Our dream home would be all on one level (it makes life so much simpler and is a huge benefit in old age) with a huge vaulted ceiling great room with skylights, tons of windows, and a spiral staircase up to a loft area above the bedrooms.. but we're also quite frugal and building such a house is not quite the cheap way to go. We have very cold winters here so heat would cost a fortune, and having huge windows requires a lot of air conditioning during our very humid summers. Not to mention having a sprawling one story house requires a lot more foundation and roofing, and frankly we're not big basement fans. So I guess the smart thing to do is build a simple two story home. Now browsing this site I noticed that most people here tend to build HUGE homes, believe it or not the house I have planned here is quite large by Montreal standards.. but pales in comparison to what I've seen on this site where some people's garages are larger than both of my sisters entire bugalows! I want our house to be extremely functional, appeal to our tastes, but not be so personal that if we need to sell it for whatever reason that it won't appeal to an average buyer. Like I stated earlier, we like open concept living, I was reading the thread on "trends you think are on the way out" and a couple of people mentionned "open layouts". Is open layout really a recent trend?

So back to the plan, it's a box, should be quite simple to build. We like light and we like privacy so all of our kitchen/living/dining windows face the back yard. I put in a room off the living room which we will use as a playroom for the kids when they're babies/toddlers which will move to the basement when they get older. The room upstairs would likely be converted into an office. It's big enough to be used as a formal dining room, and it could be converted into a bedroom if our visiting parents are no longer able to navigate the stairs.. or if we stick around long enough and one of us develops mobility issues, it could give us a few more years in our home if we use it as our bedroom. I put a shower in the downstairs bathroom for this reason as well, so that someone could function completely on the ground floor alone. Everyone I know has their extra pantry and laundry in the basement, they go up and down the stairs a million times a day, and if it wasn't for that they would never have a reason to step foot in the basement. I've put ours off the kitchen, seems like a much more functional location? We debated putting the laundry upstairs but we think it's better to put a chute in and have the laundry room downstairs. If it's upstairs you have vibrating machines making noise above your heads all day, and you can't do laundry at night with the kids sleeping. You also have to run upstairs to put in a new load, put clothes in the dryer. We'll be spending almost all of our time on the ground floor so it seems to make more sense to me to have it there, easy to check on machines, change loads, can run them anytime, can fold clothes while watching tv, and can bring the clothes up when its convenient or when going to bed instead of having to go up everytime the buzzer goes off. I've done my best to get all of the plumbing on both floors into the same corner of the house, the sink in the garage is the only one on its own. The master bedroom and upstairs bathrooms share no walls with the kids rooms, and a future owner could easily remove the guest room adjacent to the master and use it as a lounge area or turn it into an office. We don't have a mudroom but frankly they're not that common here. Our entrance area is isolated enough that we'd never have to walk through it, there's a closet on one side which could be made fairly deep and on the other side we would put in a bench/shoerack and above it a shelf organizer that holds baskets (for mits, hats, etc..) and has numerous coat hooks. The garage is deep, a lot of people I know don't keep their car in their garage because there isn't room with all their junk, hopefully this is big enough that I don't become one of those people :)

So what do you think? What have we overlooked? What doesn't work? What would you change? Thanks! I know there are a lot of measurements missing, still figuring out the software but each square in the plans represents a square foot

First floor: http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/5416/88779378.jpg
Second floor: http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/3180/70848399.jpg
Front view: http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/8082/frontem.jpg
Back view:http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/2065/backlw.jpg
3D Rendering:http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/579/74071160.jpg
Different Angle: http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/5807/52318015.jpg

http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/2554/landing.jpg
http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/1645/landing2.jpg

<a href="http://..." target="_blank"><img src="http:/..." border="0" alt="a brief description"></a>

Suero, I followed your instructions but it creates a clickable link to the photos but it doesn't display them as you did?

You are right that we in the US do tend to build big. I noticed long ago that the Canadian designs I looked at tended to be more compact with smaller bedrooms, smaller closets, etc. than US designs. But then, I suppose we Yanks also tend to be fatter so we need the extra space just to get around our own homes. LOL!

Overall I like your plan very much. It is clean and simple and fairly space efficient. You do have a lot of hallway upstairs but I don't really see any way to reduce the hallway by very much - and even if you did, it would make your central hall seem cramped. Probably better to leave it alone.

Do be aware that with an open plan, you will need to provide ways for water/sewage to travel up/down to the second floor. (i.e., "Wet-walls" on the first floor) Down here in Texas we just run our pipes in the outer walls but then our temperatures almost never fall below freezing. Up there in Montreal, if you don't want to insulate the heck out of every pipe, you probably need to have interior walls on the first floor that plumbing to the second floor can be run through.

There are a couple of other things I would recommend also:

Along with widening the porch, you should consider lengthening the garage. With a couple more feet of length, you could squeeze two small cars in if you had to. You may only have one car now but after your kids get to be teenagers, thre is a good chance you'll wind up with a second car - that is, assuming there is still fuel to be had for anything approaching a reasonable price!

The bedroom in the center at the back is really too small to be very useful. Plus, the closet you have drawn there isn't deep enough to actually hold clothing. A clothes' closet's interior needs to be at LEAST 22" deep and even that will have the sleeves of heavy clothing such as jackets rubbing up against the back wall on one side and and the closet door on the other. As sketched, the closet looks barely 18" deep. If you make the closet 24" deep - which is what it needs to be - the "useable" space in that bedroom is reduced to a rectangle about 9.5' X 10.5'.

You're showing the tub in the front bathroom far larger than a standard-sized bath tub. A standard sized tub is only 5 ft long. Even a big tub is usually no more than 6 ft long. I've never seen one 6'9" long! I'm also surprised to see that you're putting a separate shower and tub in the secondary bathroom and that the overall bathroom is so large. It seems odd for the secondary bath to be so much larger and better appointed than the master bath. Do you anticipate two or more of your children using the bathroom at the same time? Maybe when they're toddlers they will but, once they get a little older, even if all the same sex, each child is going to want privacy when using the bathroom. So, there is not much point in making their bathroom huge or sticking in both a shower and a tub. If you went with a 6ft tub/shower combo, you could make that bathroom a whole lot smaller and use the extra space to enlarge the bedrooms.

You could also rearrange the upstairs rooms to provide for more parental privacy by putting closets and bathrooms between the master bedroom and the other bedrooms. Here is a VERY rough sketch (made by rearranging your sketch using my paint program) of a possible layout.

Just my 2 cents worth...

Your garage is almost deep enough for 2 cars, one behind the other. If you extend it, someone could get 2 cars in if they wanted to, and it can be listed as a 2 car garage when selling it whenever. Actually, since it is already 17' wide, just a few more feet gets you the 2 car garage width which would be better.

Normally, the laundry and kitchen are put closer to the garage, so on your design, I would flip the rooms on the first floor.

On your elevations (outside views) be sure to line up the windows and doors so there is symmetry or balance, depending on the final design inside.

It's only been relatively recently that new construction has included mudrooms. Have you looked at new homes in your area, or might you be referring to older homes when you say mudrooms aren't common, since you also mentioned that most houses also have the pantry and laundry in the basement which has changed in the last couple of decades. If you read more of these threads for a while, you'll find that most people love having a mudroom as much as having a first floor laundry and large or walkin pantry.

BTW, if many houses in your area have basements, not having one would likely be a deal-killer for most people when you need to sell the house. And the future has a way of turning out differently that we sometimes expect . . .

Since we also live in a cold climate, we put a 2-sided gas fireplace between the living/family room and the dining room. Love it on cold mornings!

Since you're putting a shower in the first floor bath, I'd fit it in between the stairs and the front wall, so that it can be accessed from the dining room as well as the front hall. That way, if needed, you could say that you have a first floor suite.

Anne

Also, I meant to mention that, for ease of unloading groceries, most people prefer to have the garage on the kitchen side of the house. If you read much here on GW, you'll also hear a lot about "mudrooms" which are back-entry halls (usually between garage and kitchen) which contain a place for everybody to dump off clutter like coats, hats, boots, etc before they bring them into the house. Especially if you're going to leave your garage attached directly to your great room, you may want to carve out some space for a "mud-room" in the garage. As sketched I'd probably pull the garage forward by about 4 feet so that the back wall is even with the edge of the fireplace wall. Then I'd cut off about a 10' x 7' space to make a mudroom and make it so one had to go thru the mudroom to get from the garage into the great room.

Of course this would make it impossible to turn the garage into a 2-car garage but, what the heck. The teenager's car can sit always out in the cold. ;-)

The only thing you did wrong was you copied code in the "Direct link" box instead of the "HTML code" box. Suero, who is obviously a LOT smarter than I am about computers, somehow coverted the code you provided into its HTML code equivalent. You don't have to figure out how to do that. You just have to copy and paste the right piece of info directly from Imageshack.

Here is what I came up with by flipping the master bedroom to the other side. I'm pretty sure you can fit a window in on the side over the garage so long as the window is near the back of the house instead of right at the peak of the garage. So, the masterbedroom can still get light from two directions.

Advantages:
1) Room for separate walk-in shower and a big bathtub AND his&hers vanitys in the master bath.
2) His and Hers closets... altho "his" is a lot smaller than my last sketch. Sorry but you guys always lose out when it comes to closet space. LOL! \
3) Each secondary bedroom is sized so that a double bed would not have to be placed right up next to a wall in order to have room to move about.
4) All secondary bedrooms are about the same size (Fewer squabbles among the kids about who gets the big bedroom - and trust me, tho you don't have kids yet, this can be a BIG deal!)
5) Greater parental privacy since master bedroom is separated from secondary bedrooms by closets and bathrooms.

Disadvantages:
1) The master bedroom is a tiny bit smaller than your original.
2) You may not like the angled wall that is necessary to reach the back bedroom in a manner that won't make moving furniture in nearly impossible.
3) The hallway linen closet is smaller - but it is more accessible.
4) You would not be able to put your bed right under the window as you showed in your original sketch - but having it directly under the window might not be such a great idea anyway b/c even the best windows don't have the same insulation factor as walls.

Well if anyone else has any ideas or suggestions on how to get the tub into the master bath while keeping the laundry chute and windows in both bathrooms, let me know :)

Anne

We are on our 13th home, believe it or not. 21 years of marriage, and we have often bought-fixed up-sold. We, too, owned a Loft! Loved it. That's when I became hooked on an open floor plan, also. I don't think they are going out of style... at least not in the southeast US. Well, most people want an open kitchen/family room anyway. I have polled people endlessly, 'cause we, too have just spent the last 5 yrs plotting our "final" home. Almost always, people like their kitchen opening up to a family area.

I wanted to mention a few things:

*Apparently we in the US do build bigger. I once had a 9' bedroom and that was a mistake. I would never build a room smaller than 10, but 11 is my minimum for bedrooms. I do currently have a 10x10 craft room, and that is quite functional. It would work as a kid's room.

*When my boys were younger (they are now 11 & 12) a tub was a necessity, so do keep a bathtub in the kids' bath. I also highly recommend double sinks in both baths! A basement playroom is fabulous to have for children...esp. on bad weather days. It makes a big difference in quality of life. When mine were toddlers, it was hard to drag them out to do things. We just played at home most of the time in winter, upstairs, down, basement. Kept the kids very well-entertained. A friend of mine in a tiny house had to go out almost every day to play at a McDonald's playland or somewhere. I was so thankful for my bsmt!

* Be sure you have a good pantry space near the kitchen. I'll have to look back at the drawings, can't remember. Where will the vacuum & brooms go?

* I would never build without a fireplace.....but we love ours and use all the time. Also makes holidays more merry.

* Don't know how available it is up there, but Beam Central Vac Systems are wonderful...I wouldn't build even a small house without it. They have little "garage doors" that can go in the kitchen toe-kick, and you can sweep right into that, and it's sucked away. My SIL has that by her birdcage, where seed is thrown constantly by her bird. I think the systems cost about $2800 around here.

* I did just like you---I started by sketching what we wanted. I then went through 2 residential designers trying to get the floor plan all ironed out (it's very big) and I think we'd still be struggling if it weren't for my Interior Designer. She was the miracle worker, and has worked magic on my plans. She is very reasonable. I hired her to help us with the interior architectural design (my husband & I love to decorate & will probably do most of that ourselves when it's finished). But I was surprised when she looked at our plan (and our frustrations with it) and she said, "May I please work on this?" She came back with wonderful solutions! LOVE her. The 2 pros had not been able to solve these layout problems, but she did, beautifully. Her name is Sharon Murphree-Demos, and she works in the southeast US.

But I think you're getting great help here. I'm not sure that you need an architect. My builder has said he wishes I'd gone with an engineer instead. Once you get your plan the way you want it, I might choose a builder first...ask him if you need to get the plan to an engineer, or a residential designer, or an architect. You might want to get several opinions on this, not just one builder. Someone else may have better advice on this, but in the US, architects are the most expensive option.

* I have hated my closets that were under 24" deep. At 22", the clothes kept getting caught in the door.

* I had a house with 2 small showers. One was highly annoying (too small)-- it measured: 3' x 2'9" (this is a square, but had a corner angled off). The other one was 3' x 3.5' (also a square with a corner angle door, so actually less than that large). That shower was fine & comfy, but the first one, tooooo small.

* LOVE laundry chutes!

* OH--regarding laundry room on 1st or 2nd floor--I'd rather have it on the 1st floor with a chute...I spend most of my time in kitchen/family room, and I want to do laundry right near the kitchen. In my final house, that was the most critical element---laundry and craft room and big pantry right near the kitchen. And as the kids get older, you do more & more laundry.

* Do you need a computer desk area? We couldn't function without a craft room or home office. I think your ideas about using your formal dining room different ways are GREAT. I think you are right on target there...that will be a wonderful play area for toddlers, while keeping LR clean, and where you've located it, it will be good for other purposes. Traditional Home Magazine once did a big research project about what people need long-term in houses, and the answer was a house that could change somewhat with their needs, as their lifestyle changes. I think you've done great with that.

If you raise the floor to floor height a bit you can use beams at the ceiling to add some formal organization and style to the otherwise casual plan.

I would also turn the ridge line 90 degrees to simplify the roof construction, tie it into the porch roof and improve the front elevation for possibly a small cost savings that might pay for an attic window.

This is just a rough idea sketch and need some tuning:

10 ft ceilings would increase the length of the stair about 30" which could be a big problem in such a small house. IMHO a 10 ft ceiling would not be appropriate. I would use a 9-0 (or 8-6)ceiling and add some beams below that. The goal for a small house is charm rather than grand design. Don't be intimidated by fads and the typical houses developers build; they don't have to live in them or pay the cost of the added volume and heat gain/loss.

Here is the roof and elevation. It eliminates the roof to side wall flashing and provides a stronger gable front profile to the front. It also integrates the porch roof into the building mass and the long rake creates a strong Shingle Style form.

The roof slope will get steeper and the elevation will get better if the floor to floor height increases.

Don't ignore the opportunity to use the attic. It is cheap space and far better than the basement. Insulation should be placed between the rafters and the space used like a "bonus room" (I hate that silly phrase).

It really bothers me that I have so much wasted attic space, I'm a big fan of efficient use of space. Would I save a lot on building costs if I lowered the roof and put in dormers for the second floor? Like this:

http://www.homebuilding.co.uk/files/ascent-homebuilding/images/1108duff_elevation_free.jpg

I know I would lose a fair amount of square footage on the second floor but I could probably make up the difference by using the space above the two car garage? I really want to make this as economical as possible

Stairs are not designed at a constant ratio (angle). As the risers get taller, the treads should get shorter and the angle then gets steeper. A 10 1/2" tread is a bit long for a 7 5/8" riser. For a 9-0 ceiling, a 7 1/2" riser and a 10" tread would be good.

The rafters would be longer although braced by the attic floor and the additional cost of the dormers might be offset by fewer windows. There would be more roof shingles and less siding and trim. To regain the 4th bedroom the second floor could extend over the garage.

Determine your space needs first, then consider the possible house types.

For this type of house I like to build a complete platform framed second floor (as if it were going to be a 2 story house) and then add a 2x6 perimeter sole plate and put the rafters tails on that. This detail raises the rafters up a foot and allows more headroom under the rafters. Of course, the rafters must have a steep slope for the upper floor rooms to have sufficient headroom and for the dormers to look right on the roof.

On the other hand, there is no more efficient use of orthogonal space and standard construction materials than a 2 story square house with a low sloped hipped roof. But don't count the attic space of a steeper roof as a waste. If the rafters are well insulated, the attic space can house mechanical equipment, ducts, general storage and perhaps a future study or bedroom. Always provide good access to the attic not just a cheap pull down ladder.

Perhaps if the exterior walls extended two feet above the second floor before the rafters started you could get the best of both schemes. It was done often historically but today an engineer would require either stiff exterior walls (2x6 studs) or braces in the eaves, or both. This would allow larger eave overhangs in case you have a lot of snow and don't want to have gutters. It would also allow the dormers to be placed even with the exterior walls and still look right.

Hey, what software are you using to draw the interiors of your house?

Highjumpgirl, you know I was actually going to start a thread asking people if they ever used their 2nd floor bedroom balconies because I wasn't so sure we would. I know I wouldn't and my wife isn't sure so it will probably not happen.

Note:
I am trying to figure out something, this can not be considered spam - I only want to control what I post, like to edit things. If you have any comments, plese let me know. Thanks

Anne

Upstairs I made quite a few changes as well, I wasn't really happy with the bathroom situation, the kids bathroom was much bigger than the master bathroom and there was no room for a tub in the master. I've moved things around a lot, one of the bedrooms got a little smaller but both bathrooms are much roomier now. The master closet is also quite big (too big?). I couldn't figure out a way to make the bathrooms bigger without sacrificing the size of one of the rooms but frankly, they're the kids rooms and they don't need a whole lot of room. By moving the master bathroom though I don't have all my plumbing stacked in one corner anymore and it's actually right over the open part of the first floor, will this mean i'll need a bulkhead for the drains or is there a way around that?

Well let me know what you think, I always appreciate the feedback! Thanks

PS. What is the standard overhang for a kitchen counter bench to comfortable accomodate seating?

I know you put in a lot of thought into the design. My concern is about the laundry room being so tucked away. Even though you might have a laundry chute, you would still need to take the clothes up. To me, putting the access to it only from the end of the kitchen doesn't seem practical. You would have to go through the entire kitchen to take the clothes up. Can you instead convert that into a pantry and put the laundry room at the end of the garage? The walking distance might remain the same. However, if you have dirty clothes - working in the garden/on cars/wet clothes from snow/rain, etc, you could strip right in the garage and put in the laundry and not drag those clothes through the kitchen. This will be helpful especially with kids.

Also, in the upstairs design - if you eliminate the hallway closet, you can divide the master bedroom closet into his and hers - might be a marriage saver ;)

Just my opinions.

V

Regarding the closets, I don't think I would need nearly as much closet space as my wife so I would happy to give up some room on my side for the linen closet :) We get along pretty well so I think we can share a closet but as far as resale is considered, do people generally prefer his/her closets?