BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – CUSTOM HOUSE PLAN DESIGN CONCEPT DRAWINGS
Custom House Plan Design
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The Autocad Granddad is translating hand-drawn sketches and photographs of a 2-story residence into custom house plan Concept Drawings, preparatory to remodeling. You will see the first few pics of basic custom floor plans develop into some custom house plan Concept Drawings to cut down on both custom house plan design Model Drawings and custom house plan Construction Drawings.
We're beginning the custom house plan design by scale drawing the as-is of this residential structure. Altogether, we have sketches, pictures, and a list of the prospective owners' foreseeable changes to the exterior and interior. For now, we're working principally with the sketches and photographs until that with which we're to redesign is clearly drawn in plan view.
Here's the AG's first pass at the first floor.
About 3/4s of this drawing fits together well. It's that pesky north wing that doesn't hold together just right at this early stage, all the way from the stairs to Bed #3, inclusive. We'll work on it. Here's that north wing closer up.
The lesson here is an old one to the geezer: when your aiming at designer house plans for remodeling and you don't have the original house plans to work with (and we don't, though it's not that whatever was drawn once upon a time is what got built just so), nobody gets these measurements right the first time around. Nobody. Not even the AG and Mrs. AG. This is the slow and steady and absolutely necessary first step in remodeling: knowing for sure what you've got now in order to change it later.
And not much later from now. The AG will work on the 2nd floor drawing while the owners-to-be set the AG right side up on his 1st floor work.
Two more passes and we should be pretty tight.
The custom house plan Concept Drawing phase of this is quickly over with (even without all the precisely right dimensions for the interior). In this custom house plan Concept Drawing, the AG has to do right by the exterior first, and custom house plan Concept Drawing can cut that exterior visualization work way down.
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Let's move on to the 2nd floor plan view based on another sketch and some photographs.
Of course, it's smaller than the 1st floor — the 2nd floor ceiling follows the roofline. There are three large open spaces on the 2nd floor — each appears to be arranged over subordinate 1st floor structure:
the Rec Room is over the north wing;
the Barroom is over the Living Room;
the Master Bedroom and bath are over the Garage.
To get a better view of these three areas, we'll zoom in on each.
First, the Rec Room.
Second, the Barroom.
Third, the Master area.
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The old boy has gone to these lengths of disclosure for two different purposes:
To give the prospective owners something to look over carefully and edit as necessary for the AG to redraw, add to, and delete.
To provide the basis to clean up some measurement difficulties.
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Something to look over.
What's to look over?
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Did the geez get it right the first time? He's been known for some pretty bone-head moves on many counts, including layouts early-on. Measurements, locations, relationships, doors, windows, etc.? He thinks he did pretty well by the sketches and the photographs, but the prospective owners' opinions rule. |
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Are there cabinets, doors, windows, and the like to be added now that we've got a scaled drawing (actually, several scaled drawings) to copy and with which to work? |
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Are there wall lines to be moved, bathrooms to be rearranged, closets to be drawn in, etc.? |
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Basis to clean up.
What's to clean up?
Several aspects to this drawing do not yet work well enough to make custom house plan Construction Drawings, and a couple areas area sufficiently skew-whiff to hold up custom house design Model Drawings and even any more custom house plan Concept Drawings.
Here are the main ones that the AG can see:
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North wing overall. The overall long dimension of this wing alone is uncertain by about 3'. There are three ways to determine the length of this area: build along the SE wall line; build the rooms and let the exterior wall lines happen; build from the garage over to the northerly, shorter wall of the North wing. The AG has tried hard at all three, and he cannot get things to fit properly. Something always gets dimensionally distorted In the drawing of this page, the entry closet and air handler areas are absurdly small. |
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North wing contents. While it's clear that Bed #3's bath trains narrowly, it's less clear what space the hall bath occupies. There may well be space to comfortably satisfy the owners' interest in reducing this bath compliment to one larger full bath and a separate half-bath; however, such designing is moot until the bath areas are reconciled. The relationship of that northerly side to the north wing (air handler, closets, baths) needs looking after. The bed side of the wing works for the smaller beds, though the dimensions for Bed #3 seem way out as between interior width of 19'-11" on the sketch and exterior width of 27'-7" on the sketch. The shorter dimension in Bed #3 is also out, though not nearly that much. |
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Kitchen. While the kitchen works well on paper in almost all aspects, one is not right yet. The AG gets 13'-7"W (W always comes first) x 20'-6-1/2"L; whereas, the sketch identifies 13'Wx19'-3"L. The W difference may have arisen from the AG's drawing methodology: he started with the exterior dimensions given on the sketches, built 6" exterior walls, and then fit the rooms inside those exterior walls, allowing 5" for any interior partition. Truly, a very few inches difference for now do not matter. The W difference is pretty close to current tolerances (for this area of the residence); the L difference is beyond that tolerance. |
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The fit of the 2 floors to each other. There are small but significant differences in the overall W and L of the two floors. The width of the 1st floor is about 2' greater than that of the 2nd floor. The length (or depth, as you will) of the 1st floor is nearly 3' shorter than the 2nd floor. These are not great distances to reconcile. Easily, room measurements with and without adding in walls could put the end to this. |
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Why do you care so much about these as-is drawings, Autocad Granddad?
Given the owners' written interests in remodeling this their next home, these points to follow play directly into a more accurate second pass at measuring on site.
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We've already gone over the remodeling fit of the two baths in the north wing. Space here is critical. We simply must have a good fix on what goes where in the north wing before we start shoving it this way and that in designing a better layout. |
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Improving the entryway complex of spaces requires we know where those spaces are and how big they are. The exterior front, overhung porch and its spatial relationship to interior entry hall is nut crystal clear. |
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The AG would welcome another half-foot width in the kitchen, but the 1st floor already measure about 2' more than the 2nd floor widthwise and that's with the AG's narrower gauge. |
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2nd-floor concerns beyond the overall measuring differences center on that area at the top of the stairs to assure that the general area is as drawn. The landing looks very tight as drawn. |
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A general concern continues in regard to interior bearing walls. It has to be quite clear as to the vertical relationship of upstairs interior walls to their downstairs supporters. If they are not right atop one another, we must know that now, before we seriously consider moving or even amending either floor's. |
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The AG has put down his tools for the time being, until there's a clear direction to this project.
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The clear direction to this project turned out to be heading away from it. Between fuzzy measurements and a flattish bank account, there was no where to go but back home.
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