the page to jump to any topic. So choose your path to designing your own house plans now!
Start in with the free Designing Your Own House Plans Tutorial
Jump to Understanding Blueprints
Browse through Kitchen Design Ideas
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Now it's your turn to design your own house plans. Enjoy the journey!
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