As-Builts: You're a-door-able

Have you ever added up the number of doors in your house? Me neither - at least not until now.  It took me less than a minute to walk through my house and just add up the number of doors.  Easy enough.

Each room in your house has a door (or maybe just an open doorway), and we want to show these doors on our floor plan.  At this time we don't need to be super careful, we just want to place the door approximately in the right spot in the wall.

Architects draw doors as shown on the plan and there are two parts.
 - There's the flat side, usually shown perpendicular to the wall that it is attached to, which represents the door. 
 - The curve (or arc) represents the sweep of the door swing. When you draw your doors, be sure to draw the doors the way they really open - do they swing open to the inside of the room or the outside of the room?

When you're finished drawing your doors, just count them to be sure you got them all.

As-Builts: Let's Box.

Architecturally speaking, most people live their lives in little boxes.  Living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, and hallways are essentially boxes that are configured together and fill up the space we think of as a house.  If we think of rooms as being just boxes, it's easy to see how these individual boxes add up to develop the complete floor plan.

All we want to do today is locate the walls within your house. In my example, the living room is the biggest room, the bedrooms are smaller, the kitchen is even smaller and so forth. It doesn't have to be exact, all we want to do at this point is locate the walls that separate the rooms. If you can approximate the size of the rooms, that's great, but you don't have to.

But wait - maybe you're wondering if this is true - is the biggest room really the living room? Good catch. You'll see next time.

Now, what about your walls?

As-Builts: Measuring the Exterior

Fall is in the air and the-end-of-summer rains have started in Seattle - better get some quick measurements before the rain really sets in.

We want to get some overall exterior dimensions before we focus on the interior, which is where we will spend most of our as-built drawing time.  In this case, the shape of the house is just a rectangle so I just jotted down the length and width measurements. If the shape was different - say an "L" shape, we should dimension the length and width of each section of the space.

By the way, I recommend measuring any structures that are attached to the house, such as a garage or carport. The information just might come in handy later.

Your homework assignment is to go outside and measure the length and width of your house, and add this information to your as-built sketch.

As-Builts: Square One

As-builts are so handy - I think everyone should have one.  Whether you rent or own, sooner or later you will probably want to buy furniture or a rug or something and it's so smart to have information about the space you want to put said proposed stuff into.   These drawings are a wonderful reference - I mean really, don't you wish you had a set of drawings for your house right now?  Creating your own set is simple and you will learn all about your house.  All you need to start is a note pad, something to write with, a tape measure and a friend to hold the other end of the tape.

The first thing architects do when they start a project is develop an as-built.  To do this they visit the site, sketch, take careful measurements, and snap a lot of photos.  Architects do this because they need to know what they are starting with before they start designing anything - whether the project is new construction or a remodel.

Architectural drawings can look overwhelming if you aren't familiar with reading them, so I'll demonstrate how to develop a set of as-builts, with sort of a Sunday paper comic approach so every step will be easy to follow.  The graphic illustrates the first step - draw the basic shape of your existing house on a sheet of paper.  (I like to use grid paper but letter or legal paper is fine too.)  Our sample project will be a rectangle - based on the project in my book Drawing Home, One Story Additions.

Your homework assignment is to draw the shape your house. If you just can't figure out the shape of your house, here's a hint: go to Google Earth, type in your address to see the shape of your house from a few hundred feet up. Draw that.