Design Your Own House Plans

Designing your own house can be a wonderful journey of self-discovery and creativity. This website contains all the tutorials and reference material to assist you in your home design from initial site planning through to drawing floor plans, understanding residential structural design and creating blueprints either by hand or using a computer program.

We've been through the house design process from start to finish and our family of four is now thoroughly enjoying our custom home. It would have been hard for an architect to capture so many of the small details in our home that reflect the way that our family lives.

We have great respect for architects and the beautiful and practical designs they create. But for some of us, the urge to create our own homes is too powerful to hand it over to someone else. People have been designing and building their own homes for centuries. If you have the desire, the time and the perseverance, you can too.

Tutorial

Our free Design Your Own Home tutorial will guide you through a detailed step-by-step effective process. During this online course, you will create your own house plans starting with analyzing your building site, moving through to creating bubble diagrams before creating floor plans, learning about structural design and finally drafting your house blueprints.

You can start with the tutorial introduction or select a topic using the site map.

Our Story

When my husband and I set out to design our home, I searched high and low for good information that actually detailed the steps for how to design a house. I had hoped to find some kind of online (or offline) tutorial that would walk me through the process. Instead, I found a handful of house design ideas books and then started down the tough road of trial and error.

After creating dozens of floor plans (and at least four house plans with a complete structural design), I began to figure out a process that really worked. And I noticed elements that needed to be decided very early—things like where the main entrance, stairwell and fireplace would be. These elements wreaked havoc on the design if not incorporated early enough.

Now that our family of four is happily living in our custom home, I have the time to organize and share with you the method of house design that I discovered throughout our journey. In creating these tutorials, I have consulted with many others who have designed their own homes to come up with a "best practices" method that really works.

Start Now

You can follow through the tutorial from beginning to end or you can follow the navigation buttons at the top of the page to explore other home design topics.