April 12, 2008
Planning for home design
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As we have discussed in our previous post on planning about the kitchen and bathroom and listing about the factors that restrict your options, you also need to make a restrictions list for other rooms as well. Assess how big is your budget for furnishings, decorating and any restructuring work needed on top of that. You will not be able to calculate the last of these costs exactly until you have consulted builders and, if necessary, architects. However, you can take it for granted that it will be more than you expect, so bear this in mind before you set your heart on grand plans.
Be prepared to scale your ideas down and settle for a few cheaper options and improvisations.
How much of the work will you be able to tackle yourself and which jobs will need professional help? And how much upheaval can you cope with? You can not predict with any certainty whether doing the work yourself will be less disruptive than paying someone else. If you are doing it, it will take longer and you will probably hit stressful periods of panic and despair. If it is someone else, you will have to cope with sharing your house with them, so think it through and decide which route will cause you fewer sleepless nights and family rows.
All these factors-the way you live, the space you want, the raw materials you are starting with and the budget you are working within-need to be weighed up and balanced in order to establish just what is possible for you to achieve.
April 6, 2008
Planning for home design
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Some of the decisions will make themselves for you without much difficulty; others need more thinking though. The key choices are whether or not you need to radically rethink the kitchen and bathroom. These are the rooms where plumbing, electricity and construction will be most labour-intensive and expensive, so they should become priorities if you want to make major changes.
First, are they where you want them? Does the position make sense? Is the bathroom close to the rooms that you are planning to use as bedrooms? Is the kitchen within easy reach of your dining area? Now think about their size. Is the bathroom too small? Would you rather convert one of the bedrooms into a decent-sized bathrooms and use the existing one as a utility room? Or is it unnecessarily large? Would you prefer to swap the luxurious bath for a smaller shower room and use the wasted space to create a useful office area?
Now make a list of all those factors that are likely to restrict what you can do and what you cannot do. How big is your budget for kitchen fittings and bathroom set up? Before starting with the construction work for these two rooms, you need to have a fair idea about them keeping your budget and space in mind. This will avoid in delays and future changes for their locations.
March 30, 2008
Planning for home design
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Having established what you need and how much space is available, compare the two to assess how closely they coincide and what adjustments are needed to balance them. You should distinguish between your genuine needs and more superficial wants, and try making a few sacrifices to make the most effective use of space that you have.
Make a list of activities and items that you want to make space for-cooking, eating, entertaining, office work, creative work, relaxing, playing games, playing musical instruments, exercising. Now, divide this list into two: ‘a must have’ list for the absolute essentials and ‘a would like’ list for the things you want space for if at all possible. This may seem obvious, but it is very subjective process and will throw up surprising variations from one person to another. You are the only one who knows whether or not you can live without your piano or multigym, and how many people you need to fit regularly round your dining table. Be sure to consult all members of the household to get their views, too.
If you cannot decide which list a particular item belongs in, give it a mark out of five, where five equals maximum need. Relegate anything scoring three or less to the wants list and use as reserves to be slotted in if there is room later.
March 27, 2008
Planning for home design
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Get to know the building thoroughly before you make any major design decisions. Ask yourself these questions:
1. Which direction does it face?
2. Which rooms face the road/overlook the garden/have other views?
3. Which rooms get most light at which times of the day?
4. Which rooms are the quietest?
5. Which rooms have the most wall and floor space?
6. Which rooms have the highest ceilings?
7. Do any rooms lead to one another?
8. Are there any wasted corners or unusable spaces?
9. Are there any doors that open awkwardly?
10. Are there any narrow corridors causing obstructions?
11. Are there any doorways or corners that make furniture access unnecessarily difficult?
12. Which walls are structurally supporting and which are partitions?
Knowing the building based upon above mentioned points will give you a fair idea about where to start and what to start. You can choose the well lit rooms for day time purposes, and the rooms along the roadside can be converted into lobbies or a store if the level of noise is higher in that room. Accordingly you can keep or remove partitions to make more room for siting or joining two rooms that share a common purpose.
March 16, 2008
Planning for home design
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The important thing to establish at this stage is to establish exactly what room you have got to play with so that you can make the most of its potential. Do not be disheartened by the apparent lack of space: Knowing your boundaries is the first step towards being able to work constructively within them. With a house or apartment, you need to be able to imagine the outline clearly before you can work out exactly how to use the space within it and start building up your own picture of colors and furnishings.
It is also important to bear in mind that having too much space can be problematic as having too little. Deciding how to furnish a cavernous warehouse is daunting because you don’t know where to start. Having a clearly defined space from the outset will help you to make initial design decisions by reducing the options so that you have fewer choices to make.
Try to forget the existing furnishings and instead look for the potential of the space. Do not be put off by unsympathetic wall colors and shabby carpets, and learn to distinguish between permanent fixtures and things that can be changed. Built-in storage is useful, but can be removed if it is not needed, and it may be much more effective somewhere else instead.
March 12, 2008
Planning for home design
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Every building is different. Its shape, size, age and architecture give it a distinctive character that needs to be taken into account when you are planning how to use it.
Give yourself time to get to know your home before you start imposing your design plans on it. This usually means waiting for a few weeks after you move in (or preferably a couple of months) while you feel your way around.
Establish which rooms feel most comfortable at different times of day-which are the lightest, which are the quietest, which have the best views and which are overlooked? Trust your instincts and take note of which spaces you tend to avoid and which you gravitate towards. Consider how you can make the most of your preferred areas, and think about the other parts that need to be rearranged in order to create more usable space, perhaps by moving doorways or knocking rooms through into one another.