I’m a busy guy. I’m also a cheapskate; I have to be to support a family this size on one income (and be out of debt, did I mention?). So when I started thinking about designing a new house, and found that it meant either buying and learning house-designing software, or buying a Wintel machine and then buying and learning house-designing software, I said, Pshaw. I’ve spent years designing things in Adobe Illustrator; I can just use that. And use it I did.
I wouldn’t recommend that route to anyone. I didn’t have those third-party plug-ins that make Illustrator a scaled-down CAD imitator (and I still don’t), so the engineers who put together the SIPs from which my house is constructed, and the subcontractors who framed it, had to be a little creative with some of the dimensions. But it was pretty accurate for a guy who’d never designed a whole house before. Let’s see if I have a sample of the plans around here that I can include.
Nope, can’t find any on my flash drive. Well, if I remember I’ll copy them over tonight. I have a church High Council meeting tonight until probably 10 pm, which puts me home at 11, which when one arises at 5 am makes it hard to remember everything.
One advantage of designing one’s own house from scratch (not basing on any plans or software) is that one gets to do anything he can afford–and talk his wife in to. Fortunately we were in it not to build a “dream house” like Barbie would buy, but a house that would save us money both in building and way down the road. So I did a lot of research about new materials to use in construction (which is why I used SIPS*) and for everyday living. My research led me away from solar, which I think is not yet well-suited for an area with fewer than 90 clear days per year. I’ll detail some of the things we did do to save money building as we go forward.
In the meantime I’ll post some pix of our construction, since I can’t wait until tomorrow for that.
Tags: frugality, home design, SIPs