Find a plan that has most of your needs there are hundreds of house plan websites and they all have things that fit the bill. You can modify them or have an architect draw you a unique plan using the pre-fab plan as an inspirational example. Pictures often help relay these kinds of wants more so that a bullet list. Ex. You may list out all the rooms and style but if you show a front elevation with what you want the "feel" to be you will get further faster in my experience. Have fun! What square footage are you thinking?

Or go to an Architect, explain what you want and let him come up with ideas and make it YOUR house instead of someone else's home modified for you. Also take into consideration that the type of building lot you end up with will have an impact on the type of house you can build.

Thank you! I'm thinking it will need to be close to 3,000 sq. ft to have everything we are looking for, and have the bedrooms be a decent size. We were toying with the idea of being our own GC's so I wanted to get a head start with a plan and start a binder of ideas.

Since you already know a lot about what you want, start putting areas next to the spaces and making relationship diagrams but don't look for house designs, the next step is to find one or more sites.

IMO selecting a house design at this stage would be spinning your wheels. Some people like to do that but often is is horribly frustrating or at least many of my clients tell me so.

Of course, continuing to steal magazines from your dentist's office and taking photos of houses you like is helpful but always put a post-it note on them explaining specifically what you like about the image so others won't make incorrect assumptions - a house is made up of many elements so be careful not to let the bad ones hitch a ride with the good ones. That's what happens when you take a design from the internet; 20% good and 80% bad is not a good ratio.

You might squeeze all that into 3000 sq ft but, if you really want the bedrooms to be a "decent size," I'm guessing you'll probably wind up closer to 3500 sq ft heated/cooled minimum.

Here is a link to a 3600 sq ft plan from eplans that could be modified to meet MOST of your listed requirements. eg, you could put another nice sized bedroom in the bonus area upstairs, change the library at the front of the house into an office for your husband, then fit a sunroom and small mudroom into the space where the office was. The kitchen would also have to be modified to allow for that 8 ft island you want but that might be doable if you made the kitchen open to the great room with the island separating the two room, moved the pantry over toward the right and had wrapped cabinets in an L shape along the garage wall and dining room wall. (The storage pantry would have to be accessed from the butler's pantry.)

Note that the garage on this plan is really too shallow for many modern vehicles (you need a minimum of about 22 ft if you want to be able to squeeze around the front of back of an SUV when the garage door is closed. 24' is better) so you would probably need to pull that side of the house out by about 2 to 3 feet but that would also give you more room for the mudroom and sunroom.

The upstairs already shows a master plus 3 reasonably nice sized secondary bedrooms and an upstairs laundry. As I said, you could put another bedroom into the bonus space over the garage and perhaps enlarge the laundry as well.

Obviously, this is not a perfect design but it might be a starting point and should give you a better idea of what size house you're probably looking at in order to fit all your must haves.

A good architect could probably come up with a design that is a bit more compact than this but fitting everything into under 3000 sq ft would, I think, be a tight squeeze.

Note that the house pictured was built left-right reversed from the floor plans so it is a bit confusing.

Here is a link that might be useful: house plan

I'd recommend reading some books about home design so you can think about what is important to you aside from the specific rooms you want. Sightlines, how you want things to connect, etc... I really like "Designing your Perfect House" by Hirsch.

I think you probably will need a custom plan-- we're building a house that's got all the bedrooms upstairs, and plans like that are unusual on the big plan sites. Apparently most people want a main floor master. Since you know what you want, sifting through thousands of plans trying to find it is likely to be an exercise in frustration. I speak from experience.

I echo the advice to read some books on design. I bought the "Designing your Perfect House" book and found it quite useful. However, you really do need your lot first so you know what direction the house will face and where your views are located.

Also, figure out how large you want these five bedrooms to be, add in the square footage for the associated closets, bathrooms, laundry room and everything else you want on the second floor. Don't forget about adding in some square footage for the stairs and hallways. What is the total square footage for everything you want on the second floor? Your house is going to need to be at least twice this size unless you are okay with putting some of the living space over the garage. If that is a good idea or not depends on where you live.

Since you're this early in the planning stage, I'd suggest you think about greening your house design as well. Think about passive solar, geothermal, insulation, etc. All that will affect the affordability of your forever home as well as overall comfort.

IMO, it's rather pointless trying to design a house without a site. Good design grows from the site, with it's views, natural lighting directions, views, energy considerations, topography, locations for wells and septic (if not on city utilities), etc.

The problem with fixating on stock plans from the Internet plan factories is that they are generic designs and do not take into consideration any of the above. Taking a generic design and trying to fit it on a specific site can be a frustrating exercise, depending on the site.

Finally, a caution for you and other lurkers in the same situation: a fixation on the plan, room sizes and features of a house almost invariably leads to bulky, ill-proportioned, roof-heavy exteriors. This forum is full of threads that illustrate this condition, over and over again.

That's because good design is a harmonious balance between interiors and exteriors. A preponderance of time and priority on the interiors means less time and balance on what the house looks like on the exterior. Good design is a process that studies the inside, then the outside and repeats and adjusts the process until everything works well together and is in harmony. Don't get fixated early on the interiors.

If you are keeping a notebook of ideas and references, make sure that there's as much attention give to the exterior as the interior.

Good luck with your project!