Design Procedures

Innovative design techniques make the plans unusually easy to read and to print.

This website is intended to promote the construction of compact buildings with efficient floor plans that provide affordable and livable homes. The buildings on this website, and the site itself, were designed by a retired electrical engineer. Engineers believe that form follows function, which explains why the homes are not designed to a traditional style and why the site is highly legible and easy to navigate.

Drafting procedures

The computer-aided-design (CAD) program used was an engineering program. Using a non-architectural program eliminates the constraints imposed by the legacy of architectural design.

For example, it was found that designing on a 3-inch grid is superior to designing on the traditional 4-inch grid. For one thing, kitchen and bathroom cabinet sizes are multiples of 3 inches, so it becomes possible to do a better job of kitchen and bathroom design. And it becomes possible to distinguish 6-inch walls and double 4-inch walls by drawing them two increments wide, and drawing single 4-inch walls one increment wide.

It was also found that the standard symbols used in architectural CAD programs are inadequate. For example, it is not possible to distinguish a wall phone jack from a desk phone jack, because the symbols are the same. Similarly, it is not possible to distinguish an antenna television jack from a cable television jack, or a floor heat register from a ceiling heat register. Furthermore, the standard symbols print badly because they have too much detail. It is not necessary to show faucets on a bathtub or burners on a range. To overcome these problems, I created my own libraries of symbols that provide more information than standard symbols, yet print more clearly.

Printing

Printing of building plans is traditionally done with a plotter, which uses pen and ink to produce an original drawing. Copies are then made from the original, and it is these copies that are provided to the customer.

This procedure has problems. The customer can only guess at how many sets of plans will be needed, but dare not order too few because it is illegal to copy prints without permission. The building department might require letter-size elevations and floor plans as part of the approval process -- the reduced prints would have poor legibility because of the reduction of line thickness. And the prints cannot be modified because the lines cannot be erased.

These problems are circumvented by designing half-size drawings that can be printed with any printer capable of handling letter and legal size paper. These originals need no, or very little, reduction to make letter-size copies. The originals can be enlarged to full size on bond paper, or they can be enlarged on vellum to facilitate erasures.

Website

This website has a retro design, reflecting the aim of the originators of the hypertext markup language (HTML). It was composed with a word processor. Most websites look very different because they were composed with web page design software.

The illustrations were done with Autosketch 9. Illustration editing was done with Microsoft Paint. The elevation illustrations used a systematic array of colors.

A single-celled table on each page centers the page on the display. A cascading style sheet reduces the amount of HTML code required and allows text to be justified. The style sheet also limits text areas to a width of 600 pixels; sets display, page, and text colors; and determines text alignments and fonts.

The JavaScript at the bottom of some pages was provided by Google AdSense.