How to Create House Designs

Every house that is built has a design that was followed. There are many things that go into designing a house. It will save you many problems during construction if you take some time to thoughtfully create your house design. Here are a few design techniques that will help you in creating your house design.

Things You'll Need

• Paper
• Pencil
• Eraser
• T-square or parallel bar
• 30-60-90 triangle
• 45-45-90 triangle
• Architectural scale

Instructions

Beginning the Design

1. You will need to establish the criteria or wants for your house before you even put pencil to paper. You will need to decide what you want in the house in terms of the spaces.

2. You will need to decide what the style of the house is going to be once you have decided on the spaces that you want.

3. The design should solve the criteria you have established and follow the design style you are trying to follow.

Establish Relationships

1. You can establish relationships between the spaces once you know the spaces you need. Drawing a bubble diagram will help you determine which rooms should be next to each other. A bubble diagram just lists the spaces with lines connecting them to each other.

2. Develop an adjacency matrix which will help you determine the hierarchy of each space and how they will relate to each other. An adjacency matrix lists all the spaces and puts what you established in the bubble diagram into a concise hierarchy of the spaces and their relationships with each other.

3. The bubble diagram and adjacency matrix will become references for you during the floor plan design.

Establish Room Sizes

1. You can start establishing room sizes once you know what the relationships are between the spaces you want.

2. Draw out approximate room sizes to scale using your architectural scale and your triangles.

3. The room sizes should reflect the amount of square footage you require for each space. For example, if the bedroom is supposed to be 400 square feet then you will draw out a 20 by 20 square.

Floor Plan

1. You can start drawing the rooms in their approximate places in the floor plans once you have the sizes and the relationships decided.

2. A rough floor plan will show approximately where the spaces or rooms are located and approximately how big they are. They do not need windows or doors yet. A single line floor plan will do for a rough floor plan.

3. You can start adjusting the floor plan and designing it to fit the style that you originally choose once you have a rough floor plan.

4. It may take some revisions and adjusting but the final floor plan will eventually evolve to create your house design once you have followed all the steps. Drawing out each revision on paper to scale using your architectural scale and triangles will illustrate your house design.

Tips & Warnings

• By establishing your criteria and your room relationships, you will be able to constantly refer back to them when you start drawing out your floor plan.

• Do not be afraid to draw multiple versions of your house design when creating your floor plans.