Guidance

Before you design one, find out what real tiny homes are like. Look for homes that fit our limit: 650 sq ft or less. A 2,000 sq ft "small house" teaches you nothing about this project.

Keep your notes in your project notebook, organized by topic. Save the link for every fact so you can find it again.

To design anything well, you have to understand the person who will use it. Your client is the one person (or family) this tiny house is for. Every choice you make later should trace back to something in this profile.

You have two options:

Generate lots of ideas, quickly. These are not final drawings. They are how you find the good layout before you spend hours drawing it properly.

Start with bubble diagrams, then turn your best bubbles into rough floor plan sketches.

A bubble diagram is a map of how the rooms relate — no walls, no measurements. Draw one bubble per space, sized by how much room it needs. Then connect the bubbles that need to be next to each other.

Take your best bubble diagrams and sketch them as rough floor plans. Draw several different layouts. Label every room and the big furniture. Write notes beside each one: what works, what worries you. Then pick a winner and say why.

Keep the size honest. A sketch can be rough, but if it would be 900 sq ft drawn properly, it is not a tiny house sketch.

The floor plan is the most important drawing an architect makes. Picture slicing the whole house horizontally about 4 feet above the floor, lifting the top off, and looking straight down. Everything you cut through — walls, doors, windows — is drawn dark. Everything below the cut — counters, toilets, stairs, furniture — is drawn lighter. Anything above the cut, like a loft, is drawn dashed.

Use the floor plan guide PDF (link at the end of this section) alongside this page. It is a great resource for what a good floor plan looks like and how to draw one.

Houses are usually drawn at 1/4″ = 1′-0″: every foot of house becomes a quarter inch on paper. Past students have also used 3/8″ = 1′-0″ to fill a bigger sheet. Pick one, use it for the whole drawing, and write it in your title block.

A floor plan uses at least three line weights so it reads at a glance. Press hard for walls, medium for things below the cut, light for dimensions. If every line is the same, nobody can tell a wall from a countertop.

A wall is not a single line. Most houses are framed with 2×4 studs, which are actually 3-1/2″ wide. Add 1/2″ drywall on each side and an interior wall is about 4-1/2″ to 5″ thick. Exterior walls carry insulation and siding, so draw them about 6″ to 8″ thick.

At 1/4″ scale, a 6″ exterior wall is about 1/8″ on paper. Draw both faces of every wall, then shade or hatch between the lines to show the framing material.

Architects draw the same things the same way, so any builder can read any plan. Doors are drawn open, with a thin arc showing which way they swing. Door size is written as a small number like 3⁰, meaning 3′-0″ wide.

Dimensions are what make a drawing buildable. Draw every dimension with a ruler, outside the plan where you can, so the inside stays clear. Use two or three strings of dimensions around the outside, from big to small:

Two ways to show a loft. On the main floor plan, draw its edge as a dashed line and label it "LOFT ABOVE." Or draw a separate loft plan, at the same scale, with the stairs in the same place on both sheets. Label stairs "UP" on the lower floor and "DN" on the upper one.

An elevation is a flat, straight-on view of one side of the house. No perspective, no vanishing points. Because nothing is distorted, it shows true heights — which a floor plan can't. It also shows what the outside is made of: siding, roofing, windows, doors.

Name each elevation by the direction it faces — North, South, East, West — or Front, Rear, Left, Right. Write the scale directly under the title. Draw it at the same scale as your floor plan, or one that fits the sheet.

Two parts: one interior elevation, and a design board of samples.

An interior elevation is a straight-on view of one wall inside the house — the kitchen, the living room, a lounge. It shows what a floor plan can't: how high the counters are, where the upper cabinets start, what the backsplash is made of. Mark which wall you drew with an elevation marker on your floor plan, like the circled 1 on the example plan.

The design board is where the room comes alive. Collect picture samples of the actual things you would put in the space: paint colors, wallpaper, flooring, textures, furniture, lights. Arrange them on one page with labels. Every choice should fit your client's style.

A landscape plan is a floor plan of the yard: the property seen from straight above, with the house as a simple outline. It shows where every tree, garden bed, path and patio goes.

Draw it to scale with a ruler, then color it — green for lawn and plants, browns and greys for paving and gravel. Trees are drawn as circles the size of their full-grown canopy. Label each plant with its actual species ("red maple", "boxwood"), and each hard surface with its material ("pea gravel", "brick pavers").

Think about your client. A gardener wants beds and a water source. A retired reader wants a shady spot to sit. Off-grid clients might want a rain garden.

What would it actually cost to build your tiny house? First research what tiny houses cost in general. Then price the specific materials and appliances in your design.

Organize it so someone can read it in a minute: a table, grouped by category, with a total at the bottom. Write down where every price came from.

Zoom out. Design a piece of land with several tiny houses on it — a tiny house village. Draw the whole plot from above, to scale, with its total size dimensioned accurately.

Place the houses so each one gets light, privacy and a way in. Then design what they share: pathways, gardens, a common building, parking, places to play or sit outside.

Build your tiny house in foam board at the same scale as your floor plan. That means you can lay your floor plan down as the base and build the walls right on top of it.

Build exterior walls, interior walls, and the details that make it real: countertops, lofts, stairs. Then make it rich in detail with color-printed patterns and other materials: print wood siding or tile and glue it on, use clear plastic for windows.

You get one piece of foam board. Plan your cuts before you make them. You can buy more if you want to.

A research proposal, not a drawing. Find a real place in Bergen County that could become a tiny home community, and make the case for it.

Have another way to show part of your design? A 3D model in Onshape, a video walkthrough, a perspective rendering, a working mechanism like a fold-down bed? Talk to Mr. Hubbard before you start. You'll agree together on what it has to include.