Designing Your Tiny House

When sketching houses, I just draw whatever I'm thinking about, but when designing houses, I usually start with a floor plan. It's important to know where you're going to put things and that they will fit before you spend a lot of time drawing or building them in. My original floor plan looks like this:

A floor plan allows you to see traffic paths between spaces, to play with the location of rooms and furniture, and to notice how certain spaces may interact with each other. Tiny houses in particular require a well thought-out floor plan. You need to know where you'll be spending time, what you require of those spaces, and the simplest, most practical way to organize them. If you are unsure of how to begin, a bubble chart is a great place to start.

Determine your activities and give a name to the space in which you'd like to do them. You'll probably sleep in a bed for example. Allow the size of each bubble to reflect the amount of time you expect to spend there relative to the other bubbles. Then rearrange the bubbles so that activities you often switch between are close together. You can also make choices about spaces you'd like removed from sight; for example, if you want to have a children's play area, you can decide if you want it to be under your nose or out of your hair. In my plan, I know I want food and family time to be close together and easy to access. I've put all the social space out front. I put the bathroom and Royce's office under the loft because they are private spaces and should be removed from the notice and distraction of the social spaces. There's also a space back there for the batteries and any other work stuff that doesn't need constant attention. The bubble chart allows you to get a feel for how your house should flow. Then you can fill in the details with a floor plan. Then if you want to you can build up the flow plan in SketchUp to see how the house might actually look! Having a plan is so important. Having the image in mind is so motivating!