I noticed you have to walk through the office to get to the second bedroom, which means the office could never be turned into a third bedroom.

Unfortunately, I can't see anything else because it scanned too small. Can you make it larger?

Lots of things here could use real improvement:

- I agree that the washer/dryer doesn't work in the master closet. It means that anyone else in the household has to walk through the master bedroom and bathroom to reach the machines. Plus, no space for waiting loads or space for folding.

- Don't waste a corner on a closet. If you flip-flop the closet (make it a walk-through closet) and the master bath, you'd be able to place the baths back-to-back, consolidating the plumbing.

- You actually improved both baths by simplifying them ... but where are your towel racks going? The only answer is the back of the doors ... which won't work on pocket doors.

- You don't want pocket doors on bathrooms -- pocket doors are great for doors that stay open most of the time ... not bathrooms.

- The office isn't much of an office ... it's more like a wide hallway. You'd have space for a desk, but a person sitting in the chair would block what is probably your main family entrance.

- You don't want the refrigerator moved out of the main kitchen area /across a traffic aisle; however, that back wall would be good for a floor-to-ceiling bookcase ... or kitchen counters for things that you want out of the main kitchen area (for example, coffee pot or pantry or laundry).

- Where's your eating area? The living space is already small.

- Overall, you're very short on storage ... you have the two closets in the bedrooms, and literally nothing else.

- With its simple shape, it'll be inexpensive to build.

- The circulation /flow isn't great. Because it's small, everything's close together, but nothing's really laid out logically or in such a way to maximize function. For example, to pick up a sweater from the master closet, you have to walk through two rooms. To bring in groceries /take out garbage, you have to walk through either the living room or the office.

Not sure why the images were resized they were much larger before uploading, il see if I can get a better quality set of images up.

Just to point out, we have decided to go with stucco instead of board and batten, too many vertical lines we think.

The "office" is really just a multi use space, a mudroom and a place for my wife to have a desk. Not that we intend to add on but if we did, the exterior office door would be the direction I would push out.

Also as to walking through the bathroom to get to the closet, its a personal preference.

Ditto for the washer and dryer stacked in the closet. I will be honest we are horrible about doing the laundry... Having all of our clothes contained in one location is our only hope.

All that aside, would it make sense to extend the roof over the front porch?

P.S. considering possibly decreasing the size of the master shower to a more modest size of 60x42 instead of 60x60. This would allow for more room between the vanity and shower itself. Although there is currently nearly 4' of space there.

I will admit that the house will not be an award-winning representation of architectural genious, heck I expect most people to find it odd or quirky. But my wife and I are odd and quirky so we should mesh with the home quite well.

Thanks mrs pete, you have brought up some very valid points.

I will have to play around with swapping the closet and bathroom, keeping costs down is always a good thing.

The dining area would be dead center in the kitchen, we would use a small table for 2 or 4.

Keeping the seating along the walls in the living room is our intent with a sli. entertainment center on the bedroom wall.

Would it make sense to move the fridge back to its original location, loose the prep space and gain more storage space?

Floor to ceiling cabinetry in that spot is planned and would be ample with the 12ft ceilings.

Again I would consider the office more of a mudroom as it will be the main entrance. (We will be parking behind the house) There will be a desk there but it will have roughly 4ft from the edge of a standard desk to the door. Plenty of room right?

As for storage, everything we own, excluding furniture, barely fills half of a 5x8 enclosed trailer. 4 Rubbermaid tubs and 4 large cardboard boxes from lowes! We are minimalists and make a point of only retaining items that have meaning or purpose.

However the amount of storage we have planned is deceiving. The guest closet is a floor to ceiling built in 12ft high, the kitchen has a wall of 30" deep cabitets 12ft high, the wall dividing the livingroom and bedroom will have a row of 16" deep base cabinets and full height shelving also 12ft high running its entire length.

As for hanging towels, infront of the toilet in the guest bath and on either side of the tub in the master.

Living room space is actually larger than our current homes. Considering that the maximum recomended tv viewing distance for on 80" tv is roughly 16', I feel that it is adequate, not that we own or plan to own an 80" tv... According to google the average living room is roughly 350sqft. This one is just under 300, even if it is directly off of the kitchen.

I would leave your master bath & closet as is. In our current home our master suite is setup that way and we love it - so much so that we duplicated the arrangement in our new build.

Move the laundry machines to the bathroom and the linen to the closet. The laundry machines really don't belong in the closet: too much lint and dust and humidity, and not enough air circulation in the closet. And if you swap it with the linen, then all your storage is in the same place, but the linen is still close to the bathroom. And you have storage under the vanities, too, any maybe over the toilet.

Just to point out, we have decided to go with stucco instead of board and batten, too many vertical lines we think.

Disagree. The board-and-batten works for a small cottage-y house. I think stucco would be out of place on such a small house.

The "office" is really just a multi use space, a mudroom and a place
for my wife to have a desk. Not that we intend to add on but if we did,
the exterior office door would be the direction I would push out.

Intersected by four doorways, it's just a wide hallway.

Also as to walking through the bathroom to get to the closet, its a personal preference.

Eh, done well it's a preference ... and one I like ... but I don't think it's done well here. Closet-in-bathroom works when the rooms are arranged so that you can enter the closet with only a few steps ... in this case, you're walking the whole length of the house to reach the closet. Again, circulation /flow is a problem in this house.

P.S. considering possibly decreasing the size of the master shower to
a more modest size of 60x42 instead of 60x60. This would allow for more
room between the vanity and shower itself. Although there is currently
nearly 4' of space there.

I didn't realize the shower was that large; it's out of proportion with the rest of the house. Yes, downsize it.

I will admit that the house will not be an award-winning
representation of architectural genious, heck I expect most people to
find it odd or quirky. But my wife and I are odd and quirky so we should
mesh with the home quite well.

No, you won't find any problem here with quirky. This is just poorly laid out.

The dining area would be dead center in the kitchen, we would use a small table for 2 or 4.

We've rented a beach house with that kitchen layout several times. Hate it. Why? Because nothing in the kitchen is close together, and cooking even a simple breakfast requires so much walking back and forth. The prep space is just bad. My suggestion: Take this kitchen to the kitchen portion of this site; you'll get good advice there.
Would it make sense to move the fridge back to its original location, loose the prep space and gain more storage space?

Yes, move the fridge back into the main cooking area and use the "back wall" as secondary kitchen area /storage.

Floor to ceiling cabinetry in that spot is planned and would be ample with the 12ft ceilings.

12'ceilings in this small house will be out of proportion. Think elevator shaft.

As for storage, everything we own, excluding furniture, barely fills
half of a 5x8 enclosed trailer. 4 Rubbermaid tubs and 4 large cardboard
boxes from lowes! We are minimalists and make a point of only retaining
items that have meaning or purpose.

Okay, but once those boxes are unpacked, you want your necessities to be easy to reach ... not 12' up or two rooms away.
Living room space is actually larger than our current homes.

If you're not squeezing a dining room table into it, the living room is small but adequate.

But my wife and I are odd and quirky so we should mesh with the home quite well.

Odd and quirky is a good thing. A poorly laid out house without good flow is not a good thing.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading the Sarah Susanka book, The Not So Big House. Lots of great advice on how to create a small house with great lines and flow. This house isn't it. (Once you've read that book, read some of the others because she gets into further detail as to how to make a home flow.)

An example, not of flow, but of poorly laid out design, is if I was a guest in your home, I certainly wouldn't want to walk across what is essentially the foyer/mudroom to use the bathroom.

How wide is your master closet? I can't read the dimensions.

Also what is the size of your master bedroom and your living room? In the drawing both seem to be about the same size. Will you really spend that much time in the bedroom that you need it to be the size of the living room?

I agree that in a small house a bathroom that is 5' x 5' is a bit excessive.

I agree with bp about the laundry. If you insist on having it in your master suite, the bathroom would be a much better spot for it for all the reasons she suggested.

The dining area would be dead center in the kitchen, we would use a small table for 2 or 4.

In the kitchen your dining table will become a barrier between your fridge and your sink. When we cook, we follow this order mostly. We pull food out of the fridge and bring it to the sink where we wash it. Then we prep it in the space between the sink and the stove and finally we bring it to the stove to cook it.

So the most efficient layout is to have your fridge>DW (so it's out of the prep zone)>Sink>Prep counter space>cooktop.

Would it make sense to move the fridge back to its original location, loose the prep space and gain more storage space?

Yes to more storage space, but no to it's original spot. It should ideally be on the outside edge next to the sink and dishwasher.

Keeping the seating along the walls in the living room is our intent with a sli. entertainment center on the bedroom wall.

That will work well as long as you both follow the same wake/sleep schedules. If you're on different schedules and one wants to stay up late watching tv and the other wants to go to bed, the noise will travel through.

However the amount of storage we have planned is deceiving. The guest closet is a floor to ceiling built in 12ft high, the kitchen has a wall of 30" deep cabitets 12ft high, the wall dividing the livingroom and bedroom will have a row of 16" deep base cabinets and full height shelving also 12ft high running its entire length.

High storage is good for things you never use, but is useless for daily stuff. You need lots of storage low to you and easy to get to. BTW: I applaud that you are minimalists, but do realize that we all have a tendency to fill up our spaces somewhat.

As for hanging towels, infront of the toilet in the guest bath and on either side of the tub in the master.

So what you're saying is that in the guest bath you have to open the shower door, walk out dripping wet and grab a towel hanging on the wall since the shower door opens against the wall?

And in the master, it means that you have to walk dripping wet out of the shower to the tub to grab a towel?

Where are you located? Which direction faces South?

We are located in central FL the front of the house faces east, side porch faces south. The western side of the house is heavily forested.

Sofar we have decided to make the following changes:

Move the fridge to the sink side of the kitchen on the outer edge

Re-resize the shower to 42x60 for proportionality.

Squaring up the roof and adding an open gable over the side porch.

And... Rename the "office" to "entry".

In all honesty its usage will not be heavy, its just my wife and I. We literally have ZERO family, and any entertaining we do is in our "barn" which is where we are currently living. (Its a nice barn; with a full bath, bedroom, and kitchen).

Im not super concerned about where the towels are hung, we hang them to dry after we use them. We set a dry towel and clothes on the bathroom counter prior to bathing. And in reality unless you have a towel in the shower with you or can reach one from the shower, water will get on the floor.

Thats what bath mats are for.

High ceilings and the elevator shaft feeling I will take into consideration.

Possibly bringing the ceiling down to 10ft in the:

Guest bedroom, master bath, and offi..."entry room"

And 9ft in the master closet.

In general I enjoy high ceilings and am a bit more comfortable with slightly higher than average ceilings for the size of the space than usual.

Once we rented an appartment with a room I made into my man cave. It was 8'x8' with a FORTY FOOT CEILING! It was a ironically the shaft for a grain elevator. We lived in the basement (walkout, as it was on a hill) of the servants quarters (which contained the horse stalls and feed storage among other things) for a large manor, located in what is now downtown Burlington VT.

Not counting my "man cave" each room was a horse stall. Brick floors, brick walls, cast iron grates over the drain channels, iron bars on the stall doors, coal chutes, feed bins, barn door front door, sewar pipes from the units above us. Really interestig place.

Im also not too concerned about storage, we really take de-cluttering seriously.

To be fair storage for a mop, broom, and vacuum "was" lacking but with the relocation of the fridge we have room for a large vertical cabinet on that "wall of storage".

But for mundane "every day" things, asside from clothes and shoes, I cant think of anything my wife or I use that would be put up regularly?

Seriously, not poking fun, what are typical items that would be stored that we would need easy access to?

Off the top of my head the only thing I can come up with is an umbrella, which I currently have 5 of in my truck... NONE on which see regular use.

Living in FL you just learn to deal with getting wet.

Odd and quirky is a good thing. A poorly laid out house without good flow is not a good thing.

And that's almost exactly what I said earlier. You'll get no negative feedback here for quirky ... but what we're discussing is a house with poor circulation /poor flow and lack of function. But I think you're in love with it and aren't listening to reason.

In all honesty its usage will not be heavy, its just my wife and I. We
literally have ZERO family, and any entertaining we do is in our "barn"
which is where we are currently living. (Its a nice barn; with a full
bath, bedroom, and kitchen).

Yet you're planning a guest room and a guest bath ... with few guests, you might downsize the bathroom to kind of a "jack and jill" ... a half bath attached to your bedroom with a toilet and large vanity ... a second half bath accessible to the hallway (and more accessible to the guest bedroom) ... and a shower /tub room in between the two. It'd save you one shower.

Im not super concerned about where the towels are hung, we hang them to
dry after we use them. We set a dry towel and clothes on the bathroom
counter prior to bathing. And in reality unless you have a towel in the
shower with you or can reach one from the shower, water will get on the
floor.

This is a good example. You can rearrange things so that you'll have towel bars or hooks adjacent to the shower /tub so that you avoid this problem ... but you're opting to say, "We'll accept this flaw. It's no big deal."

In general I enjoy high ceilings and am a bit more comfortable with
slightly higher than average ceilings for the size of the space than
usual.

Investigate the Golden Ratio. It's the proportion that our eye naturally finds most pleasing.

Seriously, not poking fun, what are typical items that would be stored that we would need easy access to?

One thing I'm very excited about is a small cleaning closet that'll be in the very center of my house. Right now I have cleaning items scattered here and there throughout my house: Some above the washer/dryer, some under the bathroom sinks, some crammed into the coat closet. As I started making a list of what I wanted to store in that cleaning closet, it turned out to be a pretty extensive list: the vacuum cleaner, dedicated spots for the Roomba to plug in, a shelf for bottles of cleaning products, hooks on the back of the door for brooms and mops, space for the bucket in which I keep old-rags for cleaning, storage space for bulk-purchased paper products.

In the kitchen, I have some things that can be stored in difficult-to-reach spots (12' up) because I don't use them often; for example, the punchbowl -- I use it a couple times a year, but I don't need it at my finger tips.

On the other hand, I have quite a few things that I use frequently and do want to have handy: Crock pot, large soup pot, cake dome, cookbooks, canning materials during canning season, my dehydrator when I find the right things marked down for quick sale ... and more.

Extra light bulbs (I buy heavily every other year when the power company offers the good bulbs through the mail for 25-50 cents).

Emergency supplies such as flashlights, batteries, candles.

Coats ... even in Florida you need a light jacket and a rain slicker.

Books ... I don't see any bookshelves.

Even though you're clearly strong on the concept of minimalism, I think you've undershot your storage needs.

We are located in central FL the front of the house faces east, side porch faces south. The western side of the house is heavily forested.

Heavily forested still won't keep the west sun from the back of your house.

So let me get this straight, the best elevation to allow light and sun in without the extra heat of west and east elevations is south. Yet your south elevation has a closet, a mudroom type entry and a guest bedroom.

I'm also in FL. SW FL to be exact. I oriented my house so front faces north and back faces south. I have large eaves (32" wide) that let in the filtered sun this time of year and when I was at my house 2 weeks ago, the outdoor temps were in the mid 90's (before the rains came). Inside the house, even with windows but no insulation yet, there were nice cross breezes and it was actually quite bearable.

Sofar we have decided to make the following changes:

Move the fridge to the sink side of the kitchen on the outer edge

Re-resize the shower to 42x60 for proportionality.

Squaring up the roof and adding an open gable over the side porch.

And... Rename the "office" to "entry".

Yes all good starts but not enough for the overall flow of the house that mrspete keeps mentioning.

Im not super concerned about where the towels are hung, we hang them to dry after we use them. We set a dry towel and clothes on the bathroom counter prior to bathing. And in reality unless you have a towel in the shower with you or can reach one from the shower, water will get on the floor.

So let me get this straight. You're spending big bucks and/or your hard earned time creating this house for you and the Missus but instead of working out even the smaller details, you just don't care? It's not important for your overall comfort and making things easier on you? What's the point of building if it's not to take what you've learned and make things better for you for now and into the future?

As for water getting on the floor, there's a big difference from reaching next to the shower to grab a towel on a hook and having to step completely out of the shower to walk across the aisle to grab a towel on a bathroom counter. One creates about 3 drops of water and the other requires being careful so you don't slip on the wet floor.

Thats what bath mats are for.

And these are the things that will not help sell your place if you ever have to sell.

High ceilings and the elevator shaft feeling I will take into consideration.

I love high ceilings. My first floor will be 10' in the main rooms and 9' in the hallways. Upstairs will be 9'. My house is 2870 and the height works with the size of the house.

What happens is when the ceilings become too high, it actually then makes the rooms feel smaller. There's a balance between just right and too high.

In general I enjoy high ceilings and am a bit more comfortable with slightly higher than average ceilings for the size of the space than usual.

I think 10' in the main rooms and 9' in the bathrooms and hallways will work fine in your case. The other added bonus by making the hallways 9' is that when you walk from the smaller space into the larger space, it makes the larger space feel even larger. It's a visual trick Frank Lloyd Wright used in most of his houses to great effect.

Im also not too concerned about storage, we really take de-cluttering seriously.

To be fair storage for a mop, broom, and vacuum "was" lacking but with the relocation of the fridge we have room for a large vertical cabinet on that "wall of storage".

And how about the few coats, raincoats, shoes, etc you have? Even in Central Fl it gets cool.

But for mundane "every day" things, asside from clothes and shoes, I cant think of anything my wife or I use that would be put up regularly?

Seriously, not poking fun, what are typical items that would be stored that we would need easy access to?

Cleaning supplies. Brooms. Mops, Vacuum. Rags, Linens. Books. Hobby supplies. Spare toilet paper, spare paper towels, light bulbs, household tool kit, household sewing kit, your favorite beverages, canned goods, ink cartridges, computer paper, pencils and pens, guns if you keep them, pet food, extra soaps and shampoos, toiletries, iron and ironing board, place to hang wet laundry that can't be put in the dryer, etc.

Living in FL you just learn to deal with getting wet.

Raincoats help.