How To Design A Tiny House: Software To Use | Banging Toolbox (2024)

Designing a tiny house can be a challenge as fitting inside all your furniture is hard. You might have to make a furniture sacrifice, because of the limited space between shipping container walls, or the edges of your trailer.

This means you want house design software that is accurate to the point, rather than drawing on paper the computer is quicker, easier, and more accurate. The last thing you want is a couch not fitting in by half an inch.

Walls and furniture need to easily be adjusted quickly, as you will shuffle furniture around to fit.

Doing this on paper is slow, as one thing-not-fitting could mean having to re-design the entire layout from the shell and start over from the beginning.

There are 2 stages in a tiny-house design, first the floor plan, and second considering the layout in 3D.

Unlike a traditional house that generally relies on a floor plan for a functional layout. A tiny house needs design consideration in 3d to make use of space efficiently.

A more efficiently designed tiny house using split-level, and floor storage can save space needed for furniture, and so can a tv wall mount.

Of course with a tiny house, a sacrifice has to be made sometimes, but the overall benefit can be worth it.

With an R.V or House-truck, you can actually drive it and park it wear you like, living cheaply and being able to travel wherever you want in a country.

An R.V or even a well-designed house bus or van could beat having a batch, but they are not as comfortable to stay in one place VS a timber-framed or shipping container tiny house or obviously a batch.

R.Vs are high up on the ground and generally have a small hard-to-get-through door, this bad entrance way could be fixed more easily with a truck VS a bus or an RV with the right design idea.

You could build a comfortable “park-up” for an R.V by digging and leveling the ground down lower in the spot the R.V will be parked.

You could build a permanent deck with a canopy and BBQ, and a separate garage (for woodworking), and an outhouse.

Use a split-level bed

I recommend a built-in split level bed with enough room under the bed for all your storage, while not being too hard to climb on-to, while keeping decent headroom.

People that design tiny house’s on wheels like to have the bed high enough to have a room like a kitchen underneath, but generally sacrifice good headroom on the bed with also, an awkward staircase sometimes.

It’s good to have enough room to be able to stand on your knees comfortably on top of the mattress thickness.

If you want a room like a kitchen or a bathroom under the bed, build with a single slope roof.

Have the high point at the car end of the trailer where the bed is located, this looks better and is good for towing-weight-distribution, and bed headroom.

Allow for some storage space

Don’t clutter yourself with a million hidden storage areas, allow enough room under the bed to fit a set of draws and jackets. Keep things simple, you can’t stay in a tiny house with things not being used.

Position as much as you can off the walls a few high-level open shelves is your best way to have storage as you can see everything.

Build in-built furniture

No matter what place you want to position your bed you should have an in-built custom bed.

A custom-made bed means you can build storage underneath. A solid inbuilt bed will be more stable when otherwise it could be heavy and move around in transport.

Using a bed as part of the tiny house structure will add extra support and strength to the walls in timber or steel-stud framed tiny houses.

With a mid or top-level bed built this extra bracing will help stabilize the framing when your tiny house is in transport. For a shipping container, you don’t need to worry about any bracing.

A TV stand would generally take up a lot of floor space and shelf space, instead install an extendable TV wall mount, so that you can position and tilt the in the direction that’s best while taking up less space.

Having a small viewing distance in a tiny house can make T.V. viewing difficult, but with a swing arm TV, you can direct your LCD exactly in the right spot, and push it back against the wall when not in use.