It’s been hard work cleaning out the house and preparing for this house remodel. We’re to the point that we can start thinking about design! Woo-Hoo!

Cabinets, outlets, bathrooms, OH MY! So many things we’ll need to think about.

I watched an episode of Dr. Oz last week. He talked about decision-making exhaustion. The number of decisions we make throughout the day correlate to feelings of exhaustion by the end of the day. With the number of decisions we’ll need to be making on this house remodel, there will definitely be some feelings of exhaustion! HA!

Chris and I tend to be DIYers. (Remember this post!) So when we decided to begin the design process, we wanted to do it on our own. This house has some “unique” features but we could figure out a design for it, right? It’s just a 40′ by 60′ rectangle with an 18′ by 36′ rectangle hooked on to the side. It can’t be too hard to lay out a few walls.

We drew and talked. Then we talked and drew. We brainstormed our favorite ideas, mapped them out on graph paper, and tried to visualize what the space would look like. Here are our very first drawings.

First Floor

 

Basement

Visualizing a space can be difficult!

We also needed a way to visualize the exterior. The house was a big hot mess surrounded by trees. We wanted to be able to “see” our exterior design. Our main dilemma, for both interior and exterior, was the odd 18′ x 36′ rectangle stuck to the side of the house. Plus, remember, there’s basement under all this!

Our simple graph paper drawings just weren’t going to cut it. There had to be a design program out there that would help us visualize the space and lay out rooms more accurately.

We found one!

We downloaded Live Home 3-D Pro from the Microsoft App Store. There is a learning curve but once you get the basics, it’s not too hard to use.

First, Chris drew out the two rectangles that make up the house. We slowly plugged in a few things we knew we wanted. The program was nice but could we really design the whole house and have everything our contractor needs to complete the project? We felt good about our plan. The interior layout seemed to flow nicely as we worked through little tweaks here and there. We struggled with the exterior.

Here are some 2D and 3D pictures of our designs:

Even thought we were feeling good about what we had accomplished, something was still missing. We needed some way to play around with different roof designs and exterior features. One big roof on a 60′ expanse may end up looking odd.  I’m sure the program offers different roof styles. We just weren’t able to figure it out. 🙁

No, Chris did not throw his computer but we both got pretty frustrated!

We needed help.

We needed an architect.

Till next time…