My Dream House!

For Maths we have been learning about measurement with a focus on area and perimeter. It is very important that we are able to apply our skills in real life situations. Therefore we have now all begun designing our very own dream house. Below is the task that Mrs Baldwin gave us last week:

Congratulations!  You have been selected to design a dream home for you and your family.  To get ready for this special assignment, you must be sure that you have the skills that you, the architect, will need. A solid understanding of area and perimeter is required. You will design and draw the floor plan for your dream house. Then you will determine how much carpet or tile you will need in all of the rooms and how much fencing you will need to go around your yard to make sure your dog doesn’t get away while you are at school. This dream home will include everything you desire!

Our imaginations ran wild with all the ideas we could use to design our dream home. To make it as real life as possible there was some criteria that we have to stick to. The criteria included:

  1. Living areas have to be able to get north light.
  2. We cannot have the toilet next to the kitchen
  3. The bedrooms need to have an east window.
  4. Include doors which can be 1-2 meters long, and windows which can be 1-3 meters long.
  5. Include a fence around your whole house including a gate.
  6. Use a scale for our drawing so that it is realistic and life-like. Our scale will be 1cm = 50cm.

We were very lucky to have had Zoe’s parents Catherine and Brent helping us with the planning and designing of our houses. They demonstrated the importance of having northern light in our main living area along with eastern windows in the bedrooms. This is to maximise the amount of sunlight that would come into these rooms to heat them up during the day. They also showed us some examples of real houses that have been planned and built and that there are many different layouts that you can use to design a home.

Firstly we began by writing down all the possible rooms we wanted and needed in our house. We then had to decide what the size of each room would be by calculating the area of each one. We then had to calculate the total area of the house to check that it was near 150sqms.

Once this was achieved we drew our rooms on graph paper, labelled them and cut them out carefully.  By cutting out the rooms first it allowed us to position the rooms where we would like them before gluing them down. We also had to be careful to use the scale of 1cm = 50cm when drawing each room.

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We then calculated the perimeter and area of each room in the house and the total area of the entire house.

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Finally we had to calculate the costing for flooring each of our rooms.

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A big thank you to Catherine and Brent for all their help!

What have you enjoyed so far with designing your house?

What have you found challenging and how have you dealt with that challenge?

What is something you have learnt with being an architect and designing a house?

2 thoughts on “My Dream House!

  1. Dear mrs b
    I enjoyed so far was the rooms

    The most challenge bit was how much space there was

    I learnt lots about my hause and how diffecolt it is

    By Cooper

  2. Dear mrs baldwin, my favourite thing about designing our house was doing the sticking in, the arranging.

    the challenge was space but it was not that hard to keep it under 150 metres!

    i’ve learnt that it would take a little while to design a house but it’s awesome and fun !
    from Kain.

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