This article focuses on the final project of a course, which involves creating a floor plan for a Habitat for Humanity House, originally designed by the course founder's architecture firm. Participants will utilize multiple layers in AutoCAD, work through a project from start to finish, and incorporate blocks completed earlier in the course, offering a comprehensive learning experience.
Key Insights
- The final course project is the creation of a floor plan for a Habitat for Humanity house, a practical application of the skills acquired throughout the course. It involves designing a 20 feet by 24 feet rectangular building with four rooms, including a family room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.
- Participants will employ multiple layers in AutoCAD while working on the project. They will incorporate blocks like kitchen and bath fixtures and door and window symbols completed earlier in the course into the floor plan.
- The process of creating the floor plan starts with the bounding box, defining the largest dimensions. The building's design begins with the exterior wall, followed by dividing walls and finally door and window openings, adhering to the principle of working outside to inside and largest to smallest.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
We are about to begin our final project for this course, which is the Habitat for Humanity house. This house was originally designed by our founder’s architecture firm and has been built in the real-world.
While this project is quite small, it will allow us to explore multiple layers in AutoCAD and work through a floor plan project from start to finish. You will notice that we will bring in many of the blocks we completed in earlier parts of this course, including the kitchen and bath fixtures and the door and window symbols. Let’s take a minute to examine what’s on our floor plan, and then we’ll discuss how we want to approach the design process.
You can see that this building is 20 feet by 24 feet and fully rectangular in shape. There are four rooms: a bathroom, a family room, and two bedrooms. This interesting shape you see at the top is actually two closets, where there would be a datum or header above a closet door here and here.
Additionally, the family room includes a small kitchenette on the left, and the bathroom, which has the shower stall and toilet, has the bathroom sink on the outside, making this section appear as a small hallway or mudroom. The floor plan is annotated using dimension strings, specifically continuous dimension strings, which you’ll see here and on all sides of the drawing. It is also annotated with our door and window symbols, which we need to finish using attributes, and we will do that before the end of the course.
Now, let’s talk about the workflow for getting to this point in a drawing. Where do we start? The first place to start is always the bounding box. What are our largest dimensions, and where will we work from and to? We always work from outside to inside and from largest to smallest.
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Here, we’ll start with a rectangle. Again, this is 24 feet by 20 feet, and our zero-zero point will be in the bottom-left corner. That way, it’s positive, positive for all our geometry.
Additionally, you might consider trying to draw this specific wall shape. That would be very challenging. Instead, it’s better to draw the large gestures—first, the entire exterior wall, then a dividing wall, the remaining walls, including the bathroom, and finally, add the door and window openings.
If you think about it, this building consists of walls that are only punctured by doors and windows. These doors and windows are not full-height objects but rather small openings in an overall wall. We will also discuss the layers required for this project and build those in the next video.
Finally, this project is placed on an 8.5 × 11 title block, which you will see to the right of the screen. This title block is provided in your course datasets and will not be created in this course. However, we will be able to fill out the attributes, including adding your name and completion date, so you can have a personalized printed PDF at the end of the course.
For reference, while you work through this project, please use the floor plan PDF provided in the PDF handouts folder of your file downloads. I look forward to completing this project with you by the end of the course and to seeing all your PDFs in the final submission. Let’s get started.
