Coming Up With Our Initial Floor Plan Wish List
When most people think of a home design, what they think of first is the floor plan. Do a simple Google search for floor plans and you’re going to get millions of results. The process of coming up with our initial floor plan idea started long before we even met with an architect. And it happened over quite a long period of time in phases. So, I think that makes the most sense how to share it in this post.
PHASE ONE
The very beginning started with perusing floor plans in general - mostly on Instagram. (One of my favorite accounts for doing this was America’s Best House Plans.) During this phase, we really were just saving things we liked with no real guidelines or wish lists. The point here was to be open to different ideas. I don’t have a timeline for how long this phase lasted for us, but it was quite some time. Each plan I looked at gave me different ideas of what I liked and didn’t like. And the more floor plans I looked at, the more those things started to become more clear. For example, I realized I really didn’t like plans where the master bedroom was in the front of the house. Both of our houses have had the master bedroom at the back of the house, and when we really consider our lifestyle, we know that it is a better fit to have our master bedroom at the back of the house.
Phase two
This was the phase where I took the information I learned during phase one and started writing it down. Just get all the things you think of down in writing so you don’t forget them as you start to really design your floor plan. There are so many elements of a floor plan and so many things you can want that if you don’t write it down, you’ll definitely forget them later.
As this list got longer, I started to categorize it into rooms and areas. Here’s a screenshot of what my list looked like before we met with any architects.
PHASE THREE
This is where we got more specific with using our list to find floor plans that matched our list criteria. This is also where the options that worked started to really narrow down. We started saving all the plans we liked. This made it easy for us to simmer on them and revisit them as more things were considered. I should also mention that my husband and I very actively talked about things and shared our thoughts as we had them. If we thought of something as we were going about our daily life, we’d write it down or think about how it fits with the floor plans we were considering.
There were a couple of things we really went back and forth on.
Originally we were pretty firm on doing a crawlspace instead of a basement. But then we toyed with the idea of doing a basement that would allow room for a really large gym and a theater room. We let that idea simmer for a while but ultimately kept coming back to no basement because I just don’t like basements.
We talked about doing the gym in a bonus room but then decided against that because bonus rooms typically don’t have enough height in their side walls to accommodate real usable space. Plus, we didn’t know how easy it would be to get heavy gym equipment up the stairs. This also led us back to reaffirm that we didn’t want stairs which would also mean we didn’t want a gym in a basement.
Now, I’ll admit, this is where it got a little overwhelming for both my husband and me at times. We took breaks often. We looked when it felt exciting and fun, and we stopped if it ever felt overwhelming. That is one of the biggest benefits we’ve realized of doing this so early on. And not when we need a plan by next month, or we won’t be finished building on time.
When we felt like we had a really good idea and were not going back and forth on things as much, we set up meetings with the architects we wanted to meet with.
PHASE FOUR
This is the phase where we took our wish lists, exterior ideas, and floor plan ideas to the three architects we chose to meet with. In these meetings, we genuinely wanted their feedback and insight. Every architect we met with, even if they weren’t the one we chose to work with, gave us an opportunity to learn from the meeting. The biggest benefit to having a really good idea of the floor plan you like in mind is that often architects have plans they’ve already drawn (some even sell them as stock plans), and if they know what is most important to you and you have a floor plan that is close that you can show them, they might have something drawn and can save you a lot of money and time. This happened to be the case with two of the three architects that we met with.
After we met with each of the architects, we simmered on their ideas and continued to look over floor plans that they had shown us - most even sent them to us as samples to look over. We got even clearer on what we wanted, but we not only needed to get clearer on a floor plan, but we also needed to decide which architect we felt the most comfortable with and that could capture and design our vision. By this point, we knew we were really close to the floor plan that we wanted, and even though there were a lot of changes (the redlines below are not even close to all the changes we wanted to make), but gave us a much clearer starting point than where we were before Phase One.
PHASE FIVE
We scheduled a second meeting with the architect we opted to work with to talk more details and get a starting point. We used this redlined plan as the starting point for this second conversation.
This architect asked us to make a list of things we knew we wanted to change right from the get-go. He also explained what this process would look like working with him. The short version is he’s going to start with our initial list and draft a very basic set of plans so that we can look it over, simmer on it, make revisions, and then repeat until we feel like there is absolutely nothing we would change about it. One thing we’re very excited about is that while we have plans we really like as a starting point and we have a good vision for our exterior, we’re working with an architect that still wants to make this house uniquely our own. So, there’s still that element of excitement and surprise to seeing this come to life!
I will say this process would be overwhelming and hard if it was our first house. We would have no idea what was “absolutely perfect,” and I still think that even with our third house, we might not know, but we’re much closer than we would be if it were our first house.
Once we reach that point of having nothing to change, he will start drafting more detailed plans and creating 3D renderings and photos. The really exciting thing about this architect is that he has software that he’s developed that lets us walk through our plan in VR at his office. So, we’ll definitely be excited to see that as we get further along in the process!
