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Pulling a thread on a tapestry - pic heavy

Alex House
9 years ago

This is what I imagine home designers/architects have to go through when the revision process starts. Pull up a chair and let me show you a story about how one little modification to a plan creates downstream consequences.

Right now I'm struggling with how to give spacial definition to a dining room in an open concept plan. Kitchen on the top and LR on the bottom. This is how the DR looked before:

{{gwi:2133727}}

Then I saw this photo in the Build Thread and I liked the look of the doorway:

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And so I did this - I made a 1' thick doorway on each end of the DR:

{{gwi:2133729}}

By doing this though I encroached on space for an adjacent doorway from the foyer into the LR. This is what it looked like before:

{{gwi:2133730}}

And this is after:

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The doorway was now 1' narrower. That wouldn't do. So to solve that issue I had to move the wall on the bottom of the photo.

This is what that area looked like before:

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And now after:

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The foyer is now 1' deeper same too with the office. All this in order to keep the doorway width into the LR the same as it was before the 1st change.

By moving the outside wall I affected the roof line. This is what I had before I moved the outside wall - two roof planes intersecting and meeting at the corner of the house:

{{gwi:2133734}}

After moving the wall, this is what happened:

{{gwi:2133735}}

In order for the roof planes to align once again I needed to move the other external wall in the office. Now my office has grown from 12' x 11'7" to 12'9" x 12'8". This also increased the size of the 2nd floor room as well as the basement room over and under the office.

Now, by changing the size of the room on the 2nd floor in order to get the two roof planes to align I ended up with this in the roof above the 2nd floor room:

{{gwi:2133736}}

By moving the walls the 2nd floor eaves were reduced so now I had to fiddle with 5 roof planes in order to end up with this:

{{gwi:2133737}}

Back to my title - pull a thread on a tapestry and you don't just pull out an isolated thread, you affect the whole tapestry.

There is no moral to this story, I just thought it was an interesting process and I wanted to share - my autobackups on the plan made it a breeze to extract the images from the different stages, so I thought I'd share a story with the world.

A desire for a 1' thick detail ended up giving me 33 sf more per floor on 3 floors. I'm sure a smarter/experienced design or architect would have some tricks up their sleeves but they'd still have to deal with the rippling out downstream effects of changes.

Now, do any of you have similar tales of one change creating the need for other changes in the rest of your design?

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