Drawing the First Floor

So...remember how I said in my last post that I would routinely publish posts on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays? Just go ahead and disregard that. I'm quickly realizing that my posts will have to coincide with what I get done during which days of the week. You CAN expect, however, to read at least three posts a week.

I started drawing the first floor a bit later than I expected to, and I haven't gotten as much done as I wanted to... but I started drawing the first floor of my practice house!! This is exciting :D I wonder what I'll feel when I start drawing my real house...

I had to do some more research before I could start drawing. I found this amazing site that gives a step by step process of how to draw the first floor of the house, and it also lists all the tools you'll need to begin designing blueprints/floor plans. These include an architect's scale, a T-Square, mechanical pencils, erasers, a drawing board, compass, symbol template, masking tape, tracing paper, a utility knife, adjustable triangle, and felt tip pens. A LOT more was required to start blueprinting than I thought! Luckily, my dad had the majority of these tools (including a nifty drawing board he used for his dissertation) that I'm able to use, so I don't have to go out and buy them. The only things I should probably are a T-Square, good erasers, and 24"x36" drawing paper. I was so eager to start drawing, I crafted a new size of paper with graph paper from the IHS library. It's working for now, but I'll use not- taped, plain, not sticky paper in the future.

Now for the hands on portion! So while I did research prior to starting, I messed up a little bit...instead of drawing all of the exterior walls and making an actual shape for the bottom of the house, I just went ahead and started drawing rooms. I had to erase all the work I had done and make logical, exterior walls for the house. I could blame this on the fact that I don't have a smart phone and I just wanted to get started, or the fact that I thought I remembered what I read correctly, but the truth is that I was getting a late start on my plan for this week and I went ahead and started drawing without knowing EXACTLY what to do. Even though I proceeded incorrectly, I'm still glad I started doing some hands on work. I'm realizing I will constantly have to be fixing, erasing, and rearranging the spaces in my house, so this was good practice for what is to come.

I'm also realizing that I don't have very good spatial abilities...meaning that it's hard to picture how big a 10'x10' room is. This being said, I'm going to be looking around different rooms and estimating the square footage. If I have a tape measure on me, then I will go ahead and measure it so I can check my guess.

Today will be my first mentor meeting, and I'm going to tell her all of the concerns I've posted on here just now. The ball is really rolling now!