Module 8 - Draw Floor PlanDesign Your Own Home TutorialWelcome to Module 8 of the Design Your Own House tutorial: Draw Floor Plan. You've come a long way with planning your house and learning about structural design. This is probably the module you've been yearning to get to. All of your site, zoning, needs analysis, drawing bubble diagrams and considering house exteriors and roof styles will come together in this module as you draw floor plans for your home. This online tutorial is best followed in order. If you are just starting out with your house design, see our tutorial site map to go through the tutorial in order, or to jump around it as it suits you. Design Floor Plans – Bringing it All TogetherThis step of designing floor plans is really an iterative process where you will go back and forth from your indoor bubble diagrams, your site map, your needs analysis, house exteriors and what we have learned about residential structure to design floor plans.Essentially this step is all about firming up the walls of your indoor bubble diagrams. But more than likely, as you design your floor plans, you'll find yourself modifying your bubble diagrams, trying out different house exteriors and occasionally crumpling up your design and starting all over. Don't be afraid of this. It is a learning process and chances are someday you'll look back at one of your initial designs and think how glad you are that you didn't build that one. Somewhere I have a file folder of all the weird and wonderful floor plans we fiddled around with. Some look like they belong on another planet. This fiddling stage really helped in letting the creativity flow but the other parts of the development process: our site plans, needs analysis, and structural design constraints would always bring the designs back to reality. Draw Floor Plan - Simple SketchesWhether you will end up drawing your final blueprints by hand or using home design software, I suggest that initially you draw floor plans as simple hand sketches. You don't have to be an artist for this stage. I certainly am not. By doing them as simple sketches you can do them wherever you are with a notepad (or a paper napkin) handy, indoors or out. Do lots of these. Below is the main floor bubble diagram for the 1 1/2 story house from our bubble diagram exercise. Next are two rough sketches, with the walls firmed up, for possible floor plans. The first plan is a rectangle with three bumpouts. The second floor plan has a simple rectangle for its exterior shape. The second is a simpler and more economical option. Draw Floor Plan Example 1 Draw Floor Plan Example 2Below is my sketch that ended up forming the basis for our main floor house plan. (It is rotated to match the orientation of the bubble diagram above.)  This was one of many rough sketches associated with this bubble diagram. We also had other bubble diagrams for which we did rough sketches. One of the big variants in our designs was the kitchen and the dining area. I'm a big fan of the farmhouse kitchen where the eating area is in the kitchen and there is no formal separate dining area. We went back and forth with many different designs where the eating area was right in the kitchen, across a peninsula or island or, as it turned out in the final design, adjacent and open to the kitchen. I mentioned firming up the walls of your indoor bubble diagrams. For an open concept home these "walls" will be more figurative than real. Oftentimes other design features will take the places of walls. A change in flooring, ceiling height, paint color, a rug, partially open shelves or a half height wall may define one space or "room" from another. The sanity check for your designs should always be, “Can we build this?” (Along with, “Do we want to build this?”) But don't let that question stifle your initial design efforts. Some great ideas will come up when you're not worrying too much about how to build it. Later some of these ideas can be adapted to fit into a more practical design. Drawing Floor Plans in More DetailInitially let's try an exercise. Look at your main floor bubble diagram. If you already have an exterior house shape in mind, go with that one initially. If not, pick one based on the basic exterior shape of your bubble diagram. Start with a simple house shape. As we discussed in house exteriors, it's always easy to bump the design out here or there or add a dormer where needed. If your bubble diagram is more or less oval shaped, a basic rectangle will probably work. As you design, you can bump it out where needed. An L-shaped bubble diagram is also easy to work with by combining one or two of the basic house shapes. Consider each space on your main floor bubble diagram and the functions (from your needs analysis) that it needs to fulfill. Think also of the furniture that may potentially be in this space. Make an estimate for the size of the room. You will be free to change this as you proceed but come up with a basic idea. Is it 12' X 12'? 18' X 16'? Jot these dimensions down on each space on your bubble diagram. Add up the total length and width of your diagram. You may end up with anything ranging from 25' X 25' for a small house to 25' X 40' for an average house to - well, anything you have space and money for. Remember, however, that depending on where you live, every additional square foot could cost anywhere from an extra $70 to $250 (and way beyond that for a high-end home in an area where building costs are high). An extra 10' X 10' area for a two story home with a basement results in an extra 300 square feet in your home (since usually this extra space is then built on each floor). Multiply this through by your local cost per square foot and you could easily be paying $30,000 for that extra space. Designing wisely can eliminate space being added on to your home simply because you couldn't quite get something in the design to fit. On a piece of paper, draw your basic shape in plan view (looking down from above) and put your dimensions on it. I usually use graph paper for sketching with each square on the graph being one square foot. This way I only need to count off squares to make a rough drawing. Draw Floor Plan - Interplay Between SpacesOn a piece of graph paper, draw each space using the rough dimensions you just decided on. Cut these pieces of paper out, then lay them down on your basic shape drawing. In this way, you can move these basic shapes to see how the interplay between the spaces could work and also how traffic could flow from one space to another. The shapes can overlap somewhat as required. Identify where traffic can move right through the rooms and where extra space will be required to allow movement between rooms or spaces.On a separate piece of graph paper, make rough furniture outlines for the furniture you can envision in the home. Use the same scale as your room drawings. That is, if you are using each square on the graph paper as one foot, do the same for your furniture. A six foot by three foot sofa would take six squares by three squares of graph paper. Below are examples of common household furniture and fixture symbols. (Note: The graph paper shown below is not using the one square per foot scale.)
Place the furniture pieces on your floor plan layouts. It will quickly become evident if you have adequate space for the furniture you are planning as well as for circulation. Here you may make modifications to the either the room size estimates or your planned furniture. Do not automatically assume that you need to add to your projected overall square footage if everything does not fit. Sometimes there is space wasted in other areas of the home plan that can be shifted to another room. This phase of your design process is where you will spend a lot of time. Going back and forth from your needs analysis, site plans, bubble diagrams and floor plans. Do not lose sight of your most important items in your needs analysis. Modify the needs analysis as required to make your dream a realistic one. Use Case ScenariosIn the draw floor plan part of your design process, it is important to consider what I call use case scenarios. A use case scenario is simply an ordered list of steps that you go through for a given task. These use case scenarios can then be used to check if your floor plan designs work well with your family. Let's take the example of food. Here are my use case scenarios for food and family supper. Food Family Supper Write your own use case scenarios and then with your floor plans in front of you, go through each use case scenario and walk through each step. Does it work well? Is it easy to get the groceries into the kitchen? Is there a convenient place to set them as you put them away or will you need to walk back and forth too much? Create a scenario for every typically recurring aspect of your family life. Scenarios could include meals, bedtime routines, laundry, homework for children, music practice, entertaining, recycling, garbage and compost. Don't forget to include the full cycle of a scenario. That is, recycling doesn't just end with tossing something in a bin or bag in the home. This bin or bag needs to get to wherever the recycling is collected and back into your home again. Likewise with compost. It needs to get out to the composter in the yard (where will that be best placed so you will actually use it in all weather conditions?), the inside compost container needs to be rinsed or washed and returned to wherever it lives in the home. Next Module - Building a 3-D Scale House ModelIn the next module you will learn how to make a three-dimensional model of your house design:Module 9 - Build House Model Jump from Draw Floor Plan to the Tutorial Introduction No part of this web site may be reproduced or copied without written permission. Illegal Internet copies will be detected by Copyscape.
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