TUESDAY TUTORIAL
One useful thing you can do with AI today.

Good morning.
Mike and I go back a long way, and periodically he sends me things I end up publishing. This time it was a closet plan for his son's bedroom in Portland, built entirely from a sketch and a conversation. Andi did the same thing for our loft in Flagstaff a few weeks ago, and we have two contractors coming out to look at it this month. Two different projects, same method, so it seemed worth writing down.

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Mike lives in Hollywood, South Carolina. The wall he spent last week designing a closet for, is in Portland, Oregon, in his son’s bedroom.

He has never stood in front of it with a tape measure.

What landed in my inbox was a full build plan. Three 48-inch bays, rod heights, a cut list, a shopping list, a budget range, and a picture of what the finished thing would look like. He did it with a pencil sketch, a phone, and a conversation.

Mike is the same friend who built two live websites in a day with Claude. He is retired, not a developer, and not a carpenter either.

Here is how that works, and where it goes wrong if you are not paying attention.

Mike's starting drawing was a rectangle on a piece of paper. The 144-inch wall. The 24-inch depth of the existing opening. A door, a window, and the words "no doors" where the current closet is.

That is enough. What matters is that every number on the page is real. If you are guessing at the ceiling height, do not write it down, because AI will treat it as a fact and build everything else on top of it.

Standard reach-in closets run 24 to 30 inches deep, and you want roughly 24 inches of rod per person. This Old House has the rest of the standard dimensions if you want a sanity check before you start.

My wife Andi could this part better than Mike could. She sketched our Flagstaff loft on a legal pad, then walked upstairs and took a few photos of the room as it looks right now, and described what she wanted in it.

Sketch + photos + description. Three inputs instead of one.

The AI titled her result "Loft Layout, Your Chicken Scratch." Fair. After several iterations, it placed the Murphy bed, the kitchenette, the pocket door, and three low windows exactly where she said they should go, because she showed it the room instead of describing it.

Mike could not do that from South Carolina. His plan is stamped "verify in field" for a reason.

This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that matters.

Mike's first version came back wrong in four places. It read a 90-inch wall as 9 feet. It invented shelves that do not exist. It misread which measurements belonged to the existing opening. Andi burned several rounds on layouts that put items on top of each other.

Neither of them opened a new chat and tried again. They fixed it in place:

Each correction makes the next answer better. Starting over throws away everything it already got right.

Mike could have taken three identical 48-inch bays. Instead he asked for each bay to do a different job: double hanging, double hanging, then long hanging with drawers and adjustable shelves.

Then he asked for the picture. Then he asked what it would look like with sliding doors, and what hardware that would require.

Decisions are cheap at this stage. Shaker or flat panel, brushed nickel or matte black, doors or open shelving, all settled before anyone buys a sheet of plywood.

Ask for the cut list, the materials list, and a budget range. Mike's came back at $310 to $440 for the closet, plus $320 to $560 if his son adds the doors.

Then read the assumptions. Mike's plan assumes a 96-inch ceiling, and says so twice, because nobody ever told it the ceiling height. Hi son still has to go measure. So does Andi, which is why two contractors are walking our loft this month.

AI will not build the closet. It will get you to the point where you know what you are building, which is where most home projects quietly die.

Try This With AI

What it does: Turns a rough sketch of a real space into a labeled plan you can hand to a contractor or take to a lumber yard.

Before you begin: Have your sketch photographed and three or four photos of the room as it looks today.

Customize it: Swap [home project] and [dimensions] for your own. The last two sentences are the important part, so leave them in.

Try it now: ChatGPT · Claude

Then ask this: "Now show me three different layouts for this space and tell me what each one gives up."

This week: find the project you have been putting off, take four photos of the space, and sketch it on whatever paper is nearby. Ten minutes. Mike did it for a room he has never seen.

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