Present Needs
Floor Plan programming is the beginning process to designing your home. It is where you sit down and specify the various rooms that you wish to have, the number of people that will live in the home and the capacity of the various rooms and their essential functions.
For instance, if you think about your master bathroom, and both of you work, it’s essential function is to provide enough space and facilities so that you and your spouse can both get ready for work at the same time. Continuing on this path, if you have 3 very young children all within a year of each other, you had better certainly provide a bathtub for all to be bathed in at once now, but you had better allow for additional facilities for the time when they mature and have to all go to school at the same time and have to all get ready at the same time (hint jack & Jill bath, separate tub area 2 sinks). See this page for more advice on decorating a bathroom.
Future Needs
If you do not sit and do this planning before hand you may very well design a house that will suit your needs today, but fail to do so five years from now, requiring either a new home or a major remodel. It will be less costly for you to plan this functionality and facility requirement in advance.
Even if you think your budget will not allow for all the possible contingencies, it is best to proceed in this manner to really focus your priorities to ensure you have designed a home you can live with.
This planning should occur before you engage a designer or Architect to produce the actual floorplan. They will be charging for their time to make revisions, so having a program that was well thought out and discussed in advance will save you money at every step of the way. The most costly thing to impact your project will be changes so proper planning from the start will go along way towards maximizing your dollars.
Once you have committed to a plan, stick to it. At the very least, make your second step be the construction of a budget. More about that next.
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Designing Your Home
Before beginning the process of designing your home, you need to do some upfront visioning about the type of home you want, the budget that you are comfortable spending, and the program requirements that the home has to meet.
Program Requirements In Home Design
The program requirements that your home must meet are the functional needs that your will require. It is important to think about these in detail at the beginning of the process to help you keep focused throughout the process. The reason for doing this early on is that you will have less of a chance of being distracted into decisions that will, in the end, not meet a basic program requirement. This is especially important to do before beginning the process of drawing the Architectural plans.
Whether you buy an off-the-rack set of plans or opt to have an Architect design your home from scratch, to some degree that will involve paying someone to produce the drawings from scratch or modifying an existing plan to conform to your program requirements. Time spent in planning on the front will reduce the time to accommodate your changes/requirements in the plan and that translates to money saved.
Detailed Functions
Your program requirements begins with the number of people that will live in the home (present and future), the facilities therein that will be required to service those people and the broad outline features that you desire in your home. It is alright to load up on features, but a more useful method of doing this is to do a matrix of features with a priority assigned (1-5) you assign to that feature.
Functional Space Requirements
Include the size of the kitchen, number of full bathrooms the number of 1/2 or 3/4 baths, any powder rooms, media rooms, family rooms, number of bedrooms, number of sinks in the bathrooms, number of showers occurring at the same time, etc.
Design Features
Include items that will enhance your enjoyment of the house, the comfort and usability and the level of customization. This can extend to items such as:
- Home Theater Systems
- Home Automation Systems
- Tankless Water Heaters
- Multiple Dishwashers
- Alarm Systems
- Heat Pumps
Once you have developed both a functional requirement and a features matrix, you can start the process of thinking about the budget and budgeting for these specific features so that you can start to relate them to the overall budget.
The Value of Bubble Diagrams
Bubble diagrams are a useful tool in the beginning stages of designing your home. Before you can begin defining the spaces with walls on the floor plan,you need to understand the relationships between the spaces as you picture them in your mind.
Architects begin with a bubble diagram. The bubbles represent interior spaces and their importance and relationship to each other. You can do simple ones with your Open Office Draw tool (free download) or the Microsoft Paint program on your Windows computer. These will be easier to change and manipulate, but you can do them with plain old pencil and paper also. You can also do them by hand.
Defining Relationships Between Spaces
Larger bubbles mean larger rooms, overlapping bubbles are spaces that are accessible from another space. You can also let every bubble float free and draw connecting lines to indicate access and flow.
This exercise will save you time and money later if you are drafting your own plans or paying a designer to do them. This process is critical and precedes the others and is reiterative ( it is cheaper to make mistakes here) but it will help you clarify how you want the space to relate and flow and will be very helpful as floor plans are drawn. Go ahead, have fun and draw away.
Once you have completed these exercises, you are ready to start thinking about building plans.
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