Interior Design Homeschool Unit

I don't know why this looks so blurry. But it will be better when you click to enlarge it.

What a year it has been! It has gone both fast and slow, as every year does. Everyone looks surprisingly young in the pictures a whole year ago. And now we're living in a different house than we were when the school year started! That move is actually the reason we thought of doing this unit on Interior Design in the first place. We knew we'd be moving in September (halfway through this unit, in fact) and we thought it might be nice to have some knowledge that could help us as we rearranged rooms and chose new furniture and so forth.

My pinterest board for this unit is here.

We watched some of the episodes from this cool Netflix show, The World's Most Extraordinary Homes.

Here are some of the other things we did:

We learned about design principles including the Golden Ratio and the Rule of Thirds. We made these visual representations of the Fibonacci Sequence.

Sam taught the kids about one- and two-point perspective for drawing interiors and exteriors.

 

We went on a field trip to IKEA to look at all the cute little display rooms. You can see lots of design principles in action there!

(Ziggy had to hug some doggies, of course)

We learned about color. We practiced mixing paint (primary and secondary colors) and making tints and shades of each color.

We also made color schemes with paint swatches (this is Junie's, featuring many pigs).

Teddy's color scheme

We learned about fabrics and textiles. I had a whole semester-long class on textiles in college! So I had lots of knowledge to share. :) We learned some differences between knits and wovens and made these weavings to talk about warp and weft.

Some related videos we liked:

• How cotton is made into fabric https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHgNoSYlhYs
• Silk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqFm_7KyfHI
• Velvet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjmXWWsEszw
• Fibers to fabrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qRhHKi8Pg8

We made to-scale diagrams of the children's rooms in the new house, along with scaled pieces of their furniture. Then they tried out different arrangements and chose their favorites. (This was a VERY USEFUL activity and saved us lots of time and effort moving actual furniture! Sam and I have often done this in our houses over the years, but we've never included the children in it, and it was fun for them, I think.) 

Of course, you can make these floor plans yourself on graph paper, and measure your own furniture to get custom sizes. That's what we've always done. But this time I bought a couple things that I thought it might save us time. It was nice to have the beds, etc., already drawn to scale, and ready to just punch out and use:

Furniture templates and architectural shape stencils

Room and furniture layout kit

You can also use this idea when making and measuring for floor plans:

Your body can be used as a measuring tool when you don't have a measuring tape conveniently with you. Although it's a nonstandard unit of measurement, it's conveniently with you all the time. It might also help you remember the measurements, because you have to use parts of your body instead of inches, feet and yards. Below are examples of how various body parts are used for measuring. 

foot: It probably goes without saying that the unit foot was based on the length of a man’s foot. 

span: Stretch out your hand so that the tip of your thumb is as far away as possible from the tip of your pinky. That distance is called a “span,” which for most people is almost exactly half a cubit. 

handbreadth: The width of your four fingers where they meet the palm—usually about 4 inches—is a handbreadth or sometimes just a “hand.” The height of horses is usually expressed in hands. 

digit: The width of a finger, which tends to be about 2cm (about 13/16 of an inch). 

thumb: The width of a thumb, which was later used as the basis for the inch 

Your assignment:  Go home and measure your bedroom.  However DO NOT use a ruler, use your foot.  On the back of this paper draw a scale diagram of your bedroom be sure to include and identify the following:  Length, Width, Windows, Door, Closet (see example below) Extra Credit:  Calculate the area of your room in “Square Sneaker” units.

I…actually have no idea what Goldie has drawn here. It does not appear to be any actual furniture.

I found a bunch of other good ideas for an Interior Design Unit for older students on this post. For example, I thought this sounded fun, and if we do this unit again, I'd assign this to an older child:

Create a Design Portfolio

Each week, [my daughter] had to create a design plan in a portfolio notebook. (I purchased one that had 11" x 14" sheets so that she could sketch her designs on a separate sheet of art paper and then glue them into the notebook. This gave her the freedom to make a mistake without ruining the entire portfolio.)

Acting as a potential client, every Monday, I "hired" her to design a particular room in my house featuring a specific design aesthetic/mood, certain color schemes, and/or furniture features. (I even petitioned some blog readers for help in coming up with unique requests.) For instance:

"I'd like you to design a French Country style dining room. I prefer grey and purple hues. My great aunt gave me this beautiful pie cupboard that I'd like you to incorporate into the design. I do a lot of entertaining, so the table needs to seat a crowd. There's not a lot of natural light in that area of my house, but I'd like it to feel bright." 

Other times I just gave her a few keywords for inspiration.

Multi-purpose family room: mix of fabrics, pool table, western, storage space, no checkered prints 

With those parameters in mind, she created a 3-page plan for her proposal. Each proposal consisted of:

a planning page with paint chips, fabric swatches, and notes

a colored sketch of the completed room

an aerial layout of the room plotted on graph paper

Making (tiny) Tiny Houses

As I said, the Tiny House movement is apparently a big thing in some places, and it was fun to learn a little more about it. Not sure it's compleeeetely practical with 8 children, but I'd love to live in one by myself! Ha ha. So, this assignment was for each child to make a tiny Tiny House—by which I mean, we used floor plans for real-life Tiny Houses, but we made them truly tiny! Dollhouse size.

My wonderful friend Carrie Ann, who teaches Interior Design at BYU, came over to teach a model-making workshop. She showed us how to cut foam board and make corners, how to attach flooring, how to use architect's scales, and so forth. She also brought examples of some of the models her students have made for Interior Design assignments.

After the children had some idea of how to go about constructing models, they went online and chose floor plans from real tiny houses. They converted the plans to 1/2" scale in Photoshop, and then printed them out and pasted them onto foam board.

The assignment was for each child to design a house that he or she could personally live in. (Daisy and Junie's house was for both of them.) They had to consider storage needs, cooking, bathrooms, etc., and use actual appliance dimensions, but they were allowed to customize the house to contain the things that they needed most (and leave out the things they didn't).

Two of the floor plans

It was so helpful to have already made a bunch of mistakes during our workshop with Carrie Ann, so we knew what to watch for when making our actual model houses!

Yes, there were still hot-glue-gun burns. But fewer of them than there might have been!

I was truly amazed at how well the children did with this assignment. They all got really into it (except maybe Malachi, who needed lots of help from Abe at the beginning—but he did a great job once he got going!) and I couldn't believe the darling, creative little touches they added to their tiny houses! We worked on these for about a week and half in all.

Malachi's house from above. He has a bedroom, a kitchen, a living area with couch, a desk, and a bathroom.

Malachi's toilet, sink, and desk with computer.

Sebastian's house from above. Seb's was probably the most meticulously constructed of all the houses. All his corners were tight and perfectly square, and his measurements were exact. He had a little shed with a separate entrance at the back of his house, plus a bathroom, kitchen/living area, and a computer area. ("I just sleep on the floor, or in my hammock," he said.)

• 

• 

• 

Great little details in Seb's house: • the doors that actually swing open and shut. • The little lawnmower in the shed! • And the keyboards and computer mice on the desk.

Abe's house was so great! He thought of all kinds of little household items to re-purpose for his house, and I couldn't believe all the creative uses he found for them!

• 

• 

• 

• Bathroom with opening toilet, sink, bath mat, and safety-pin shower curtain rings. • The little washer/dryer with a drum that really opens! • And of course the darling kitchen: pin-back stove, noodle faucet, tiny clothespin stools, and teeeeeny tiny little box of cheese-its, bag of Doritos, and bottle of root beer on the counter!

• 

• 

• 

More great details. • Abe's bedroom with bed, Civilization board game on the night table, TV remote on the other night table, DVDs of every season of Pysch, and White Collar playing on the TV. • Little computer desk and chair in a cozy nook. • Aerial view of the walk-in closet, with clothes bar and Abe's tiny fedora sitting on the shelf!

Daisy (8) and Junie (7) did their house together, but Daisy did most of the work. I helped with the more difficult cutting and some of the gluing, and the printing and manipulating of pictures in Photoshop. Daisy and I had lots of fun coming up with ideas of all sorts of tiny little items to decorate their house with. The girls have already played with it for hours!

Junie made a little "playhouse" all by herself, to go with the tiny house. You can see it on the left of the picture.

• 

• 

• 

• "Playhouse" from above. It had a porch, a stove, a chair, a bed, and (my favorite) a little hardwood dance floor to dance on! • The tiny house itself had a porch made of composite decking, with a toothpick railing and darling little planter boxes with flowers. • The girls made a flower garden with shrubs around the edges of the house, too.

• 

• 

• 

• Bedroom desk with pencil and paper, with flower in a vase by two books on the shelf above. Also a picture of a penguin and a pig (the girls' favorite animals) on the wall. • Eating area in the kitchen with two chairs, a table, and a microwave. You might also be able to make out a little note held on the fridge with a fluffball "magnet." It reminds Daisy to go to Activity Days at 4:15. :) • Daisy made this tiiiiiny frying pan with an egg in it, and a spatula to turn the egg with. On the shelf above you can see a box of macaroni and cheese, and a can of Pringles chips.

• 

• 

• 

More details: we took pictures of the girls (front and back) and printed them out tiny (to scale) and glued them onto foam board. • Here is Daisy standing at the sink washing dishes and looking out the cute little curtained window. • The girls have bunk beds with a ladder, and two tiny stuffed animals (a pig and a penguin) to snuggle with. • In the laundry room, you can see a washer, a clothesline, and two folded towels. The pink thing at the bottom is a bowl sink Daisy made, with a faucet over it.

A house fit for a queen—or two! Such a fun, fun project!