In my last posting we began to develop our lot and think about placing our home on the lot. I ran across the excellent diagrams below [Tedd Benson, The Timber-frame Home, Tuanton Press 1997 2nd edition, pgs 71 & 74] showing how to place a home and its living activities on a lot considering the features of the property -views, trees, sunlight, winds, and land contour. Take a look below and see if it helps you:

Our site had several very nice features. The contour of the land gradually sloped down so we placed the home on the high side of the slope. We faced the full length porch to the south-west because we have great views of the mountains across the valley and of the multi-colored sunsets.

When have you had the privilege to design a living space? Why not collect the insights from your past living spaces. What did you like in the house where you grew-up? What charmed you about the first house you moved in to after your first marriage? Maybe you have done some remodeling on other houses you have lived in. Envision those good things in this new home. The bubbles in the following diagram are a great way show activities going on in your new living space.

There are two ways to visualize what you will do in your dream house. One is to categorize areas such as bedrooms and offices as private, areas like dens or family rooms as semi-private, and kitchens and living rooms as public. Another is to list rooms individually: sun room, study, breakfast nook, study and the like.

Why not brainstorm with those who will live in your new dream house? You can denote these activities in bubbles.

Below shows how to make the bubble representation of activities into a floor plan. Here is a good time to think about traffic patterns in the house. For instance, you do not want to go through private areas to public and semi-public spaces.

Now you start to place conventional exterior and interior walls around your activity blocks as shown below. Is it starting to look familiar?

Develop your floor plan further with inner room partitions, stairs and major fixtures. Don’t forget those windows looking out at those inspirational views. Now it is looking more like a formal floor plan.

Taking an abstract bubble diagram of your dream home and making it into a floor plan sketch is something, I do as an Independent dealer for Real Log Homes. We send the floor plan sketch to the Real Log Homes Design department who will work it up into a large scale architectural floor plan for your review. After your approval of the drawing we will provide you a quote of your custom Real Log Home. After your approval the floor plan will become a full set of architectural construction drawings.

We provide design consulting to all of our log home customers helping them to design their own log home from scratch or to customize standard Real Log Homes floor plans.

Duane Phelps
North Coast Log Homes