How to Design a 1,200-Square-Foot Ranch Home

Building a new home allows the homeowner to make all the construction and design decisions. Builders will have set plans from which home buyers can select, but these plans may not satisfy all potential buyers. Designing your home plan not only allows you complete control of not only what goes inside the home --- it lets you decide every element of the home including square footage and overall style. Designing a home takes a great deal of planning and help from some experts prior to the start of construction.

Graph paper

Instructions

- 1
  Write down a list of areas you find vital to the construction of your new home. These are the "must have" areas within the home. Examples include the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, kitchen and living rooms.
- 2
  Draw a bubble diagram for these rooms --- a basic diagram that makes it easy to see how the rooms flow together without the need to make detailed plans. For example, try to determine the difficulty of transporting groceries from the garage to the kitchen with the current diagram. Draw a number of bubble diagrams to see how the designs work with your needs.
- 3
  Create a basic outline of the home using the must-have list and the bubble diagram to create a basic shape of the home. Begin adding dimensions to the rooms to determine whether the desired room sizes fit within the 1,200-square-foot goal. For example, if a bedroom measures 12 by 10 feet, it takes up 120 square feet in the home. Mark in the door and window locations in each room.
- 4
  Establish the exterior elements of the home, such as what type of roof design the home should have. Draw a sketch based on what you would like the exterior of the home to look like.
- 5
  Use free online tools that create detailed floor plans from websites such as Small Blue Printer or Floor Planner (see the links in the Resources section) to make even more detailed plans.
- 6
  Contact a local architect to review the plans. The architect will review the structure to determine the viability of a design. If you do not have the correct support structures in the home, your design may require additional elements or more expensive materials.
- 7
  Work with the architect to create a finished plan complete with blueprints and elevation plan --- an outside sketch of the home.
- 8
  Contact builders obtain prices quotes based on your designed home.

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