House Plans Changed

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that earlier we had posted plans for the "big, concrete" house...

Well, this isn't that. We had worked on a set of plans for the small wooden Mennonite house. We even built a model of it. It's not much to look at - the hip roof is built out of scrap foam-core so we could save some sheets for future models (good thing too - we used 'em).

First Mennonite House Model - With Roof On

This model was built to 1/4-inch scale, that is, 1/4-inch equals one-foot in real life. This scale doesn't leave much for you to work with. It was OK for the initial glimpse, but wasn't really suitable for true "doll-housing" as Dianna likes to call it. Really getting down and scoping things out through the windows, etc.

First Mennonite House Model - With Roof Off, Showing Interior

Using that first model, we spent a lot of time looking at it, at other plans on the Internet, and at a couple of books loaned to us by Canadian Bob. And, after much discussion drawing, sketching, scribbling, gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands, and generally peeing and moaning, we've come up with a new design.

I have to be truthful - it was Dianna who came up with the idea. I took her sketch and did the below drawing, and both of us worked on the model.

The software we used for this project is some new software we downloaded, called "SmartDraw 2007" (http://www.smartdraw.com). It's not cheap (around $200 - don't tell Dianna), but it's extremely easy to use and produces very nice drawings. It's great for all sorts of other things as well, such as wiring diagrams, certificates, etc.

Mennonite House Plan Revision

Here's the model of the revised plans we built - took us about two days to do it. It's built to 1/2-inch scale.

1/2" Scale Model of the House

For those that have known us for a while, we had built a similar model before, for the house we built on Rogers in Olympia (Sandy and Owen's house now). It really came in handy for us and the contractor to be able to show what we wanted, to view how things would look through windows, traffic flow, etc. It's also a lot of fun to build. Now all we have to do is get the real McCoy built.