Wanna Know A Secret?

I have a form of dyslexia. Apparently that happens with spina bifida. Mine doesn't bother me when I read... only when I spell and try to deal with numbers and equations. This sometimes can cause problems when I'm building rooms and furniture.

Kim of flowers and art mentioned a way to plan a mini room setting that she's figured out in her most recent blog post. She's making mock ups of her furniture to see how they fit into a room before she builds. I think it's fantastic!

I shared with her a trick I learned from my engineer mother and I after I posted the comment decided I should share it with everyone.

Measure your existing dollhouse room, or start with your measurements to build from. Either way it works. Get some quadrille graph paper and sketch up a scale version of your room. Calculators and rulers are both my friends and enemies. This part always takes me a while as I check and recheck my figures.

Make sure you mark where your doorways are and which way the doors need to swing to open and close. Very useful to know. Mark where the windows are and make notes of their height and how far up the wall they begin. Remember that you're working in only 2 dimensions (length and width) and you need to remember height.

A "footprint" is the term for the amount of floor space a piece of furniture takes up. I measure my furniture pieces or again use the measurements from the furniture design and make shapes from the quadrille paper that correspond to the furniture's footprint. I can move them around a floor plan and end up modifying my furniture designs to fit the room.

Remember that this trick works if you have a room and furniture or not. You can use it as a complete design tool. It's also cheaper than fancy software and you can store your furniture footprints in a box or baggy for use again on other floor plans.

This trick works great for moving into a new house too. Get room measurements and make the footprints of your real furniture to figure out how your furniture will fit into the new house. It takes a bit of time but think of the energy you save rearranging furniture! ;-)

I think any technique or trick that can be used to help visualize an idea for a 3-dimensional structure is awesome. Some of us need to see what we're working on. We just can't do it all in our heads.

Kim's got a get way of seeing things. Does anyone else out there have any tricks they'd like to share?