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 by:
- Performing a site analysis
- Researching local zoning regulations
- Planning outdoor spaces
- Creating a home needs analysis
- Designing indoor spaces
- Planning and designing the house exterior
- Learning the basics of residential structural design
- Designing floor plans
- Creating a three-dimensional house model of the home design
- Learning how to make your own blueprint or investigating the various home design software programs available
- Creating full house plans, including cross-sections and elevations
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!
Contact The House Plans Guide
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Design your own home online tutorial. Complete house design tutorials starting with site analysis, home planning, drawing floor plans and finishing with creating house blueprints..
House Blueprints Tutorials - Free tutorials and glossaries for how to read house blueprints, blueprint symbols and making your own home blueprints.
Whether you are renovating or designing a new home, finding excellent kitchen design ideas will make for beautiful and unique kitchen designs. See our pages on designing your own kitchen, kitchen layout design and kitchen islands design.
Quality home lighting design can make all the difference in your new home design or home remodel. Learn about the types of home lighting, how to work with natural light and how to calculate the optimal lighting levels for your unique home design.
Comparisons and full design descriptions of the most common house heat systems: electric and gas forced air furnace, electric baseboard, electric infloor radiant, hydronic infloor radiant, geothermal heating, air sourced heat pump.
On this page are free home design software reviews for our three top-rated online programs. Other pages on this site provide reviews for non-online free house design programs as well as commercially available software programs.
Reviews of House Design Books. Many home design ideas can be gleaned from home design books. One book, A Pattern Language, can provide not only ideas but also almost a method for house design.
Search through all categories of house plans with photos. From vacation home plans to contemporary house plans. Browse over 20,000 home floor plans with an easy quick search tool.
On our Home Design Stories and Photos page you have the opportunity to share your own house design story, photos and drawings and have other site visitors offer feedback, comments and encouragement. Whether you are in the beginning stages of home design or are already living in your custom home, tell us about your design.
The House Building Blog. Building the insulated concrete forms, or icf walls, is almost like putting together Lego blocks. Our forms are Logix blocks. Each row of blocks needs to have a course of rebar snapped into the slots of a spacer bracket.
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