That's a LONG way from the kitchen to the dining room, don't ya think?

I was going to suggest also that you may want to think about switching the LR with DR, or eliminating that wall to make one large room. Of course, that won't help you with trying to eliminate some sq. footage, but a DR is wasted space if it's too far away to use.

Also, will all three kids be okay using the same bathroom, if they're at home at the same time? Just a thought.

Very pretty exterior with an interesting floor plan. I always like plans that are unique, but not to the point that they are strange to live in and this one seems very nice! I'd suggest that if you can afford the sq. footage as it is, keep it. When you think about shaving off 300 sq.ft, your savings vs. the extra room may not be worth it.

P.S. Your location sounds divine!

Hi Hadley,

That elevation you linked to is the very one that inspired the home we're in the process of building right now!

It is a Drummond Designs house and I fell in love with it at first sight. Thereafter, no other design I looked at moved me at all... and I must have looked at about 10,000! Unfortunately none of their floorplans met my needs so I had to design from scratch. But, I incorporated the porch/deck element. Here is a pic taken about a month ago:

My builder is supposed to be painting my exterior next week. If you want, I'll post some more exterior pics as soon as the painting is done. I don't have anywhere near the gorgeous view that it sounds like you will have tho!

Meanwhile, I do see where you're going with your floor-plan but you are right that the stairwell has got to be changed. Right now you don't have nearly enough room at the top of the stairs. Problem is however, when you move a stairwell, it usually causes a domino effect that winds up forcing you to change everything on both floors.

But, in case you don't already know it, Drummond Designs has several other plans with a very similar exterior. Perhaps one of those would fit your needs without so much tweaking?

Here is a link to the same plan on the Drummond Designs website. At the bottom right there are links to related plans. Or, you may find another design on their website that you like. Personally I think Drummond Designs has some of the most beautiful and unique exteriors of any plans available on the web. Especially if you tend to like the "old house" look.

Here is a link that might be useful: Same plan on the Drummond Designs website

Thank you for the feedback!

The DR is a long way...our current DR gets use primarily for crafting (that big table), music, and another quiet place (when no one is practicing) to read. For actual dining, it gets used about four times a year. In this house, which has no usable cellar, I was considering changing out the dining table for a pool table. That won't be necessary in the new house as there will be some nice usable space in the walkout basement.

Bathrooms...there is room between the rooms if I make the closets smaller and push down to the outside wall. With a full bath downstairs, though, I'm hopeful we can manage as I would rather have the closet space and desk nooks for now. Since DH will be plumbing the place, maybe he should go ahead and bring service to where the location would be so that it could be added easily later.

Once concern I have now is that mud/laundry--yes, it is really a back hall as somebody said in another thread--is combined and a little narrow to me. Ours is separate now, and I realize we would have to be much more careful with the mess and avoiding having clean clothes fall on a dirty floor or be in the way...

Bevangel, I am very excited to see your house! I like that you added the bay...I love bay windows and just might add one now that I see yours. Please keep posting pics of your progress. Do you have a floorplan online anywhere?

Other questions--how are you handling the upper decks? Rain drainage, snow shoveling?

I'm in central Texas so haven't even seen a snow shovel in 25 years. LOL! We do however get gully-washer rains on occasion. 5 or 6 inches in a single day so rain drainage is definitely an issue!

We lowered the porch roof as much as possible and put a very slight slope (1/12) on the part of the porch roof that is under the upper deck. That part is still basically a flat roof though and has a "torch-down" finish. Then, at the point where the deck ends, the porch roof drops down a couple of inches and then dips down to a 3/12 slope. That part will be shingled like the main roof. (I wanted a standing seam metal roof but the budget wouldn't stretch that far.)

The deck itself will ride on top of the flat roof portion and we will use Ipe deck tiles to floor it. Deck tiles are easy to put down and can be taken up and set aside temporarily if (when) the roof below begins leaking and needs repair. (As you know, flat roofs ALWAYS develop leaks every few years but I decided I could live with the occasional repairs - especially since any leak will be to an open porch so I don't have to worry about wet insulation or wet sheetrock leading to mold problems. Hopefully, it will not be too much of a problem to dry out the porch roof panels (also Hardie) and then repaint them.

A bigger issue for my architect was figuring out exactly how to support the deck without having to having to have support posts in the center of my porch which would have ruined the whole effect. We wound up with a very thick support beam that runs to one of the porch posts that sits on the angled cut off. That single porch post has to bear a LOT of weight. Ours is 12" x 12" square post and composed of about a dozen 2x4s bolted together then wrapped in Hardie. The other posts look the same but are built of only four 2x4s because they don't have to bear the same load. For a few hundred dollars, you can purchase porch posts that look like turned wood but have steel post inserts that will bear something like 12,000 pounds. That was what I had in mind - but my architect forgot to include that in his specifications - and my builder built these square posts without asking what I wanted. I finally decided to keep the square posts rather than pay extra to have them redone.

I'll go out and take some detail pictures of the porch and deck and post them for you.

My floor plan isn't on line anywhere but it is quite a bit larger than the 2500 sq ft limit your DH wants to impose. We're an older couple who entertain fairly large crowds of people quite a bit but we don't have any children. Thus I doubt our plan would be very adaptable to your needs but if you want to see it, I'd be happy to share it with you privately via email.

I wouldn't want to have to walk by the washer and dryer to get to the garage.

I wouldn't want to have to walk through the entire master closet to get to the bath, but its better than going through the bath to get to the closet.

The proportions of the public spaces seem off. I'd consolidate it into a single space and create a smaller dining nearer the kitchen. I'd swap the location of the stairs and main floor bath, which would bring the bath nearer the kitchen, and I'd move the door to the garage to the 'top' of the drawing-- the whole laundry/mud area is functioning as a hallway lined with storage.

The location of the office is great if it will be visited by people coming to see you. If it's for family use, I'd rather have it near the kitchen to better monitor kid's computer time, and so I could keep an eye on dinner while doing computer stuff.

I am no designer, but it sure seems to be a backwards house. When guests come in, they will be entering a dining room. You might use that area for something else, but you mention resale. How many people would want to buy something like that? With the comments made, not many. The first floor bath is supposed to be a 'guest' bath, or a bath that would be a 1/2 bath. There are no bedrooms on that floor- how many people would want to be trudging from upstairs to go down a flight of stairs to take a bath? For a 4 beroom home there is absolutely no closet storage upstairs.The closets in each bedroom are way too small- look at the dinky thing in the guest bedroom. With a family that big, there will be a large amount of linens, vacuum equipment, items that you just don't put in your bedroom closet. And yes, I sure would not want to have to go through a closet to get to the master bath- can you imagine showing your friends/family the new house, and having to drag them through your personal things just to see the master bath? It just is not a user-friendly house. It does not flow smoothly. Yes, the laundry room is narrow- but that seems to be insignificant related to other problems. I'm sorry to dig at plans that you think are a dreamhouse, but think about resale, also. I think you would have a hard time selling it. Now you can chew aprt the kind of house I want......

This is probably way out in left field, but what if you started with something like this one, lose the garage, change bedroom 4 to office, and tweek things around a little.

2nd floor: With bonus room (change to bedroom 4) it comes in at 2268 sf, so their is wiggle room.

Just a something to look at. Hope it helps.

Thank you all so much for all the suggestions. Goodness, thepond, you really went above and beyond....

You all have given me a lot to think about. I will have to ponder. There are some interesting and surprising points here.

In addition to the looks, we chose this particular kind of elevation to have a house from which you could see the long view from every main room--DR/music, family, kitchen, and every bedroom. Transoms over and perhaps sidelights on the 5-ft. wide doors between main rooms downstairs will allow light to flow on a minimum of three sides in the main rooms. Garage needs to go to side (barn or carriage style), not front, to keeps interior views clear and avoid a suburban feel. The full bath downstairs provides for those days when people come into the house too dirty to go any further (happens more often than you think!--I'm also considering another one in the basement). Also, we have one now off the kitchen and I really treasured it when my kids were younger--so much easier (and warmer, in the winter) to let them take a bath there than trompsing up the stairs--but better closer to kitchen, to be sure, I'd like to figure out a way to do that without losing master bath space upstairs. It is also just nice to have an extra full bath when you can, I think, especially if you need to host someone who can't do stairs.

My thoughts on the d/music room, fam, kitch placement were as follows: most of our traffic and room-to-room interaction is kitch-family room, it would be bothersome to traipse through the d/music room to get to the fam room. Said traipsing would disrupt the quiet space provided by the d/music room. The quiet/music, usual tidiness and nicer furnishings of the d/music room makes for a pleasant entry into the home and provides a buffer against the chaos happening elsewhere. If you visualize the table area without leaves, brought down to five or six feet and perhaps a little more seating near the piano (may be an upright, we have one now but will be getting something else), the idea of stepping into that space might seem a little more logical? If not, please let me know as I had seen plans entering the side of the DR and had liked them for that reason.

The comments about the closets really took me by surprise. Coming from a 200-year-old house, I thought there was enormous amounts of storage space in this one except Bedroom 4. As is, there is actually plenty for the intended occupant and my thought was that anyone following us could easily throw up a wall across the back if they prefer the storage to the view and floor space. Ditto the other bedrooms. Given the amount of usable basement and attic storage we will have, I will be happier with windows and floorspace.

On the MBr closet, I thought of the larger space as more of a walk-through dressing area. Our "mess" wouldn't be out, it would be behind doors of some kind. I had been thinking about shortening either the hanging or the other side to put in a dressing bench. But it doesn't seem to be clicking with some of the posters as a dressing area, so I will think on it more.

Interestingly, the original floor plan for the elevation swapped the kitchen and family room. The pro to that is that the kitchen then gets all day sunshine and is adjacent to both DR (still to the left) and family room. Also, fam room and mbr can share a chimney for fireplace. The downside is that it throws off the very traditional and practical garage-mud-laundry-kitchen progression...but maybe there is another way....

Please keep the thoughts coming. I would really like to know if this plan is completely off-putting or the flexible, sunny gem we are aiming for.

Home designs are intensely personal so, for the most part, if YOU like the design and aren't worried about resale value, do what you like with it.

But, that said, your stairwell simply won't work. You don't have any measurements on the plan but it is clear that the hallway between the top of the stairs and bedrooms 3 and 4 is only about 18 inches wide and maybe narrower. (It is only about half as wide as the door to bedroom 4 which could be an narrow as 28" or, at most, as wide as 36" so logically, your hallway at the narrowest point is maybe 14" to 18" wide.)

At the very least, you need to move the stairwell back toward the back of the house. That means both your mud and laundry room and your master bedroom closet will be narrower by however much you must move the stairway backward to give yourself a reasonably wide hallway upstairs.

Since you mention a basement, that means you will have a staircase down to the basement that will be underneath the one shown. Thus, you can't even use the space under the upper portion of these stairs for low-roofed laundry area.

As bevangel said, moving a staircase has a domino effect on floorplans. It is never just a "tweak." You really need to start over with a different idea for the staircase and design both upper and lower rooms around the stairwell.
One suggestion, straight staircases take up less square footaage than U-shaped stairs because you don't lose space to a landing. Given that you're trying to keep the plan under 2500 sq ft (not counting garage?), you might want to design around a straight staircase instead of the U.

I do appreciate wanting to design for the views! You mentioned the direction of your best views but didn't say which way you wanted your house to face. Does it matter? Also, what in particular do you like about this elevation. Perhaps with more info some of the good folks on this site could point you toward plans that might meet your needs.

Do you already have your property? Would the house HAVE to sit a certain way on that property? I too, would want lots of light in the kitchen, where you tend to spend alot of your day, especially if you have children. You have given us a good 'puzzle' to do- I'm sure a pro could figure it out right away, but it is interesting to try to do it ourselves.

Well, let me toss in one experience with "sunlight in the kitchen" which I had really really wanted. Until I lived with it and discovered that south sun means the kitchen is bright and HOT from about noon on. It also means that at some point each day there will be blinds pulled down the windows because all that sun causes severe glare on *everything* and you literally can't see what you're doing. And did I mention the kitchen is HOT every afternoon from mid-spring through mid-fall. If I want a cool kitchen, icicles will hang throughout the other rooms.

No, my next house will have the kitchen facing north or east, but absolutely not south or west.