Author: Brian February 2, 2012

A big mistake in designing a house is to get involved in detail too quickly.

Rough sketches of a floor plan, which you can easily change, are the best way to start. . . . Much better than using a computer drawing tool which can  ‘Lock You In’ and stop you considering different ideas.

1. Decide what rooms you need and the approximate size of the house (see How Much House?)
2. Draw some bubble diagrams. . . . These are drawings where each bubble represents a room, or a feature of the house.
3. Work quickly, while thinking, and discussing, how you want the various rooms to relate to each other.
4. As you develop the plans try to draw the bubbles to roughly represent the room sizes, but don’t try to be too accurate.
5. Because the drawings are done quickly you can easily do new ones as your ideas develop.
6. Don’t throw the old one out though! You might want to go back to a previous idea.

The collection of diagrams will be a demonstration that you have gone through a process of developing a design rather than infringing someone else’s Copyright.

The above illustration is a tidied up version of the initial bubble diagram for our first Australian house. It was based on certain things we wanted in the floor plan. These were:

• A rectangular plan to keep things simple and economical
• A passive solar house with the main rooms facing North
• A wood burning stove in the centre of the house
• Our bedroom at the opposite end of the house to the children.

Next  I will show how we developed the initial bubble diagram to a refined version which we could then use to develop the final floor plan.

 

For more Posts about Design see Floor Plans