Draw a Floor Plan

Shopping for a house off the menu offers some variation, but in general if you are serious about living there once its built, it’s not always possible to find what you want, and most “off the menu” building companies don’t like major changes to their stock designs.

Whatever end of the spectrum: standard ‘menu’ house or professional architect build, it makes sense to play with floor plan layouts, just for the exercise of seeing what you want, and seeing how you can make it fit together, based on your needs, experience….and the magic ingredient_SPACE. It will allow you to see your future, the way it works, down to how the spaces interconnect, air flows, and light spills in.

Graph paper isn’t going to do the trick,…so you need software to help you get it down in a useful form, and allows for the constant updates, variations and iterations that naturally follow the process of designing your future.

I found the software market limited. Many dodgy house design CD’s from the States – set up for feet and inch layouts which I found in-flexible for my non-professional skills and deficit in patience. But user-friendly, low-end floor plan software does allow you to create a decent mock-up, good enough for you to be happy with anyway. You can always let a draftsman move it into a more professional product later. We got ahead with the following.

Drawing features in Microsoft power point (could even do it in MS word, but power point allows you too copy and paste the whole slide – so you can look at subtle differences by flicking between slides) - handy as you can draw over jpgs or Pdf scans of the layout of your block, or the outer walls of your proposed house. To do this just import your ‘to scale’ outline as a jpg or Pdf into an MS Power point blank slide, then draw walls, or drop in furniture as jpgs. To ‘rub out areas’ just draw a box over the offending article and make the box white without an outline. Cons of using such a simple generic product include difficulty in getting the scales correct for all the internal walls etc.

2) SmartDraw is useful and not too expensive, and the company gives you a free trial period to play with the software to see if you like it. You can even export your mock-ups in a software format that is recognisable by high-end drawing programs. Also good assistance (helpdesk), even while you are on the free trial period.

3) Google sketch up - nice to play with ideas, and will awaken and test your CAD skills (read 3d), not much good for real work-ups. More an exercise in creativity.

In reality the full on CAD programs (like AutoCAD, ChiefArchitect, VectorWorks etc) are expensive and perhaps beyond our capacity or need. Especially as we are only really after an adaptive floor plan design.

Developing some skills to draw these floor plans is worthwhile, as it gives you many chances to play and generally refine ideas in a real and useable form. Doing it only in your head, or on a paper scrap in a restaurant is often worse than useless, as it needs to be to scale, or it won’t help you form a REAL house (one that can actually be built on your block anyway). This didn’t stop us spending hours with scraps of paper mind, and won’t stop you either.

Getting your ideas down, then refined in a ‘to scale’ floor plan involves numerous tugs of war between needs and wants. You will also be involved in untold amounts of negotiating with your partner over what goes where and what goes out the window. But it’s creative, beats watching the Bill, and that’s half the journey.

Word of warning, don’t like us think your floor plan is the blueprint for the builder to go to work. It will need their input too. For example, they like to have space for plumbing, and have a better awareness of how your plan might be challenged by the council planners etc. They also have a much better grasp of how the layout will affect the build cost, and can make small changes that offer big rewards.

Related links:

http://architecture.about.com/cs/cadprograms/tp/designsoftware.htm

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