After the house is clean, it's time to create a floor plan: a rough draft map of the house. This step is not absolutely necessary, but I always do it.
When you're about to dive into a home renovation project, you're going to be well-served to have some sort of drawing of your house. This is a bit of a stretch, but consider a film scene with military leaders overlooking the battlefield map, planning and strategizing how to achieve the next objective. You're not at war, but you're leading the renovation, and occasionally you and your team will need a bird's eye view of the project together, to plan and strategize like the army bosses, getting in sync with the next phase of your plans.
You can scratch out your home's initial layout on a napkin from a fast-food restaurant or pay someone to come in to create a computer-generated drawing for you. However, I'm suggesting you start somewhere in the middle, with a measuring tape and a sheet of paper. It's going to take a good hour to draw out the house, but it'll be time well spent. Ultimately, you may end up hiring an architect or maybe even an engineer. Nonetheless, having your own drawing, no matter how rudimentary, will only be beneficial, even if you do hire pros to be part of your preliminary team.
There are several reasons why you should sketch out the floor plan. First, it's easier to visualize changes, adjustments, and additions when you have this overall view of how the house is laid out. You simply see things differently and better when you have the floor plan before you on paper. Secondly, this drawing step is an opportunity to get more acquainted with your project house, and you might just discover unused square footage. Or this could be when you start to understand previous additions or renovations, knowledge you’ll certainly want and need that may impact your plans
I always do my initial rough drawing at the project house and then a second, cleaner version when I get home.
For the cleaned up, working drawing, I think grid or graph paper is the way to go. The best thing about using graph paper is that it allows you to make a basic drawing of the house near to scale. The ability to see your project closely scaled makes you more productive and effective as a renovator.
There are a variety of types, but I really like the graph paper with sixty-four or one hundred blocks per square inch. And larger sheets work better than most common 8.5" x 11" pages, but standard sizes will surely work if that’s what you have available.
The biggest reason I prefer using the styles with the smaller squares is because each line can scale out to a four-inch/ten-centimeter area of the house. This may seem a bit much or might come off as something that'll take way too long, but it's easy once you get going. I've plowed through this step too many times to count, and I won't renovate a home without having a drawing to work from.
There are a couple reasons why I prefer and recommend that the drawing of the home is broken down into four-inch increments on the sketch. First: doors, windows, cabinets, counters, closets, appliances, stairs, hallways, rooms, and nearly everything else in the house will be in sizes closely divisible by four. Second: most walls will be accurately represented in a floor plan if they're drawn to be four inches thick. (However, historic homes may have wider walls.)
In lieu of the smaller squared grid, standard graph paper is fine too. A space can scale down to one foot, and when I was drawing up houses as a kid, I had each line on the graph paper represent three feet since most windows and doors were close to this size.
Rather than avoiding this step for lack of graph paper, figure something out and get a close-to-scale drawing you can see and use.
Finally, remember to include fixtures in the bathroom, cabinets, fireplaces, porches, balconies, and anything else on the inside or outside that may impact your plans. This drawing does not need to be elaborate. It simply needs to be clean, organized, easy to read, and most importantly, as accurate as you can make it.
As a footnote, if walls are moved during the project, it'll be good to have the drawing as a record to show what the home looked like before the work started.
For me, Step 9 is just a routine part of how I renovate, and it’s honestly one of my favorite steps.
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The Cottage Before Demolition and After Step 9 |
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