How to Design Your Own House Plans

Prospective home owners usually have a picture in mind of what their dream home would look like, and finding that picture in existing homes is almost impossible. One never asks a builder to construct a home that looks like a carbon copy of his neighbour’s house, since being unique is a human instinct, and everybody wants his/her home to be different from the rest of the houses in the neighborhood. It is always a good idea to design your house plans and show them to a certified architect to help you finalize a construction drawing. Follow these steps to design a house that you have always dreamt of.

List your family’s requirements

Start by listing your family’s requirements. These include how many floors you need, and how many rooms on each floor to accommodate your family, how spacious the rooms should be, what kind of floor you want in your rooms and kitchen, whether you want formal living and dining rooms in your home, a house with or without a garden, and so forth.

Research house plans

After having listed the requirements of your family, research house plans. Nothing can give you more design ideas than seeing real houses. Look around at residential units in your neighborhood and note what features you like in them. You may not like the entire house, but you may like its patio or portico. Not down details of all the features that you like on houses you see in your neighborhood.

You can also take ideas from home design magazines, books on home design, as well as collections of house plans. You can find all this material online or in your local library.

Draw your design in pencil on graph paper

Once you have a clear picture of how your house should look like, it’s time to draw the plan in pencil on a graph paper. Draw on a small scale, making a block equal to a specific distance. Common scales used when sketching a house plan are 1 big square = 4 feet and 1 big square = 8 feet. You can also use a blank paper to draw the plan, but graph paper makes it easy to sketch the plan while maintaining equal distance, without using a scale all the time. When using a blank paper, use scale 1 inch = 4 feet or 1 inch = 8 feet.

Seek a certified architect’s help

Bring the rough sketch to a certified architect and ask him or her to draw a final building plan for you. The architect is an experienced person and can spot any problems in the original plan or suggest changes. You can also ask the architect to design a house plan for you from scratch.