Small Homes

I have designed a series of small homes ranging from 256 square feet to 768 square feet. These plans are available for purchase at Brown County Shops for $9.95 each. The plans are in the computer format of Adobe *.pdf and will be sent to you through email so make sure I have your correct address. The plans are on 24" x 36" sheets and 3 sheets are in each plan. The computer files can be taken to any printing business, like Office Max for example, for full size printing or can be printed at a reduced size from your own printer.

The 256 square foot model is named the "Puritan" and I have developed 4 exterior elevations for it (A, B, C and D) and the floor plans for each is the same except for front porch variations.

Designing these small homes was different than any of the previous larger homes I have designed. I had to rethink what it means to "live" in a home and what is required at a bare minimal. Quite a bit of research, thinking and planning was involved, lot's of trial and error. My goal was to come up with minimal costs while providing the essentials for a comfortable lifestyle. In other words, homes that fit you rather than you fitting the home. All of these homes are easily expanded or adapted and they use standard building materials and construction techniques. All of the building materials can be acquired at a home center like Lowes.  

This is a brochure drawing I created for the Puritan "A" model:

It is 256 square feet and measures 16'-0" x 16'-0" with 8'-0" high walls. It is built on a concrete slab and has 2x4 frame walls with R13 insulation. The roof is constructed with economical trusses with R30 insulation.

The Puritan has a compact bathroom with a shower and toilet, a small window and a storage cabinet mounted on the wall. There is a kitchen area with a single bowl sink, an under counter refrigerator and an under counter washer-dryer. Cooking will be done on an electric hotplate, a microwave oven and a toaster oven. There is plenty of cabinet storage.

There is a split unit, wall mounted air conditioner and a wall mounted tankless water heater.

Along the left wall is 12' long closet and there is an attic access with pull down stairs for addtional storage.

The Puritan lends itself easily to off-grid situations or where people are trying to save expense and maintenance and is readily adaptable for solar and/or wind power.

The Puritan model packs a lot of punch into a minimal footprint and it is unlikely that you will find a more comprehensive house plan anywhere.

Below are views of the interior.

Again, this plan may be purchased at Brown County Shops.

Leaf Day!

We were driving along on Carmel Ridge Road yesterday
and took a few pictures of the autumn scenery, enjoy!



One step beyond.

The 3 sisters, Blondie, Red and Orange U Jealous.

The tunnel effect.

The future's so bright....

Vintage Facelift

Was driving along a country road and came upon this old abandoned house.


Something about the front elevation caught my eye so I took a picture of it.

I inserted the picture into AutoCAD 2006 as a raster image and scaled it up using the width of the front door (36") as my reference scale.

Then I designed a new front elevation for it with a modern look to it.


I extended the front porch out to either side then down both sides to connect to the wings toward the rear of the house. Some of the front of the 2nd floor were renovated to provide a deck over the front porch.

A new tin roof, new lap siding, some decorative trimwork and new life was breathed into this old relic.

"Traffic Patterns & Affordable House Plans" - The necessity that divides.

Hardly anyone ever mentions them.

Nobody ever gives them any consideration, until its too late to do anything about them.

What am I talking about?

Traffic patterns in a floor plan - the places where people normally walk in a house to get from one room to another.

Traffic patterns typically link doorways, hallways, bathrooms, kitchens, closets and sometimes windows.

These are areas that cannot be blocked by furniture placements.

Sometimes traffic patterns are defined and contained by different types of floor covering material that is more able to resist the wear and tear presented by the foot traffic.

For example, a home may have carpet on a majority of the floors but have tile in the high traffic areas like foyers, kitchens, bathrooms and hallways.

If carpet is used in these areas in a few short years the wear and tear is very visible.

While its not possible to eliminate traffic patterns it is possible to keep them to a minimal or arrange them in such a way so as to provide the most amount of usable floor space.

Remember, areas utilized primarily for traffic cannot be used for much of anything else and with square footage costs for new construction being what they are every single foot counts.

So every square foot of traffic area you can eliminate will be one more square foot of space for the owner to use for other purposes.

This is even more important with the smaller homes where the amount of usable space is even more limited.

The traffic pattern in this 1200 square foot living area house plan takes up 252 square feet, a little more than 20% of the total living area of the house, and that doesn't include the areas in the kitchen, bathrooms or laundry room, so you can see how critical it is to take traffic patterns into consideration early on in the design process.

Here's how to take a realistic look at the traffic patterns in any given floor plan.

Find the center of all doors and place a small dot as shown in Step 1 and link all the dots with straight lines.

Then offset the line 18" to either side as shown in Step 2 below.

Now clean it all up and cross hatch it as shown in Step 3.

This will also show you the space left over for furniture placement and you can do a square footage check to see how much space your traffic pattern is taking out of your usable floor plan.

Hopefully this article has demonstrated to you the importance of taking traffic patterns into consideration when designing a floor plan.

Go to www.Linsenbach.com for some interesting floor plans that you can examine regarding traffic patterns and even print out so that you can experiment with the technique I explained in this article.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Don Linsenbach and I've been designing homes since the early 1970's.

On this site I will occasionally present topics that I have found interesting and perhaps you will too.

I won't adhere to any preconceived format or time schedule but will write and post things as they occur to me.

If this is your first time here, Welcome, and I hope your visit is enjoyable.