DIY Design Guide

‘How to Design Your Dream Home’

If talk about computer aided design (CAD) software seems daunting, simply just try sketching your home with good, old fashioned pencil and paper.

Your Guide to Design - a Starting Point

If you are considering designing your home from scratch, or making alterations to any of our standard

home designs, please keep in mind the following information. If you use this guide to help you create a

VERY rough preliminary sketch or doodle, this will provide us with a starting point to help us better

understand your thoughts and house design ideas .

1. Begin with your 'Bubble' design...

On a blank piece of paper, mark North, South, East, and West along the four sides. Then draw bubble

shapes for all the major living spaces. Identify each room e.g. "K" for kitchen, "B" for bathroom, "Bed"

for bedroom, "L" for living room, "C" for Conservatory, "S" for Sun Lounge, "U" for utility room, "D" for

dining room, etc.. Now play around with the 'bubble' shapes. With this 'bubble' technique you can create

a very good sketch of the relationship you want between the different spaces in your new dream home.

It can help if you also think about which direction you would like these living spaces to face. For

example , if you want the morning sunrise to stream into your kitchen it should have windows that face

towards the east.

2. Now change those bubbles...

When you have a good idea of how you want all of the living spaces in your home to interrelate with one

another, change your 'bubbles' so that they are more representative of your dream home's floor plans.

Take some time to look over some of our pattern book example home plans. Let these give you a better

understanding of how each floor is meant to look. Don't worry too much about the dimensions, so long

as the rooms look reasonably in proportion to each other.

3. Now write in the sizes you want...

Now you have something resembling a rough floor plan and its time to mark on some of sizes you'd like

your rooms to be. You should also indicate the location and size of windows, French doors, patio doors,

and external doors that you want to be included. It is not necessary to mark on every measurement, just

the widths and depths will suffice. However, do make sure you write in the overall width and depth of

each floor. This is also a good time to do a rough sketch of how you would like each timberframe

elevation to look.

What To Do Next

Finally, send us your rough floor plans - and elevations if you have sketched them out - together with

any other information, like plot width, plot depth, land slopes, and surrounding properties, and photo's of

the site and, or buildings on it, that you may have.

Now you can Contact Us and send us your ideas for a free estimate!