"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.