Dream Home
A full house design in Onshape, my hardest CAD project to that point.
// Challenges
My first plan didn't work and I had to simplify the whole design. The roof was the biggest pain. I gave up on a pitched roof and went modern and flat. Translating the 3D model into a 2D floor plan was also tougher than I expected.
// Skills Used
// Outcome
A modern dream home with a flat roof and a workable floor plan. The project that pushed my CAD skills the most up to that point.
Brief
Design a “dream home” in Onshape. Multi-room, with a proper floor plan that someone could read and understand. Style up to me. The goal was to handle a larger and more complex assembly than anything I had built before.
Process
My first plan was ambitious. A two-story house with a pitched roof, dormer windows, and a wrap-around porch. About halfway through the ground floor I realized I had bitten off more than the project window allowed. The roof especially was killing me. Pitched roofs in CAD require careful intersection geometry where two slopes meet, and I was struggling to keep the edges clean.
I scrapped the pitched roof and went modern. Single-story footprint, flat roof with a small parapet, big windows. The flat roof was a trade-off I made consciously, knowing that “modern minimalist” is a defensible style choice that also happens to be way easier in CAD. Trade-offs matter.
The 2D floor plan was a separate challenge. Onshape generates drawings from 3D models, but a floor plan is not just a slice. It is an annotated diagram with door swings, room labels, wall thicknesses, and dimensions. I learned how to add dimension chains, callouts, and room labels in the drawing workspace. It was the first time I had to think about a CAD model and its drawings as two related but separate deliverables.
Skills Built
- Architectural simplification. Knowing when to scale your ambition down to fit the time you have. The flat-roof modern house is not a worse project than the pitched-roof one I started. It is a better project because I finished it well.
- 2D drawing workspace in Onshape. Dimension chains, callouts, room labels, door swings. The drawing side of CAD is its own skill.
- Managing a larger assembly. Multiple rooms, multiple parts, named features and parts so the feature tree stays readable.
- Knowing when to pivot. Most of the project’s value was in the decision to simplify. That was the right call.
What I would do differently
I would start with the floor plan first, in 2D, and only move to 3D after the plan was locked. Building the 3D model first and then trying to derive the floor plan from it was backwards. Architects do plans first for a reason.