Sunday, August 12, 2007

Laying Out Floor Space

I'm so looking forward to getting the House reorganized a bit. I'm approaching completion with the plastering in the basement and it will soon be ready to prime and paint. I'm currently researching methods and colors for that, but in the mean time, while I'm taking it easy here and there (a guy's gotta rest sometime), I'm playing with furniture layouts.

This was made easier thanks to FloorPlanner. You can see a screen grab of one of the layouts I created below. They have lots of template items you can drag onto the drawing area. Fortunately for me, I had a semi scaled bitmap of our basement already and was able to import it as the background. The free account has some limitations but this was enough to get what I wanted.

I used their built in templates and ability to rotate, resize and reshape them to create representations of the various pieces of furniture I have. All I need to find are the fake trees to go in the corners to complete the layout once I get all my furniture down there.

The items in the closet behind the office chair are my server and game rig. I plan to relocate the dehumidifier there as well to act as an air conditioner of sorts. This will help keep things cool, dry and the closet will provide some sound deadening between me and the PSU fans.

One of the things I like about this layout is it divides the existing space into two rooms with the bookcases. I also made some dead corners more interesting by taking the bookcases in an arc, mimicking the arc my three piece desk will create, instead of a straight side to side partition as originally laid out. Now all I need to find is a cable planner tool. :-)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice arrangement :)

Jerome Carter said...

Thanks Derek. It's still evolving. This is the one I like best so far but my wife and I agreed to make the basement "our" retreat - a place we'll keep for ourselves as the kids rule most of the house besides the Master Suite. I need an office and she needs a place to set up her computer where it wont get jellied, juiced, or thrown to the floor. I'm hoping we can pull in some asian influences. I've been looking at Japanese architecture and interior design a lot lately and that's probably going to have a strong influence.