Planning With Paper vs. Computer. Which is Best?

Planning a house involves playing with ideas and organizing spaces, and people wanting to design their house often ask which is best to do this: using paper or a computer

Using paper to plan your house is a simple, effective, and familiar means to play with ideas and organize spaces using items readily available at home. Computers require you to find a program to use and then learning the multitude of commands needed to draw rather than playing with ideas. Playing with ideas is better. Use paper.

You can easily start designing your house if you have paper, a pencil, and a simple ruler in your house. If you can use a pen or pencil to underline a word on a page you have the ability to draw a plan. Let’s take a look at how planning on paper works and then compare that to using a computer.

Using paper to plan your house

Drawing with your hands is natural. Though most of us think we can’t draw, we can easily draw a loose line. Planning a house is not about creating artsy drawings or perfectly straight lines but rather putting down an idea on paper.

The great thing about paper is that its readily available. You’re likely to have some in your house right now, either as a pad of notebook paper or as printer paper. A roll of tracing paper is good to overlay ideas on top of another.

You also need something to draw with. A simple pencil or pen is all you need. A softer pencil is better than a harder one. A pen can be a ballpoint (better on standard paper than tracing paper) or felt-tipped. Felt-tipped is preferred for all paper types and can come in varying sizes for thin to thick lines.

To create your idea as a plan, measuring lines is important. If you have a ruler in your house you can measure lines for a plan. If you don’t have one, go to the store and pick one up.

You now have all the materials you need to plan: paper, pencil or pen, and a ruler. Add a table and you can get started!

In order to create a drawing that’s proportional to the actual sizes you will want for your house you need to select an increment on a standard ruler to represent a foot or meter of length. These proportions are called drawing scales.

The United States and a few other countries use Imperial units of measurement: feet and inches. The rest of the world uses the metric system: Meters, centimeters, and millimeters.

Common plan scales using the Imperial systems are 1/8 inch to represent one foot of length or 1/4 inch to represent one foot of length. This means for every inch on your ruler you get either 8 feet per inch or 4 feet per inch. It is that simple.

The metric system drawing scales are based upon proportion of actual size. Common plan scales are are 1:100 and 1:50. This means that a meter is measured as one centimeter at 1:100 scale and two centimeters at 1:50 scale.

To figure out the size of a plan that can fit on one sheet of paper you just multiply the length and width of the sheet by the plan scale increment. A standard sheet of notebook or printer paper that’s 8.5 inches by 11 inches represents a drawing scale size of 68 feet by 88 feet using 1/8 scale (8 feet times each inch), or 34 feet by 44 feet at 1/4 scale (4 feet times each inch).

Larger sheets of paper are also available such as 11 x 17 printer paper. Even larger sheets are used in architecture, but these would need to be specially ordered. They are not necessary for you to get started

Graph paper is a good option for initial planning because each square or number of squares can represent a foot or meter.

Another paper option that is used by architects for initial planning is a roll of see-through tracing paper which is available in either canary or white color. These rolls are typically 12 inches or 18 inches in length and are easily available online. They’re pretty inexpensive for the amount of paper you get.

Most people think floor plans are all about perfectly straight lines. They picture old-school architects using specialized tools to draw plans. Get that idea out of your head.

Early planning is about figuring out how spaces can relate to each other. Loosely drawn plans are best for this. Architects sketch very loose circular of rectangular shapes to figure this out.

Don’t worry about straight lines. Your early plans can be loose blocks for rooms and spaces or squiggly lines for walls. As the plan ideas get more developed the lines will start to become more controlled; however, actual straight lines are not even needed for a fully developed plan idea.

Using computers

There have been a ton of drawing programs created for drawing plans. They often claim that they are “design” programs, as if the computer does all the work. Instead, these drawing programs are nothing more than fancy pencils. Yes they can be great to have but you don’t need them.

I am not saying you shouldn’t use a computer or a drawing program – I have a few myself. They are great to have and can make understanding what spaces will look like simpler when drawing in three dimensions. But they are not necessary, especially at the start.

Drawing lines with a pencil or pen is easy – you already know how to do this. The initial problem with computer drawing programs is that you have to learn how to use them, which takes a lot of time and energy trying to decide what menus and options you need to select in order to do what you want.

Even once you’ve learned how to use a drawing program, computers limit your ability to think about design ideas. You focus most of your time deciding which drawing options you must use to do different things. This technical complexity takes away from the creative thought process you need in the early planning stage.

Because of this, once you start creating lines in a computer program you are thinking rigidly. This means that your mind is not thinking “outside the box”; instead it tells you “this specifically goes here” rather than “I could put it here or there or do something different. The computer restricts your ability to see new possibilities in the design.

The vast number of programs out there can be overwhelming and hard to decide on which one to get. From free online tools to downloadable programs you purchase, there is a wide variety of what they can and can’t do for you.

Many free online tools are pretty simplistic and easy to use, but they are often limited to only creating rooms and simplistic decor – not for designing a house.

More complex programs give varying degrees of capabilities from basic “user-friendly” design programs for a few hundred dollars to complex professional ones costing thousands of dollars. Deciding what to get is overwhelming. Don’t put yourself through that right now.

The best time to get or use a drawing program is after you’ve developed your plan ideas enough to warrant going to a “hard-line” plan, one with straight lines.

Drawing ideas

Drawing initial ideas for your house should remain a loose process that allows your brain to play with ideas and seek out new ideas as you draw.

Never start drawing a plan with perfectly straight walls of very specific width or specific room sizes. Instead, loosely draw spaces, trying different ideas on where rooms and spaces can go.

If you’re still uncomfortable on drawing by hand you can use simple programs such as Word or Adobe Illustrator to create initial studies.

The spaces you play with should be general in size and shape, allowing for you to push and pull and play with proportions and placements. Don’t start drawing rooms of specific sizes and shapes. Keep it loose and let your brain play.

Be sure to create many variations on your design. Each time you create a new design layout your brain will see new possibilities that you can also play with. That is what you want – multiple ideas that can lead you to your dream house.

Summary

Though drawing by computer can seem new and exciting – a “must have” tool – you don’t need one. Let your brain think about ideas and opportunities and let your hands do the drawing on paper.