Draw House Plans -- Design TutorialModule 5: Indoor Spaces Bubble DiagramsBefore you begin to actually draw house plans, it is a good idea to create simple house bubble diagrams to design floor plans in a very loose form. This will allow you to play around with the locations of rooms and how they interact with one another. This is Module 5 of the design your own house tutorial. These modules are best read in order. If you are just starting out, go to the: Draw House Plans Bubble DiagramsNow it's time to create another bubble diagram -- this time indicating the functional spaces within your home. Make photocopies of your site plan but choose a lighter setting on the photocopier so that the site plan information is still visible but not as distracting.Another option is to lay a sheet of tracing paper or a clear piece of mylar over top of the site plan. Now consider all your notes on your space requirements page and think about some of the options for house location. Choose one of your potential house locations as indicated on your site map. Start with drawing a bubble for where your main entrance could be. Where you will enter your own home, most of the time. Mark small bubbles at any other places where you feel you will need a door or entrance. If you will have a yard, vegetable garden, driveway, or foot path from another direction, consider how you will enter the home from those various places. At this point you are just drawing small bubbles so don't get too concerned if it looks like you will have several entrances. Later when you draw house plans, you can figure out how these entrances can be combined to result in fewer doors. But initially mark all these bubbles so you can see where the ideal places are. You probably have an idea for the types of house styles you like in terms of what they look like from the outside. It's important to have a rough idea of this at this point. (Later in the tutorial, we'll discuss exterior house designs.) Will the house have one floor or more? This will affect whether your floor plan bubbles are all in one plane or whether some will be on different levels. Example Bubble Diagrams for Two Story House Main Floor Upper FloorDraw Circulation in DiagramsConsider how the traffic will flow from space to space. When entering the home where will you usually go first? Where will your friends or guests go? Consider what you want to see when you first enter your home. Mark all circulation spaces (such as hallways or even just traffic areas) as bubbles on your diagrams.Organization of and Relation between SpacesConsider what kind of space you want where you first enter your home. A formal space with a closet or a very casual space with lots of hooks and shelves to place your things? Or something in between? Consider whether you prefer a separate formal entrance or whether a separate entrance is necessary.What do you want to be looking out at from various spaces? Make sure that you are considering your site as you locate your bubbles. Pick any peaceful views for spaces where you will want to be relaxing and enjoying the view. Put spaces that do not require a view in places where the view is not as prominent. Consider where to place spaces that require privacy from some outdoor spaces but also natural light. Also consider local noise sources and breezes. Begin to draw house plans bubbles for each space or room keeping in mind the connection between the rooms or spaces. Think about where you will prepare food and where you will eat it. Do you want your living area and/or eating area open to your kitchen or completely separate? StairsIf there will be a basement or more than one story to your house, draw a bubble for a potential stair location. (We will discuss the amount of space required and the types of stair shapes in a later module.) At this point, simply draw a room sized bubble for the stair. Make sure that you make this stair bubble on all floors of the house in the same location. Usually, the stairs for all levels are stacked in one space of the home resulting in essentially a two (or more) story open space in the home. This space must be marked on all levels since it is unavailable for rooms or circulation spaces.The FireIf you will have a fireplace, woodstove or a zero-clearance fireplace, make a bubble for it as well on your diagrams. Make a reasonable sized bubble for them. Woodstoves, although they do not necessarily need walls behind or beside them, require enough space around them to pass safely.Keep in mind where your chimney will exit the roof. The chimney or stove pipe will need to be cleaned on a regular basis and ease of access is important. In our area, the chimney or stove pipe top must be about two feet above the highest roof surface or structure within about ten feet of it. Our roof is very steep and the slope of the roof surface ten feet away is roughly 12 feet higher. If our chimney was built anywhere low on the roof slope, it would need to be 12 feet plus 2 feet, or 14 feet high. This would create a crazy chimney requiring lateral support. This design would probably look rather odd and be difficult to clean. We located our fireplace so that it would exit the roof very close to the peak of the roof. The chimney only needed to be a few feet high and one can straddle the roof peak to drop a chimney brush down it. Continue to Look at Previous Worksheets and DrawingsYou should be developing a bubble diagram of interlinked spaces or rooms. Keep going back to your needs analysis page and asking if spaces will meet their needs and keep going back to your site plan to check if the rooms or spaces will be in the right places on your land.Next ModuleYou are almost at the draw house plans step. But first let's look at:Exterior House Designs: Module 6 of the Design My Home tutorial before you draw floor plans. Jump from Draw House Plans (Module 5) to the Tutorial Introduction Jump to The House Plans Guide Home Page 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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