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Floor Plans For A Narrow 3 Story House

11 years ago

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This post was edited by Crea12 on Mon, Apr 8, 13 at 22:35

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Comments (6)

User
11 years ago
You can put the link in the box provided. It doesn't show up until you preview your message.

The drawings are very difficult to understand.

Here is a link that might be useful: link
mrspete
11 years ago
Your dimensions are not condusive to comfortable furniture placement. For example, a 10x24 dining room (with one door on the narrow end) is just going to be odd. To say the least, it's going to look like a bowling alley. Likewise, an almost-square office is going to leave you with lots of empty space in the middle, while you cram all your desks, bookshelves, etc. around the edges.

I suggest you start placing furniture in these rooms, and that'll allow you to see how your rooms'll function.

This is why it's always good to spend lots of time on paper! (or, in this case the computer) Mistakes here are free.
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zone4newby
11 years ago
I'm having trouble looking at the plan too. The font is tiny, and I can't tell which rooms are which upstairs.

How will this house be used? Is it a vacation home, or will all those bedrooms be full all the time? How many people will live/stay here?

It looks like there's no interior staircase from the garage to the upstairs. Is that typical in your area? This looks like a beach house to me, so you may plan to use the garage more for storage of beach toys than parking, but even so, having stairs that are protected from the weather would be important to me-- hauling groceries upstairs in the rain is not fun. And based on the number of bedrooms you've got planned, you're going to need a lot of food!

When people have posted plans with the wraparound stairs you've got inside in other plans, one of the experts usually tells them they're not up to code. Apparently those tiny angled stairs aren't allowed in new construction.

It's a good first effort, but I agree with Mrs. Pete that the room sizes are all off. The kitchen is too big to work in efficiently (the work triangle is massive), the dining room is awkwardly long and narrow (I'm in a 12 foot wide dining room right now, and I wouldn't want to lose 2 feet of width-- if a big person sat at the far end of the table and needed to leave during the meal, they may have real trouble squeezing between seated people and the wall to get out. If you go this way, I'd buy a narrower than standard table and seat people on benches. I think you should place furniture in the living room to see if you can come up with an arrangement that makes you happy. Your kitchen and living room have a bigger footprint than my entire first house-- it's a whole lot of open space for just sofas and cooking.

Good luck! I'm sure you're going to have a beautiful home!
Crea12
Original Author
11 years ago
Hi thanks everyone for responding. I don't have to worry about it being up to code because this house won't be built in the U.S. anyway. It will be a vacation home for a family of 8 plus other relatives that stay with us, however, we want to eventually retire there and be able to have our kids and grand kids over. We will spend most of our time in the kitchen and living room because we do have a lot of relatives. Do you think the kitchen and living room are still too big? Good idea about the staircase being covered or adding one inside the garage. Should we just cover the outside one or add one inside? I kind of feel it to be a little creepy having one inside the garage because it would have access to inside, but I don't know. About the dining room, I was thinking it was too narrow also but couldn't really come up with anything better. The office room is big enough for another sitting area. I wanted it to be that big because it has access to the balcony. What do you think about the carport and covered patio and balconies? Does the third floor seem okay?
zone4newby
11 years ago
I would want any interior staircase to have a solid locking door at the bottom.

What I think of the size of your kitchen/living room doesn't matter. I think you should play around with furniture placement in that large space and think about whether or not *you* are going to be happy with it. I might consider talking to an interior decorator about how she would recommend designing a space for so many people. Do you imagine a few conversation groupings, or do you want a set up so everyone can watch a movie/tv together or what?

If you go over to the kitchen forum, they can help you figure out how to design a kitchen that will work for lots of people, while still being functional for one person to make a meal. I think you haven't got a kitchen that works for one person very well right now, and I think it's worth working on that.

My intention here is to point out things you may not have noticed, so you can decide whether or not they are a problem for you. It's your house, and you need to live with it, so you get to make the final call.

Happy building!
User
11 years ago
Building codes are minimum standards for safety and comfort. To say you don't have to worry about being up to code is to say you don't care about safety and comfort.

A better attitude would be to try to exceed the standards of the code so any observation about a feature that is below code standards should be taken very seriously.

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