During my pre-teen and teenage years, my parents planned and built an addition on our previously quite small home. You might remember seeing the exterior transformation of our house here. I watched them with their graph paper, planning out walls and windows and furniture placement for hours on end. It was a completely new art form to me, and once I’d been given my own pad of graph paper, planning room layouts became my favorite hobby.
Once the addition was finished and I moved into my very own room, I would spend hours measuring walls and window placements and drawing out all the different ways I could arrange my furniture (all 4 or 5 pieces of it – haha!). My graph paper hobby fell by the wayside a bit when I took a drafting class in high school and drafting assignments became higher priority than sketching for fun, but there’s something about seeing a room layout that still gets my wheels turning.
Last week, we showed you a little before and after house tour of Heardmont. Even though I tried to include glimpses into other rooms in the photos I shared, one reader suggested we share a floor plan to make visualizing our layout easier. As soon as I read that suggestion, I knew a layout was exactly what our house tour needed!
This time around, I tried to take advantage of all the advancements in technology that have occurred since I was in high school. Instead of going the graph paper route, I started researching online floor planning tools. First I tried HomeStyler, a tool Sarah from Thrifty Decor Chick suggested. It was free, but I only got this far along before I decided to keep looking for an easier tool.
Next I tried out a different free program called FloorPlanner. This is the tool John and Sherry of Young House Love use to draw their floor plans, which always turn out so nice. I was shooting for something similar to the youngsters’ plans, so maybe that’s why I stuck with FloorPlanner for long enough to come up with this!
The newest addition to our house tour tab: The Heardmont Floor Plan.
I liked the idea of color-coding the rooms by the paint colors currently on our walls, so this is a fairly accurate representation of the color scheme we have going on. You can see our gray entryway and hallway, leading into our blue living room, which flows into the chocolate dining room and tan kitchen. The other half of the house is all bedrooms and bathrooms, with the two smaller bedrooms and guest bath on the lower half and the “master suite” on the upper half.
Hopefully this will help you visualize the layout of our rooms as we show you the changes we make. Of course now that it’s so pretty outside, I can see more happening to the Exterior than to the Interior of our little abode over the next few weeks!
Want to give floor planning a try? I’d definitely recommend FloorPlanner.com, and I’d love to see what you come up with!
Thanks for reading. 🙂
