A Design Work-Sheet

 

This is literally a cut and paste design worksheet. Print it, cut out the

various shapes representing my drawer and display cases, and design

your own PERFECT Home-Museum.

 

HOW TO USE THE ROOM PLANNER:

Step 1.

Begin by measuring your room. It’s best not to rely on your memory when you do this. Make a quick sketch showing roughly where the doors, windows, and whatnot are. Then measure exactly where things lay. In the long run, it’s easiest to measure everything from one wall and the floor. This is to say that if you measure one side of a door from one wall and the other side from the other side, it will inevitably come out wrong. Write down the dimensions in feet and inches.

Step 2.

Transfer your sketch and dimensions to a Planning Page*. The page I provide is scaled at 1 inch (on paper) equal to 1 foot (in your room). It shows a typical 8 foot tall room. The top of the page is the ceiling, but given the way various printers work, I have to leave it out. If your room is taller then 8 feet, you will need to work with some larger paper. The human figure works out to 5 feet 6 inches tall and the chair is a basic desk or dining-room chair.

The planning page has some things to help you, but you may chose to ignore any or all of them. The solid line at the very bottom is the floor. The line running across just above the floor represents a single 2 x 4 laid on edge as a toe-kick under your cases. The window may or may not be anything like the window in your room, but it will probably be accurate as to the height. If the window is a bedroom, the bottom may also be right. The door is three feet wide as drawn --and while I have no idea where or how wide the door(s) in your room might be-- I suspect that the height is right. Door and window heights are pretty standard after all. The little hash marks across the floor are one foot (one inch) apart.

Once you have the shapes knocked out –doors -windows –other casework –furniture etc., and drawn, you might consider Xeroxing a few copies to work with. In this way you can fiddle about till it’s just exactly the way you want it, or you run out of patience.

Step 3.

This is the fun part. Cut out the little shapes from the Display Cases Sheet* and the Drawer Cases Sheet.* Then design yourself a Home Museum.

*If you don't have Acrobat, -Adobe's PDF reader-, it is useful, free, and easy to download from Adobe's Web Site.