How to Design Houses

What is This?

In this section we will take a house design from start to finish, and show the whole process, from planning through design and rendering.

Here's the Thing

In this section of the website we will design a house. We will start with initial concept and some direction, and we will finish with a completely rendered design using the Home Designer 6.0 Pro design tool. Before you become distressed, you should note that we won't do anything (or much, anyway) that the Home Designer 6.0 Suite tool can't do.

This section will also be a work in process. I plan to modify and add to this section as I work, and with any hope we should finish with both a nice design and a nice website section. As I said: let's hope.

Recent Changes to This Section

27 November, 2005

Revised and added to the kitchen layout section.

2 July, 2005

Made several small edits to some pages, and added some content to the "end" of the section.

24 May, 2005

Made much more progress on the design. Edited many pages and added a bunch of pages. You may want to skim back over this section from the beginning, since I added several "tips". It's starting to get really interesting.

9 May, 2005

Published changes. We're getting further, but we aren't (nearly) done. The fun, as they say, is just beginning.

26 April, 2005

I decided to reorganize this section because the number of pages is beginning to become significant, and the navigation bars at the top of each page were becoming quite lengthy. So, to keep the navigation simpler/shorter, I divided this section into subsections, Getting Started, Exploring Options, The First Floor, and The Second Floor. Other subsections will be added as I get to them.

18 April, 2005

I added a page on the basics of drawing walls, and started the discussion about the design of the stairway (straight, L-shaped, or U-shaped), and what might work best for our house. Of course, you are always free to choose the design that best suites you.

12 April, 2005

Updated some content on the Program page. Reorganized the "Materials" section into categories, and added information about windows, doors, and floors.

4 April, 2005

Added this section and the first 3 pages. Stay tuned for more content.

Let's Begin

We begin at the beginning: What is our motivation for designing this house? Obviously, we desire somewhere to live, and we also want to have it be something we helped design. Sounds good, but first we need to layout some basic requirements. In architecture, these requirements are called the program.

The Program

Every design should begin with a program. There's nothing great or mysterious about the program, it's simply the things that should (or should not be) included in the finished house. It can be at any level of detail that we want. Some of us might have very specific ideas about the things we want; others might just have some general thoughts. So, before we begin, let's consider the elements of the program:

Square footage. How big do we want our house to be? This is important, of course, because cost is probably the single biggest consideration (unless we're quite wealthy), and cost is directly tied to the size of the house.
Location. The lot or acreage where we plan to build. Of course we can do a lot of design and planning without knowing this information, but if we already have a lot or location to build, we may want or need to take site information into consideration. This might be especially important if the lot is sloped or wooded. Some houses do better on slopes than others. Some houses like it flat.
Locale. The area of the country where we plan to build. Some houses are nothing more than "generica", but if we want to build in an area with some character, we may want to do our homework before we begin. We should make note of common characteristics for the area (such as the Pacific Northwest or the South), and take those into consideration in our planning and design.
Configuration. Number of bedrooms? Number of floors? Size of the garage? Other rooms we know we will want or need? A basement? Need a media room for your big screen TV and home theater system? Need a place for your mother in law? Ahem. Before we get very far we need to understand some basics of the configuration.
Materials. Do we have ideas for the exterior? Siding? Brick? Stone? Stucco? Something else? What about base moldings and crown moldings? Many subdivisions don't put up crown moldings, due to the cost. What about the carpet? Do we insist on hardwood floors or perhaps laminate? What about the kitchen and the bathrooms? Would we like tile, or would vinyl be OK? This is a huge consideration, because the choice of materials is the second largest component of cost. The first, of course, is labor.
Other things. There are many other considerations, but if we want to build this house ourselves, we need to choose materials and techniques that we know we ourselves can accomplish with the skills we have. You seriously don't want to learn the building trade while you build the structure you're going to live in. Personally, I would not want to trust the inspectors to ensure the design and construction are up to standards. If we don't know what we're doing, we really should rely on the professionals.

There are many, many things that could go in our program, and I will begin assembling the one we will use, and add to it as we go along and learn more about what we're doing. I'm placing the program on a separate page, and I will link to it from every page in this section.