Planning vs. Design – What’s the Difference?

The terms ‘planning’ and ‘design’ are often used interchangebly when producing drawings for a new house. However, each term refers to something different in the overall process of designing your new home.

Planning – Figuring Out What Goes Where

Planning is the first step of designing your new home. In its simplest term, planning is the process by which you determine where on your property you want your home and then where each room will go.

In order to accomplish this effectivelyyou need to figure out what you need and what you want. Next, create a simple diagram of each room based on the furniture that goes into each room in, allowing you to determine the target size for each room. Then, you should study your property to find out the best spot to place your home. Once you’ve completed those steps you can then create diagramatic plans of where the rooms could go in relation to each other.

Determining What You Need

The next thing to do is determine what you need. This involves understanding what rooms you want, the activities for each room, and the furniture, cabinetry, and fixutures (sinks, tubs, showers, etc.) you want in each room.

See our article “Four Steps To Take Before You Design – Step 1: Determine What You Need” for more information.

Knowing What You Want

Once you’ve analyzed your site, you need to figure out what you want. This is beyond listing out rooms and their sizes. This involves the intangable aspects of a home, such as how you want your home to ‘feel’, along with tangables such as style of home or materials you like.

See our article “Four Steps To Take Before You Design – Step 2: Determine What You Want” for more information.

Analyzing Your Site

You need to understand the elements of the property you’re building on in order to create an effective plan for your new home. Every property is unique. You should know how big your property is, how it slopes, how good the soils are for building on the property, what existing vegitation (trees, shrubs, etc.) there is, what impediments there might be to building such as rock outcrops or poor soils, how the sun and weather impacts the property through the seasons, what utilities are available at the property, and what zoning requirements and limitations apply to the property.

You need to know all of the above in order to determine the best location for your house, what’s allowed for the physical size of house you can build (footprint on the property and overall house size), and how tall you can build. You’ll also identify the best views available so that you can place rooms accordingly.

Read our article “Four Steps To Take Before You Design – Step 3: Select Your Property” for more information on analyzing a site, and “Designing a House On a Hill or Sloped Site” for further site analysis information..

Creating Diagrams of Your Rooms

Once you know what you need you should create a simple diagram of each room, drawing your preferred furniture layout in each first in order to determine the size of room you need.

Refer to the following articles for a better understanding of how to create diagrams of your rooms:

• “How to Create Room Layouts for Your House“
• “The Ultimate Guide to Room Sizes and Layouts“
• “Planning Your Living Spaces“
• “Planning Your Dining Spaces“
• “Planning Your Bathroom“

Putting a Plan Together

Once you’ve created and collected the information outlined above, you can start the process of planning. Planning involves figuring out where you want rooms to be. This process won’t involve creating a formal floor plan or even the final floor plan, but rather creating loose studies help you figure out what will become the formal plan.

I use the term ‘loose studies’ because you shouldn’t sweat the details at this point. This will just be a ‘shuffling’ of spaces around until you get what you think is a good starting point for the design of the house.

See the articles in the next section for more information. our article to learn about planning options, and for more information on types of plans, including initial planning studies.

Options for Drawing

When creating options you MUST avoid the most common mistake when starting a plan for your house. NEVER START BY DRAWING ACTUAL FLOOR PLANS. What I mean by this is that the purpose of planning doesn’t involve worrying about things such as exact wall placements, wall thicknesses, actual door and window locations, etc. You’re working on big ideas here, not details.

There are two basic ways you can create these studies: draw by hand and draw using a computer. Both have advantages and disadvantages. See the following articles for more information:

• “Planning With Paper vs. Computer. Which is Best?“
• “Learn How to Draw Plans by Hand“
• “How Plans are Measured“
• “How to Draw Your Floor Plan Using Word“

Drawing by hand is the simplest and most straightforward method, as you don’t need to invest in drawing programs. Also, in this phase, fancy drawing isn’t needed.

Most people think they need to start drawing by computer, but I don’t recommend that at this stage. You need to keep ideas big and freeflowing at this stage. Computer drawing programs for houses instills a sense of detail – getting things drawn “exact”. This short circuits the ability to keep ideas loose and to be open to different options, which is what’s needed at this stage.

Design – Making Things Real

‘Design’, as opposed to planning, is the process of making the planning concept “real”. Design involves creating actual floor plans, designing the house as a volume that’ll actually get built, and deciding on the materials, finishes, and the systems that go into the house.

Refining Your Plans

Once you’ve decided on your planning concept you’ll begin to draw an actual floor plan. This is where you’ll start to get specific. Walls will be drawn to a thickness, dimensions will get established, doors and windows will get placed, and cabinetry and plumbing fixtures will be set.

Creating this plan won’t happen in one pass, but instead will be refined in several passes as you think about things in greater detail and coordinate with other aspects of the design.

Working In the 3rd Dimension

In conjunction with the development of your floor plan, you’ll begin to create the “third dimension” of your home. This is where you’ll create the overall form of the house in terms of width, depth, and height. This is where you’ll decide how tall walls will be and what the roof form will be. You’ll go back and forth between creating the third dimension and refining the plan as you refine your ideas.

Materials and Finishes

To complete design you’ll need to decide on the materials and finishes of the inside and outside and integrate those into the drawings for the house. You’ll also need to integrate the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems (MEP systems) into the design.

Note: All drawings and photos by Cayl Hollis unless noted otherwise.