I’ve been thinking about house plans and layouts over the past few weeks. Spurred on by various comments from Emma about things she’s seen in TV shows that she likes the looks of, I thought it was about time I sat down and put some boxes together.
You can insert a whole heap of disclaimers here: these are not finished plans, are likely to be completely inappropriate, and should be treated with derision and scoffing. What they do, though, is show you what we’re wanting to achieve from a house. Well, actually, it’s what I want to achieve from a house – Emma isn’t really that interested right now. These plans will evolve, likely significantly.
These plans were put together with the aid of House Design Studio Pro from Punch! Software and my Mac. Putting aside my dislike of company names with exclamation points in their names (also Yahoo!), and the inherent quirks of the software, it’s pretty good. It lets dreamers like me put boxes on pages and wiggle things around to fit.
First step was to start on the ground floor of the building. In a former plan, I had hankered after a basement. This time, I decided against it. Excavation on that scale is notoriously expensive and time-consuming, not to mention the nightmarish damp-proofing required.
The ground floor, which House Design Studio Pro annoyingly calls the first floor, has to have the following:
- Office space for both of us
- A garage (a double would be nice, a triple is overkill)
- Accommodation for parents when they are old and/or infirm and need care
- Stairs (that go up)
- A wet/utility room
- A studio for me (I’m feeling indulgent)
- A plant room for Emma (she’s a garden writer, y’know)
- Boiler room, including provision for under floor heating equipment
- A porch (I like porches)
I started by creating arbitrary 4m x 4m boxes for each room and dumping them on the empty canvas without any joins or intentions of final sizes. Clearly some rooms would be bigger than others (a double garage, for instance, is rather larger than 4m wide, especially if you want to get two cars in it and be able to get in and out of the car(s) to, y’know, drive places).
After three hours of fiddling around, head scratching and muttering I came up with this:
Nice, huh? You can tell I’m not a designer. From there, after a bad night of sleep (or lack of, I suppose), it was time to bolt these boxes together. A further hour or so of wiggling around and I ended up with this:
There are no doors or windows at the moment, so getting in and out will be something of a struggle, but as a ground floor I kind of like it. At this stage I was rather short of inspiration, so the first floor (or second floor if you talk in Home Design Studio Pro parlance) is a bit lacklustre:
Here’s the thing: it’s big. Man, it’s big. It’s hard to imagine how large it is overall, so I’m using the room I’m sat in as a guideline. The room I’m in as I type this is, roughly 6m x 3m. It’s full of furniture and other office-related detritus, but it’s all I’ve got, so it’s what I’m using. The usable floor space of this house (Cooper Towers) right now is ~80m². This iteration of Cooper Acres is ~650m² – about 8 times the size of Cooper Towers. Yikes.
It’s a long weekend here in the UK at the moment, and I’ve set myself some quality time of working on these plans to flesh them out a bit and maybe – just maybe – put some doors and floors in. If all goes to plan there should be a badly-rendered 3D model in the next few days.
You like? You hate? There are some obvious things wrong with it, clearly, but I’d love to hear your feedback. Leave me a comment.
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