1. Design to scale.

This helps keep the sizes of your rooms and their contents in proportion and ultimately gives you a more realistic visualization of your home’s layout. You can sketch something out freehand as long as you assign a scale value to your drawing (a quarter-inch on paper equals 1 real-world foot, for example). Scale drawings help you avoid creating plans in which features are unrealistically distorted or out of proportion.

2. Place your stairs properly.

One of the most common design mistakes is misplacement of staircases in a floor plan. Lining the stairs up against a particular wall might seem to work at first glance, but take it one step further and try to visualize where the stairs will interface with the upper level. Will a slanted roof on the second story crowd the upper portion of your stairs, forcing people to bend over to keep from bumping their heads on the ceiling? If so, you’ll need to find another spot. When determining the best location for stairs, make sure you think three dimensionally.

3. Allow room for plumbing and electrical wiring.

When building a log home, it’s natural to want to maximize your logs’ visual impact on the inside. A common misstep, however, is to insist on building all of your interior walls out of logs. While this certainly looks great, it decreases the amount of room you have to run plumbing pipes and electrical wiring throughout your house.

4. Size up your kitchen.

Many buyers focus on the size and shape of their kitchen windows without considering the impact this decision has on the rest of the room. But what about your cabinetry? Will the remaining wall area provide enough space for cabinets that will accommodate your needs?

Building codes require that each bedroom provide occupants with more than one point of egress. So if you’re designing a home with basement-level bedrooms, you need to make sure that you either provide a second doorway leading out of the room or incorporate a window large enough to allow a person to crawl out at ground level.