First Draft of Floorplan
It’s been several months since I updated with progress, and that’s mostly because we were in the waiting phase while our designer finished up some other projects. We knew this would be the case because we are not in a hurry with this house build, by intention. And we let him know that he could fit us in the extra pockets of time. So we were prepared for the fact that we may have to wait a bit longer to see initial drafts.
I think I talked through the process of working with him in one of my previous posts, but the way he handles things is, starting with a very simple site plan and floor plan to get things right there before we move on to refining the little details of the plan. We have to make sure the layout is right because it’s so much easier to change before all of the details are added if you decide to move a room or structure something different.
In general, his process is this:
Get an idea of where you want the house on the lot with a rough site plan.
Create the rough floor plan with the bare bones basics so that you can settle on a general layout.
Start refining the layout for the smaller adjustments.
Move into details of the design and because our designer does a lot of 3D renderings, that would be when that part of the process starts.
We got the first draft of the floor plan back! The square footage came in a little higher than where we wanted, but we took some time to consider how much we really wanted to cut out, and from where, and it started to feel like it wasn’t worth it. The goal is for this house to be our forever house, so we need to focus more on what we want and need and less on how much square footage that ends up being.
First, the initial site plan - which is the placement of the house on the lot.
The site plan seems easy, but there’s actually a lot more to consider about where you’re putting your house on your lot than one initially thinks.
Where are the utilities at?
What is the terrain like?
How long will your driveway have to be?
What aspects of your yard do you want maximized?
Will you have enough room to turn into your garage with a side entry garage?
Are you leaving room to accommodate getting a vehicle into a backyard if you need work done?
Are you leaving room for a potential RV pad in the future?
What kind of landscaping upgrades might you want to do in the future and how does the house placement affect those?
Next up, the floor plan - which you can see a very small preview of in the site plan, but the floor plan goes into much more detail obviously.
This first draft of the floor plan came in at almost 2800 square feet, which was a lot higher than we wanted. Ultimately we wanted to be around 2300. So that was the first thing for us to consider. Knowing that, we started to look at rooms that we could either cut completely, or resize to help shave some square footage.
We simmered on it for a few days and talked to a few people and decided that the smarter idea was not to look at the actual number as much as the size of the rooms and the rooms we had.
We knew we did not want the left side of the house to have two suites for the bedrooms. It’s a cool concept and something we would have considered differently if we were building this house in an area where we expected to have guests often, but that isn’t likely to be the case. So, two bathrooms was overkill.
The other consideration was the size of the master bedroom and bathroom. They are much bigger than we really needed, so that’s another area that it would be pretty easy to reduce size.
We sat on our initial thoughts for the first few days and this was the feedback we gave our designer:
Move placement of house on site plan to be more centered side-to-side - 40 ft front setback is fine
Make the gym bigger and the 4th car garage smaller
Move man door in shop so that the gym wall can be bigger
Make the windows on the side of the gym/shop symmetrically spaced
Revise the bedroom wing because we need to shave sq footage
Remove one of the two extra bathrooms
Perhaps we can move the living room wall a foot closer in and shorten the island in the kitchen
We don’t need an 8 ft shower in the master bathroom so we can lose some space there.
We need to add room by the back door for a dog door
Make the walk through space connecting the garage to the shop just a bit bigger
We gave our feedback in the form of a Loom video so that we could show the floor plan and point things out as we talked. It turned out to be a really helpful way to communicate. And now we wait for revisions…
