Overall I think it looks good....but tell us about your family...kids? ages? etc. Is this your forever house, etc.

A few initial comments...really just based on how I'd prefer things, but everyone is different! So, if you like it this way, then keep it! :)

1) I don't know that I'd turn the stairs at the bottom in the foyer. The first few steps seem like they'd be in the way of entering/exiting the main door.

2) We are getting ready to start our new build, and actually deleted the Living Room all together. I have one now, and don't think I've ever used it. So, we decided to scrap the whole idea and make a larger family/kitchenspace. (But, that's us.) I'd get more use out of a larger playroom for kids and an office space instead.

3) I'd prefer an enclosed toilet for master bath

4) Do you know what the overall sq footage is? The house looks like a very good size, and you may want to consider 4 bedrooms for resale, rathern than 3. In my area 3 would be a very hard sell.

5) Is the Upper Family room an actual room on the 2nd floor or is it open to below? Or is that just stated that below it is the family room? It's hard to tell from pic...

I'm not an experienced builder either, but yes to #2, 3, and 4 above.

We are at 3400 sq ft, no formal living but "study" for office and music. I don't like using the toilet in a large space. And we have 4 bedrooms (master, 2 kids, and guest).

Also, seems like the closets are a really far walk from the shower. Ours are a bit too, but yours are even further! Think about getting out of the shower wrapped in a towel, taking to the closet, then having to go back to the bathroom to hang it up, back to the closet to finish dressing, back to the bathroom for toothbrushing, etc.

In addition, I'd put a laundry chute from the master bathroom to the laundry room. We are doing this. No hamper, woohoo!

I like your plan alot.

Love your big bedrooms (although 4 might be something to consider). So many people build bedrooms that are so small, there's barely room for a bed and bureau. However, I see you have a playroom, so apparently those huge bedrooms upstairs are for little children?

I really like your master bed/bath arrangement. I dislike closets right off the bath, and I think your arrangement would be something I would really like. In our last home, the closet was right off the bath. My DH is a big user of powder after his shower, I think he throws a handful in the air, and then walks through it. I found that all the clothes were getting white dust on the them. If you find it too far to walk, the double door into the bath could be moved down, or made 1 door.

Where is your dishwasher? I personally don't care for sinks in an island, but that's just me. If the d/w is in the island (I don't see it), you'll have the d/w, oven, and fridge all opening into the same space. If I'm reading it correctly. Be sure to visit the kitchen forum.

Nice family room, but are you intending to put all that furniture in there? You'll need a walk-way to get in. Right now there is no way to walk into the room.

Do you need a study?

Another door in the garage besides the huge garage door would be very handy. And I'd expand the garage a bit for bikes, toys, lawn mower, etc.

Good luck, it's going to be a beautiful home.

I like the general flow of this plan.
Knowing about your family (current/planned) would be helpful.

Some things:
A. Generally, I do not like double-entry front doors. I think a single door that swings is great with some very nice side-lights is sufficient and more efficient.

B. The kitchen does seem a little crowded, and as mentioned above, do, by all means, take your kitchen plan to the kitchens forum for feedback.

C. You need a bigger garage (wider). At least 2 full cars (you have, functionally 1.5 car garage). At least 2 doors, and 2.5 would be better.

D. Where will your guests sleep when they come over? There isn't a good place downstairs (at some point, the playroom might be converted?, but there isn't a full bath down there for them). Upstairs, there is only 3 bedrooms. If they stayed, in what I am reading as an upstairs playroom, there is no upstairs bathroom accessible from the hall. No matter what, your guests will HAVE to infringe on whomever is in a bedroom (take your pick). I think you need hall bath access somewhere.

E. You have a LOT of space in the master suite. TONS. That is fine, except, you really need a hall bath. So, I'd suggest modifying that some. You have a large hall walk-in closet that could actually become a master closet, so you can turn the "larger" master closet into a hall bath.

You also have, as pointed out, a huge distance to go between bathroom and closet. Why not move the bathroom door down so it is in the same corridor as the closet door. Then, you could just skip across the hallway.

Also, I think having extra doors within the closet is a waste of space. You don't need that little room in the closet that is formed from the doorways. Why not just let there be a hanging wall, and let it be a circular closet, for example.

I think you can rearrange that hole space up there to be more space-efficient.

F. Now that I look again, I think your Upper Family Room, is actually just open to the lower family room, and not a separate space. Really think thrice about this. Noise carries. All kinds of noise. If you are downstairs having a dinner party and the kids are up trying to sleep, it will be difficult. If the kids are sent to their rooms for a tantrum, you will not have the peace you hoped for downstairs (it will carry down). The open foyer is enough (if not too much all in and of itself).

G. Yes to a laundry shute.

H. Is there any way to get another source of natural light into the central "child's" bedroom?

Your usable mudroom space may be a little small too, as drawn. Only 2 lockers?

The kitchen and family room are both smallish. I'd add at least 2 feet to the house depth, if not 4. That would let you have a more workable kitchen and family room and would let you get another bath upstairs.

And if this is one of those double height family rooms, I wouldn't do it. They are noisy, inefficient with HVAC and waste valuable space.

There are multiple problems with this plan. The kitchen is not workable.
The garage has no storage space once you put two cars in it. Your master bedroom is over the garage. It creates two problems. Unless it is perfectly insulated it will be too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Every time that garage door opens you will hear it in the bedroom above and wake up who ever is sleeping. All loud noise will travel up. There have been numerous discussions in the past regarding this. I lived in one.
Your master closets are a problem as well. You will have to walk by the doors to your bedroom naked or with towel to get your clothes. If the door is open it is a direct shot to the top of your stairs. With kids around you can not guarantee that door will remain shut.
Four bedrooms for resale.
Two story family rooms are a problem as well. Noise and HVAC travels up. Google gardenweb and two story family room for all the discussions in the past. All bedrooms will know what is happening in the family room. I lived in one as well which had a similar design to yours. A fix is 12 foot ceilings below for the bigger feel and short ceiling room above.
Present house has no formal areas because we never used them before.
Ditto hall bath on second story.

I'd like to start by thanking everyone for all of their feedback, you all bring up very good points, some of which we have thought of and some of which we have not. It's great to get other's perspectives on our plan based on your individual personal experiences.

I should start by giving you all some info about us as requested; we are a young family in our 30s living in the city with a 1 yr old. This will be our first home but we both grew up in the burbs so we have experience living in a house. And to answer your Qs Andi, yes this is our forever house. Although the resale value is important we feel that having 3 bedrooms on the 2nd FL is sufficient for us since we don't see ourselves having more than 2 kids (we may just settle on this lil guy since he's got our hands full as it is!) The sq footage is about 3900sq ft.

I apologize in advance for not including the basement, I've included it below - I omitted it b/c there are still changes we want done with it since it's the last piece we're working on. You can see the first layout and the revised layout which has 2 bedrooms and a jack/jill bathroom. the original had a laundry which we do not need since we have it on the 1st FL and instead included a home gym. and b/c of the full bathroom in the basement we felt that it was OK to have the 2nd FL bathrooms all enclosed and not in the hallway. Any guests we have would be staying in the basement so they can use the bathroom there. Oh and since you can see the basement please feel free to give some feedback on it. We're still unsure about the revised layout. The boiler in the revised won't have access to a chimney so it'll have to be a direct vent boiler. Anyone have any experience with this type of boiler? I did a search here but could not find much on it. We're also thinking of having the space under the garage (labeled as crawl space but isn't really a crawl space) excavated into livable space. There are costs associated with it and from what I understand the ceiling will be lower than the rest of the basement (8' vs. 10') to allow for steel beams supporting the cars in the garage. Anyone do this before? or have any thoughts on it?

living room - We thought about doing without the livingroom altogether but felt that it would still be used, even if on occasion. If we don't end up using it very often we can utilize it more as a library/home office/music room (have a piano at parents house that we'll be bringing) so either way we felt that we wanted it. I do remember growing up and not using our livingroom very often though so we def considered not having it at all.

master bath - I have to agree with all of you on the enclosed toilet for master bath. we've been looking at pictures and trying to get ideas to switch things around in there to have it enclosed. we imagined that having the lil guy run in there while one of us was in the toiled wouldn't be very fun so we thought it'd be best to enclose it somehow. We are playing around with having it be 1 door like you suggested joyce, and perhaps moving it closer to the closets, not sure yet but the feedback here was really helpful so thanks!

Mudroom/garage - initially the floor plan had the garage being 2 feet deeper into the laundry/mudroom but we felt that they were too small this way. i almost feel like they're pretty small as it is! we decided to remove the window from the mudroom to allow for additional lockers (thx kirkhall). is 20x23 really too narrow to fit 2 cars? we have a mid-size SUV and would have to get an additional car so would hate for the garage to be too narrow. the problem that our lot size limits the size of our house and we are at the max as it is so we'd have to rearrange other areas of the house to allow for a wider garage, which would in turn affect the 2nd floor layout...

kitchen - will be sure to post in the kitchen forum for feedback, thx for the tip.

family room - we are opting for radiant heating instead of hvac (since so many ppl have recommended it on this forum), and since cool air travels down the summers the family should be fine. as for the noise, not sure what we can do about that. since the bedrooms are away from the family room we are hoping the noise won't travel too far, and if we are entertaining and the kid(s) are sleeping we could take the entertaining down to the basement where the bar is...we really like the open space concept of the family room. we both lived in 2 story homes growing up, noise does travel up but i don't ever remember having it be something that bothered us, and we're fairly quiet, the only time I can see there being noise is with the lil guy and if he's up late one night making noise down there then we'll have a diff problem altogether!

ORIGINAL BASEMENT

REVISED BASEMENT
{{gwi:1402059}}

The 45 degree turn in the stairway creates either a winder tread or a landing. The drawing does not appear to meet the code requirements for either condition. Even if the building inspector allows it, it should be made safer.

bump

International Residential Code:

1) If the 45 degree stair turn is a WINDER: "Winder treads shall have a minimum tread depth of 6 inches at any point."

2) If the 45 degree stair turn is a LANDING: "Every landing shall have a minimum dimension of 36 inches measured in the direction of travel."

It is a good idea to pull the risers a half tread back from a landing at a 90 degree turn so that an inside handrail can turn the corner without an awkward vertical drop.

Except for the winder portion of the staircase and the small mudroom, I think your plan looks pretty good.

As for having the master bedroom over the garage, there was a discussion about that very issue here on GW back when we were just getting started building. I remembered it because it appeared just when we were making a decision about turning the space over our garage from simple storage into a man-cave and occasional guest room. The link to that thread is below.

As for the winder stairs, I can see that if you simply straighten that section out, you won't really have aisle space to get into the dining room. But I think if you were to pull the dining room forward by about 1 ft and replace the double front doors with a single door with sidelights, you would have room to straighten out the winder and still enter the dining room. You could make the pantry a little wider if you don't want to make the dining room any longer. At 15'6", it is already long enough for a nice sized table. I'd probably use an open rail down both side of the staircase for the first eight or so steps... just to give the space a nice open feeling.

I'm not a big fan of 2 story living rooms but yours would be reasonable acceptable to me. The opening is fairly small so not much more noise should flow between the two floors than would travel via the staircase anyway.

There are two things tho that are missing from your plan that I'd really want in a "forever home."

First, I'd want my laundry closer to where all the dirty clothing collects and where all the clean clothing is stored. You're young so it probably doesn't bother you now but, as you get older, you're likely to get mighty tired of lugging dirty laundry down the stairs and clear around to the laundry and (WORSE!) hauling all the clean laundry back up the stairs! I'd find room for at least a stacking washer and dryer on the second floor.

Second, your home makes no provision for sleeping/bathing by anyone who is temporarily or permanently unable to climb a flight of stairs. Temporary immobility can happen at ANY time... football injury to a teen, car accident, problem pregnancy, etc. While someone could sleep on the sofa, where would he/she bathe? It might be a good idea to put squeeze a shower into that powder room - tho it looks like you'd have to give up your "food staging area" to do that.

Here is a link that might be useful: Thread about having a bedroom over garage?