Input on my floor plan
Asylum_Point
8 years ago
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Virgil Carter Fine Art
8 years agoRelated Discussions
Floor plan input, please
Comments (17)Thank you all! Being able to get some fresh input and bounce ideas around really helped. Lisa, I think I have enough room there, but when we measure for the 20th time before ordering the cabinets, I will make sure. The 12" or 15" cabinet can be knocked down to 9" and 12" respectively if necessary. And one of my "ideas" for my husband would be to open up that wall further anyway. It's a small hall area (probably about 40" wide where we enter from outside and a bigger opening into the kitchen from there will make things like dragging groceries in easier. Right now we're keeping the fridge we have which is muuuuch smaller than the 36" model I'm using in my floor plans, so accounting for a new one down the line is more reason to shorten that wall there anyway. I'll have to play around with putting something on that basement stair wall--the non cordless kitchen phone hangs there right now so maybe a shallow desk-like piece of built in furniture would work there. After all, I won't have my small kitchen table to toss the mail on anymore. ;-D Lavender, thank you for all your input! I like this new layout much better than my original. The plan was for my husband to build some sort of shelving thing to transition from the end of the cabinets to the peninsula so that's a good idea....See MoreGive me some hard love! Floor plan critique
Comments (24)This is really long and will boggle your mind with possibilities... but I did some thinking about your laundry room space. I can't make everything all fit perfectly, so I'm throwing a bunch of ideas out so you can see what could get traded off and/or sacrificed according to your own priorities... By the way, keep in mind I'm working off assumed/guessed measurements. If my assumption about the position of your existing bathroom is off, it changes how much fair-game space exists between the you-can't-touch-this existing bathroom wall and the front entry wall of the house. (BTW, I have it drawn as 27'3") So here's version 1 (aka Smallish Laundry) Shower in the bath, access to laundry room from front door or from bedrooms, but smaller laundry room, with only 3 feet of counter space, and your son gets a pretty small closet. Here's version 2 (aka No Shower) Laundry room much bigger, access to laundry room from the bedrooms or the front door (hubby can at least drop his muddy clothes in the laundry room), but no shower in the front bath. (BTW, this laundry room should be flipped, so the washer/dryer are on the bath wall instead of the closet wall - that would consolidate the plumbing a bit, and also reduces the noise to your son's bedroom a little.) Here's Version 3, aka Small Bedroom laundry room has space, shower in the front bathroom, access to the laundry from the bedrooms - but, your son's bedroom starts feeling pretty cramped. By the way, an aside about entry cubbies. All three of the versions above have a little less cubby space than your original plan because of the entrance to the hall. Version 2 (No Shower) has the least - Versions 1 and 3 get a few more inches by turning the cubbies sideways, which might also mean the entry feels a little less cramped - especially if you could move the door to the left so it doesn't crowd the cubbies behind the stairs. And on the cubbies themselves: in these drawings, they're set up as 21" deep, split between hanging space and bench space (10.5" each). So versions 1 and 3 look like this the way I've drawn them: I did a version 4 that sacrificed access to the laundry room from the front door, but realized that if you're not able to access the laundry room from the front door, placing it in that position doesn't make sense. It makes more sense put the laundry room next to the existing bath (plumbing is more consolidated this way), like this: So this is basically the plan you already have, but with a shower in the front bath. My reasoning for wanting to shift things around in the first place was that the master suite felt really cramped trying to occupy the space between the front of the house and the bathroom, and you had to choose between a walk-in closet and a walk-in shower - you couldn't do both in that space. So lets step away from the entry way for a moment and visit that master suite: I realized I hadn't added a closet to your daughter's room, and doing so meant I had to make that room a little bigger, which decreased the space I had thought existed for the master bath. At first glance, pass-between closets to the master bath jumped out at me, so I drew it that way. At 3' deep, the one on the north wall could be configured as a shallow walk-in (6' total hanging space down both sides, plus wall space on the north wall) or just a really deep reach-in (5'10 hanging space as drawn here) - in either case, you end up with a little more total closet space than your proposal (looks like about 8' as proposed). There's a ton of other options for how to configure the back of the house - but the point is, I think enough space exists there to give you better layout choices than trying to jam the master between the bath and the entry - as long as you shift the proposed laundry room across the hall the the west side of the house. Again, though, keep in mind I'm working off guesswork measurements. You'll need to tweak/rearrange based on the actual measurements of your house. Back to the entry/laundry/bath: You could keep the laundry room up front but nix the access from the bedrooms to the laundry room to eliminate the need for the hall: I personally don't like this one: you have to lug all your laundry back and forth through the kitchen. Bu I included it for the sake of being thorough. :-) Then I started thinking about different ways the entry, laundry, bath, and hall could interact - would getting the bathroom door out of the entry help?I personally don't like this one largely because there's nowhere in the bathroom to put a window - even with two outside walls, you still end up with a dark bathroom. I'm sure there's other ways to configure this space to fix that - maybe with a smaller shower stall instead of a full-sized tub? But I'm not going to take the time to look at them right now... I think this is enough confusion for a little while! :-) Thanks for letting me play with your house! :-)...See MoreFloor plan input please
Comments (24)Hi cpartist. Unfortunately we can't flip kitchen and living room. There are regulations about where the garage must be on our lot. I said nothing about flipping the garage. Only the interior living room and kitchen. Have the pantry open to the hallway. I have never seen an elevator in a house in my city. We are truly OK with stairs and believe that they help with balance and core strength even as we age. My mom was still going up and down stairs daily into her late 80s:) I'm in my 60's and agree they do help. My mother in her fifties moved from her beloved colonial into a ranch house. I was young at the time and asked her why. Her comment was, "we're not getting any younger and one never knows what life will throw at you." My mother was a very wise and very healthy woman. She went to the gym 5x a week and those days she didn't go to the gym, she walked either around her neighborhood or on her treadmill. She ate healthy, maintained a good weight and never smoked. At age 72, she developed Parkinson's disease, something I wouldn't wish on anyone. She was fine for the first 4-5 years. She still drove, still went to the gym 5x a week, etc. Then she started to go downhill. Climbing up the 2 steps into the house from the garage became like climbing Mt. Everest. However she was able to park out front and get into the house. Because she had built her house with aging in place in mind, she was able to still live in her house until the last 6 months of her life at age 84. My DH's mother was fine with stairs too until she fell down them and broke her hip at age 84. Then she had to leave her beloved house and finally passed away at age 87. She never quite got over the fact she had to leave her home. Here are what the windows are like in the living room room so not sure what we need to change there. There is a 2 story house on the south side of us so more windows there don't buy us a lot. I would put high windows on the south wall to let in natural light. South is the best light. Northern light means the house will be dark. Southern windows even with a house there will bring in more light and warmth in the winter since the sun in winter is lower in the sky. You have at least 12' plus whatever the setbacks are between your house and your neighbor's house so I disagree that they won't buy you a lot. Northern windows will do the opposite. Very little natural light and no natural passive solar heating in winter. Do yourself a favor and do some research on passive solar heating/cooling....See MoreNeed input on floor plan!
Comments (19)cpartist - I will definitely consider an architect as there is a lot to consider. You've given me a lot to think about and discuss with an architect. One question though - if all the views are out the back of the house how to do maximize both the light/passive solar heating/cooling and the views? You actually started well in that your house is only 2 rooms deep front to back. However it's done by how it's laid out and that is determined by the land you're building on too. Consider an L, U, H, T, or I shaped house. Also a good architect can come up with ideas you may not have even thought of to create the home of your dreams. For example. My house is a U shaped house so my public rooms get both north and south light. Since I'm in FL, my south rooms have a lanai out the back. What happens is in summer because the sun is higher in the sky, that lanai and my public rooms stay bright with not direct sun all day long, all summer. Now that we're headed into winter, the sun is lower in the sky and now it starts to stream into my public rooms which is perfect for natural heating/cooling. I would also consider lumping bedrooms together on one side to create public and private areas of your home. You won't need separate spaces for kids & adults since you & DH will be the only full time occupants. Absolutely. When public and private areas are separated, it makes it much more pleasurable with how you live. Do you really want your master right off the living room or one of the guest rooms right off the front entry? Again, in our house, our public areas are public and our private areas are separate and distinct. Again, I also want to stress the idea of if it's a two story home, seriously considering putting in an elevator for long term use. Because we're on a narrow city lot, we had to build up instead of out and being we're in an area where the average age is retired, we put in an elevator. I've had friends use it and it's great for hauling up boxes, luggage, etc for now. My studio is upstairs so for now, I get lots of exercise going up and down the stairs multiple times a day but it's good knowing the elevator is there if I need it. There are other things we added too that make the house more age friendly. Another thing to consider is how you actually live and how to make rooms do double duty so you can get away with less square footage or better use of square footage. For example, we have a large living/dining/kitchen area since we like to entertain casually. Our living room and dining room have sliders that open to our lanai for indoor/outdoor entertaining. Dinner in our dining area, and Jeopardy and the news in the living room when we don't have guests (which we don't now.) We also have an office downstairs for DH that could double as extra bedroom space for a grandchild since there's a powder room right nearby. We have our master suite wing on the other side of the U shape and upstairs we have 2 bedrooms. However one has a murphy bed and doubles as my exercise room and the other has a pull out queen bed sofa that is my art room. Every room gets used daily. You show 4 bedrooms, a rec room and a living room. Do you need all those rooms and if so, how often will they all be used? We have 2 1/2 baths. One upstairs for the 2 bedrooms there, the master bath and a powder room. Will you need 4 full baths? So the best thing first to do is consider how you live and want to live and what your actual needs are and what your wouldn't it be nice to haves are. Put together some photos of houses and interiors you like and then contact an architect to work with you....See Morebpath
8 years agobpath
8 years agoStephanie Sims_Arnold
8 years agoAsylum_Point
8 years agoStephanie Sims_Arnold
8 years agomrspete
8 years agocpartist
8 years agoUser
8 years agoGarbett Homes
8 years agochisue
8 years ago
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