Contents
-Project Introduction
-Interview & Sketches
-Requirements
-Construction Drawings
-Summary
-Interview & Sketches
-Requirements
-Construction Drawings
-Summary
Project Introduction
In this project, I will be designing an affordable home for someone in need that will be placed in Noblesville, Indiana. I am designing a house for Ron Cascio, and his wife and son. Some of the main needs include two bedrooms, an open living area, a utility room, kitchen, dining room, and deck. The goal of this project is to learn about real-world methods of designing a practical house, as well as to practice following rules and codes throughout the design.
Client Interview
The client that I chose to interview for the Habitat for Humanity house is Ron Cascio. The house must be built according to the Habitat rules, so I made sure that Ron knew this before asking him some questions. He would have preferred a bigger home with more than one bathroom, but that would not be feasible in the scenario. Ron is an older man in his sixties, his wife is in her fifties, and his son is a teenager; therefore, the house will have two bedrooms. Ron enjoys gardening and riding his bike for exercise, as well as watching television. He would like to have a traditional-style house with a deck and he wants the house to be as sustainable as possible. He would like to have a wood-burning fireplace for the winter, however this will most likely not happen. Ron wants the house to be oriented towards the sun with the windows allowing for natural light to enter the house throughout the day.
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Bubble Sketches
These are my two ideas for a future floor plan, in the form of bubble diagrams. My client preferred the one on the left.
Quick Sketch
For the floor plan sketch, I ended up having to move a few things around because of the narrow shape of the house and the single bathroom. This sketch is drawn to scale with one block representing 4 square feet and a total of 864 square foot plan (24 feet wide and 36 feet long).
I made revisions from my bubble diagram to my final design. At first, I did not realize how small the house would be when I made the dimensions divisible by four, so it would be tough to squeeze the dining room between the kitchen and bedroom. I moved the dining room to provide more room for the kitchen, and then I made the floor plan even more open than I had originally planned to conserve more space. On Revit, the bathroom is smaller than 10' x 9' because it did not need to be that large.
Requirements
I began by learning about the various requirements by taking notes on them and reading handouts. We learned about the basic residential code requirements, habitat for humanity guidelines, and universal design principles.
Guidelines Followed: (Revisions)
Habitat for Humanity |
Residential Code Requirements |
Universal Design |
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Construction Drawings
Sheet A10 is the site plan for the house, which includes the house in its prospective location, in Noblesville, Indiana, as well as other added site features such as landscaping (trees and bushes) and the driveway.
Sheet A70 is the outdoor rendering of the house on the site.
Sheet A20 shows the floor plan with some furniture added in a few rooms and the 3D view.
Sheet A30 displays the four elevation views of the house.
Sheet A60 displays an interior rendering of the fully finished kitchen and part of the dining room as well with natural lighting and a light placed behind the camera.
Sheet A40 shows the floor plan fully dimensioned, and the wall section annotated.
Sheet A50 shows the various rooms tagged, as well as windows and doors, with their corresponding schedules.
Summary
The Habitat for Humanity project was a great way to learn about many different aspects to building a house with a real-world application. We were able to learn about different systems that go into building a house and then add them to our own house, and perform calculations that professionals would use. I started by interviewing my dad, who knows a lot about designing and building houses, so it was good to get his input. Before we even learned about it in class, he was telling me where to put certain types of trees on the site and where to put most of the windows, in order to maximize natural heating and cooling and minimize the need for electricity. My dad did want a deck, and maybe even a little deck on the back, as well as a woodstove, and I wish that I had enough time to add these things; I think that they would have made the house look better and less like a box. I also wasn’t able to add furniture to all of the rooms like I wanted to, but that’s partly because Revit City was slow, and I was a perfectionist with my kitchen furnishing. The house was a little small for the liking of both me and my dad, but that’s due to the Habitat codes. The guidelines for Habitat for Humanity were fairly easy to meet, the hardest being the accessibility section. A two-bedroom house is pretty small, and the hallways must be at least 42 inches wide for wheelchairs, so I decided that a design without hallways would conserve the most space. Without hallways, and with a house so small, it’s hard to have 3-foot wide doors, and at first my doors were too small and I didn’t realize, so that had to be fixed. With two bedrooms, there is only one bathroom permitted, and the accessibility standards for bathrooms are extremely strict, so I tried to make my single bathroom pretty big, and I’m still not sure if I actually had a 5-ft diameter open area. The general residential code requirements were far less strict than the Habitat guidelines, and I believe that my house met all of the rules that applied. I designed my rooms based on the minimum room areas in the requirements, knowing that the house was small and therefore would most likely run into problems in that range. The house was not technically disability-friendly because there was no wheelchair ramp, but it seems that the principles of universal design apply more to commercial structures. If I had more time to work on the house, I probably would add a ramp, as well as a front porch and back stoop. For the site plan, I added a lot of conifers on the north and northwest side and deciduous trees on the south, just as my dad had suggested and as we learned in class. The abundance of trees in the north will eventually act as a small forest, protecting the house from wind as well as sound, and the large trees in the south will provide shade for the windows in the summer. My driveway was originally going to only extend to the alley, but then I learned that it needed to go to a main street, so it ended up being really big. It makes sense to have an entrance from the back of the house, because you want to display the front of your house with your nice garden to the public, not your cars and whatever else you store outside. It was fun to learn how to do all of these new things on Revit, as well as reviewing things that we had done in the past, and I feel better with Revit now, although I can’t say that I won’t forget how to edit the floor boundary for the 500th time… All in all, it was a pretty stressful project, but I learned a lot of skills that will be useful to me in the future.