Prototyping your space

Several readers alerted us to this interesting San Francisco Chronicle feature story on Dirk Dieter’s 250-square-foot house in Pacifica. We were particularly impressed by a strategy mentioned in the article for testing new purchases in advance:

Make cardboard prototypes for possible additions to make sure they’ll fit into the scheme of everyday life. Dieter even put up a mockup of his range hood to confirm that yes, it really did need to be just 3 inches deep to ensure that it wouldn’t regularly meet with his head.

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Posted by PJ on Jul 3, 2007 | Comments | Tweet This

5 comments posted

  1. Posted by Jacki Hollywood Brown - 07/03/2007

    My parents wanted to put a Jacuzzi in the basement. My father built a frame the same size as the desired Jacuzzi just to see if it fit down the stairs. They ended up with the frame jammed so badly they had to take the saw and hack the frame in half to get it out.
    They got a smaller whirlpool bathtub instead.

  2. Posted by SpaceMonkeyX - 07/03/2007

    I realize it’s not quite the same, but I use Google’s awesome, free 3-D software, SketchUp, to do our prototyping for room and furniture designs. It works incredibly well and has saved us the hassle of moving giant pieces of furniture around, only to find they won’t fit.

  3. Posted by Eric - 07/03/2007

    I live in a 1200 sqft house with wife and child ( eventually 2x child ). My mom lives in a 800 sqft home. My mothers 800 sqft home is more spacious where it counts than most 2000+ sqft homes I have been in.

    Everything has it’s place and cleaning is a breeze. The trick is de-clutter what you don’t use and organize the rest.

    Don’t give up quickly too… it’s taken me a few years to achieve my current level of de-cluttering and we have another year or two to tackle the big items ( kitchen and bathroom re-do ).

  4. Posted by BigNerd - 07/03/2007

    Don’t forget to get a bunch of Rubbermaid tote boxes to keep your cardboard mock-ups in, because you never know when you will need them again.

  5. Posted by Scorpicon - 07/06/2007

    If you can get your hands on it, using Adobe Illustrator works really well for prototyping. I can make simple shapes to represent the object and move them around and save different room configurations to go over later. For large rooms use 2 or 4 pixels to represent a foot (so you can do fractions).

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