A good floor plan will let you preview your future home.
When moving into a new house, you have the unique chance to create the home of your dreams. The place may not be as spacious and luxurious as you have imagined it would be, but you are at liberty to unleash your creativity and design the artistic refuge you have always wanted or the cozy charming dwelling you have fancied since you were a small child. Regardless of the type and the size of your future home, you can arrange it in a manner that best reflects your personality, guarantees maximum comfort and adds charm and elegance to your surroundings. All you need in order to achieve the rich and delightful vibe you have always envisaged for your family nest is a touch of imagination and strategic planning.
In fact, creating an appropriate and stylish floor plan design that corresponds to your taste and your budget will do the trick for you. What is more, it will significantly speed up the relocation process and will save you a lot of troubles when moving your larger furniture pieces into your new home.
In general, moving house is quite a stressful, difficult, and tedious event, but planning your new place and making it feel like home is probably the most enjoyable and inspiring aspect of moving. A good floor plan should be the first step in your strategy for creating a dream home.
Why You Should Create a Floor Plan Before You Move
Here is an artistic floor plan representation. Well, it may have been created for different purposes, but it still works great!
Coming up with an accurate floor plan will help you avoid many troublesome situations, wrong choices and simple mistakes when moving. Hasty decisions when your movers are already at the door of your new home can result in complete havoc – precious time will be lost and unexpected problems are bound to arise. So, take the time to carefully plan and picture your living space in advance.
You will know what furniture to move. There is no point in spending a lot of money and making the efforts to move a heavy furniture piece only to find out that it will by no means fit through the doors of your new home, right? Or to realize that there is not enough space for it in its designated room, or that it simply doesn’t match the surroundings at all. If you have a detailed floor plan of your future place, you will be able to determine which old furniture pieces are worth taking with you – be it for practical, aesthetic or sentimental reasons. You can donate the items you will use no longer or you can even make some profit out of them if you decide to organize a moving sale or sell them online;
You will know what to buy. Purchasing a large modern vanity with a marble top only to find out that your new bathroom is just two inches too narrow to accommodate it will be quite a disappointment indeed. The layout of your kitchen may be appropriate for wall cabinets, not ground ones, and your new bedroom may be in dire need of a dressing table. Measuring the space and assessing the layout of your future home will help you decide what new furniture pieces you need to buy and what their dimensions should be;
You will know where each item will fit best. If you create a floor plan considering the exact sizes and shapes of your furniture, you will be able to identify the open areas throughout your place and to decide how to arrange the pieces, so that you can provide both convenience and adequate free space. To be able to simultaneously guarantee the easy access to your furniture, stylish and unique look and feel of your home, as well as adequate flow of light and enough open space, you will have to devise a smart floor plan well in advance;
Just the way you always envisaged your home.
You will be able to have your large furniture placed exactly where you want it to be. With an accurate floor plan in hand, you will not waste time deciding which pieces go where or moving them around several times – you will simply show your movers the places where your household items belong. You can even handle the moving crew a copy of your design and have them arrange everything to your liking. Easy as that.
The entire moving process will be much more efficient when you have brought only what fits in your new home and have already pictured your home design – you will be able to clearly instruct your movers and have all your larger pieces installed directly on their most suitable places.
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You will have to unleash your inner designer to create a reliable floor plan, especially if you want to fit your old furniture into your new home.
Measure Everything
Before engaging into a 3D home design game that many online tools offer for free nowadays, honor the old school – get hold of graph paper, thin cardboard, pencils and a ruler. You will soon be convinced that the proven classic method of charting a floor plan is very convenient and extremely useful. So, visit your future home armed with the king of measuring tools – just a measuring tape, that is – and get down to work!
Measure your available space. First things first – measure the width and the length of every room in your future residence. Take all your measurements against the walls and as near the floor as possible for maximum accuracy and mark down the numbers immediately. Then, you are recommended to draw the size of each room (and its precise shape, of course) on graph paper to scale – it usually works best when you represent one foot with two squares on the graph paper. Use a ruler when you draw the lines and mark the exact place and size of doorways and windows (always measure from the outer edges of the frames).
Will you be able to create a map of your dream house?
This is the moment to decide once and for all which room will be your bedroom, where the nursery will be, which space is most appropriate for a living room or a spare guest room, etc. The bathroom and the kitchen, as well as the storage spaces, are usually obvious, but if you intend to create an open floor plan or to construct new partition walls, you can merge two rooms in one larger space, or divide a spacious area into two smaller rooms, etc. Now is the moment to decide which floor plan will best fit your lifestyle!
Measure the location of electric outlets, heating vents, ceiling lightings and other installations that are difficult to move. Mark their exact position on your graph sketch to know where to place items that need electrical supply, specific light, etc.
Measure your furniture. Measure your furniture as precisely as possible and decide which ones you want to move into your new home and whether they will fit in (remember that you can partially disassemble some items to squeeze them easily through the doors). Draw their corresponding shapes on separate pieces of paper, or even better – on colored cardboard, because it will allow you to have sturdier furniture models while different colors for different items will make your floor plan very clear and perspicacious. Use the same scale you did when drawing the rooms and label each piece.
Copy the layout sketch several times. When you cut each furniture template and spread the layout sketches of your rooms in front of you, you are ready to enjoy your positioning game. Just make sure to have plenty of copies of your floor plan and colored furniture paper models before you begin.
Once you know the accurate dimensions of your living space and your larger furniture, all you need to achieve designer perfection is careful planning.
Plan Carefully
Turn the available living space into a safe, comfortable and fashionable home.
Of course, you can always rearrange furniture later on or replace some older pieces with new fashionable items, but a good floor plan before you move in and stuff the space with a variety of smaller and larger objects, some of which are delicate and fragile, will save you both time and nerves. So, before making any final decisions, imagine your rooms occupied and identify the areas of “high traffic”, as well as the desired (or required) free space.
You are advised to leave at least 15 inches in front of windows and twice as much in front of doors when placing your furniture in the rooms. Also, remember that you will need to allow for free traffic flow and easy access to every single item, so allocate enough space around each of your belongings. Keep in mind the height of every piece and make sure that nothing blocks the light to every corner of the room, or the free circulation of air – you are recommended to place furniture at about two inches from the walls and not to overload the space with too many items). Place sofas and armchairs at adequate distance from your TV (at least 8 feet away), keep your infant’s cradle out of cold air draught coming from the windows or under the doors and your leather furniture away from direct sunlight or heat sources, etc.
Just take into account every small detail to plan the best position of every single item in your future home.
Chart & Map
As soon as you have created an exact replica of your new surroundings and planned everything in your head, explore thoroughly your home map. You will probably not find a hidden treasure chest but you may come up with an excellent floor plan design. And amidst all the stressful moving preparations, you may have quite a fun at this point.
You can move the furniture piece representations within the floor plan to see where they fit best and how they match one another. Put your tactical skills to a test and arrange everything so that it provides maximum comfort and you fall in love with the interior décor of your new home.
Design & Arrange
You should fall in love with the result of your designer creativity.
Safety and comfort come first but then you can take your time and use your refined taste to add elegance and charm to your stylish home design. Follow fashion trends or rely on classical methods to create the atmosphere that will delight your senses.
Rearrange your furniture models until you nail their perfect position and achieve ultimate harmony. Abide by all the above-described rules to make everything in your home as convenient as possible and think of upgrades and tasteful decorations to impart beauty and appeal to your surroundings. Simple ideas, such as impressive curtains, colorful rugs, modernistic light fixtures, enchanting paintings, etc. will make a big difference and your floor plan will help you design and “preview” every single detail.
Tools to Create a Floor Plan for Your New Home
If you are not mathematically inclined and charting the rooms accurately seems to be quite an intimidating task for you, you can avail of the digital help that modern smart electronic devices offer.
Use a free online tool. You will be able to create an accurate 3D model of your new home and a realistic representation of the furniture you intend to arrange inside.
Search the Internet for appropriate tools to create a floor plan easily and accurately.
Advanced designer tools allow you to enter the actual dimensions of the available space, as well as the sizes of your items, and provide you with a precise preview of what your home will look like. It is more of a game, actually, constructing winding stairwells and demolishing walls, moving furniture pieces around and customizing it all with a single click of the mouse button. You can save a certain layout, then create a completely different design and finally compare the versions to see which one will work better for you. It’s tons of fun!
Use a mobile app. This works similar to the online tools but the process becomes even easier. You can take actual pictures of your actual future home and your actual household items. Then the best apps will automatically draw your floor plan with the correct measurements. All you are left to do is play with different arrangement styles to your heart’s content.
Use photos. Take pictures of your future surroundings and your furniture pieces, print them to the same scale and try out your designer ideas. This approach will take very little of your time but will never be accurate enough – it is only useful to give you a general idea of how to arrange your new home.
How To Avoid Common Floor Plan Mistakes
Creating an appropriate floor plan can be a real challenge sometimes.
Even if you took the time to prudently create a floor plan before you move, you could end up being bitterly disappointed with reality if commit one of the following common mistakes:
Assuming that a good-looking floor plan will be perfect for your style. Even the most fashionable and creative floor plan may not be appropriate for you if it clashes with your lifestyle. Open floor plans may be trendy and nice to look at but if you enjoy your privacy or prefer to watch a movie in peace while your wife is preparing dinner and your kids are playing tug-of-war, you may find out that smaller partitions are much more comfortable than large open common spaces;
Not allowing free room. Probably the most common type of mistake, especially when downsizing, is trying to fit everything you own in however little space you have available. The furniture may somehow get into the rooms but have you planned sufficient space for the people? What if you want to dance, for example, or to invite people over for a party? Let there be air in your home!
Ignoring safety and convenience. Well, a glass shower enclosure may look magnificent but have you thought how your toddler will manage in it? Say, you opted for a fancy countertop in the kitchen and purchased several tall bar stools to sit on around it. Have you thought how you will feel on these modern seats if your back aches? Consider safety and comfort above fashion!
Welcome any help you can get. You never know – your young child may become an architect or an interior designer some day.
Incorporating modern features that are not practical. Floor to ceiling windows, skylights and other modernistic architectural features may render your home too difficult to maintain or to heat. Be careful when choosing elements you are not used to – they may have a negative impact on your bills and your household chores;
Exceeding your budget. Even the best floor plan will not make you happy if you feel financially strained and have to refund a loan, for example;
Considering your design final. You can always rearrange items or change whatever you don’t like, nothing is final. Only it is much more difficult to move bulky pieces around when all your possessions are at their designated spots.
Keeping all this in mind, may you create a masterpiece floor plan design, arrange yourself a heavenly home on Earth and perform a successful move!
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