Michelle-I love the little office, it's windows and it's location. I love the front porch entry over by the garage. The half bath is far from back entry for the kids? They have to go through the dining etc to get there. I don't know about yours but mine don't come in clean from playing.

Kitchen-you'd have to share dimensions to get feedback on those aisles. I love that the kitchen has all those windows and light. It is a bit of a trek with groceries but if you are good with it then that is all that matters.

I hope someone with more flow knowledge pipes in!

What is the room on the bottom right with the angled door?

Why do have a full office at the front of the house plus the small one by the kitchen?

I'm not sure if the 'wall' between the living and dining/kitchen is truly a wall, or is there a walkway there?

As is I would consider removing the 'L' part of the dining wall on the left side, if not both short walls to allow for better walking room through the dining.

Even with the w/d out of your pantry, it is a bit odd shaped for good usage. I would consider making the walk-in closet from the garage a normal closet and squaring off the pantry.

I do like the little 'office' off the kitchen!

To clarify....the kitchen will be wider, and the right side of the "u" will be for storage of minimally used items, not part of the main work triangle. I will definitely post it on the kitchen forums as time draws nearer.

The study is my husbands, the small office is mine...sort of a house management area.

The angled room near the back door is a locker room. We have trouble now with our children coming in the door and immediately stopping to remove shoes/backpacks and thought moving this area away from the door would help eliminate that bottleneck.

Also, the large walkin closet in the mud room is important as we live in northern michigan and have a ridiculous amount of snow gear to store. But, the closet is plenty large enough to steal some space for the pantry...good tip!

Around the dining room there will be passages into the living room, entry, and kitchen. The rest will be divided off with half walls, bookshelves, and columns.

The pantry is an odd shape, we'll definitely try to rework it.

Half bath....I hear you about kids, so we'll try to move it closer yo mud room.

Thank you! Keep the tips coming!

This post was edited by Michelle1973 on Thu, May 15, 14 at 12:45

Do you need both a locker room and a mud room? So the kids have to go in the mud room to remove coats and boots, then over to the locker room for backpacks? It almost sounds like 2 separate areas will exacerbate your problems instead of solving them.

Maybe swap your half bath with your mini office? Then you could maybe make a combined half bath/laundry room, and square off the pantry to be a bit more usable.

It might be nice to add a doorway at the end of the kitchen cabinets into the living room. Save the walk thru the dining room into the living room.

My bad, there is an entry just at the end of the kitchen cabs into the living room, not through the dining into the living room. Oops. :)

Kids will remove everything in locker room...SIL has this set up and it works for them.

I will definitely consider swapping office and half bath. Thank you!

So what's in the mud room if the kids do everything in the locker room?

Pixie....not sure what you mean...the mud room is really more of an entry/hallway.

Michelle-oh boy do we have the same thing going on with the shoes and backpacks in front of the door. We also built ours off of the hallway and not part of it and have a separate closet for all that winter stuff. I envision it working well t keep order. :)

Our pantry has an angle in it and I think it doesn't really add any functionality to it. Just an observation I made on ours when I was trying to figure out shelving. Just a thought.

When you come in from the garage - the locker room is the angled space. In front of you, right? Then there is a closet type space to the right, which I thought was the mud room. But if the mud room is just the hall, what is the closet like space to the right?

Pixie, it's a large closet. It will store all our off season coats, gear, etc.

Will there be a basement for off season gear? That just seems like prime real estate for storage.

You could also make it a long reach in closet so the pantry can be rectangular.

I have a "thing" about potty entrances visible from common areas. If this were mine, I would move the bathroom towards the garage door if possible. Dirty kids having fun would come in through the garage and right to the potty.

I really like the flexibility placing the kitchen table will give you. Turn it 90 degrees and you could have 16 passing the potatoes and gravy now and then!

If it's a closet for winter gear storage, I'd move that closet to the garage. With your angled garage, you have a whole corner of open space available. Then you free up more space for your pantry. You could even have a second door to make grocery trips from the garage straight into the pantry.

IMO there are too many dead ends. I believe you should be able to walk through a house without repeatedly retracing your steps especially with large family. As kids get larger they begin to knock you down when they run into you.

The stairway is one of the most important features of the house and it should be drawn more accurately. There should be a cut line at about 3 ft above the floor so the space below can be seen. Is it a closet or a stair to a basement? I try to avoid switchback stairs because showing the landing is awkward and it wastes space. You shouldn't be designing at this level of detail without an upstairs plan.

If the dining room table were drawn accurately you would see that there is not enough space to comfortably pass by the chairs. The table would probably need to be turned 90 degrees. For the kitchen island to allow enough room to work it would need to be about 3 ft shorter so it might need to be turned too.

The connection to the outdoors is tight and awkward. Would the kids be expected to go through the garage to dump their stuff in the mud room?

The basic plan is a good one but the spaces do not seem well developed and it seems odd that you would need to be working without your architect present in order to encourage her to add some flare. You shouldn't be treating your architect like a drafter.

At this design stage design information should be exchanged in collaboration with your architect face to face by sketching on tracing paper and she should be pushing for flare as well as adequate circulation space.

In the design stage computer drawings should be avoided except as a background. Computers encourage designers to do crazy things like designing the kitchen cabinets but not the stair and showing a stair to nowhere.

Renovator, thank you for all your feedback. We met with the architect and told her she has free reign with this simply an idea of a layout that we like...she had already taken a stab at a plan with little feedback from us and it ended up being way beyond our budget and we didn't like the layout either. So we decided to provide her with some more info, which could have been done with paper but my husband is an engineer, this is how he operates.

The architect is weird about meetings. Both that we've had have lasted less than an hour. She likes to get in and be done. This way we could give her info without meeting.

Obviously, this is a rough idea, which is why there's no detail re the stairs.

Regarding the dead ends, can you give me an example of what you mean?

Thanks for the feedback on the closet. We currently have our winter storage in the basement, but I hate that as our seasons often overlap (it's snowing right now). We will definitely make the closet smaller though and give the room we gain back to the pantry. Thank you!

Renovator.....thank you, you made me realize that I'll have to walk through the dining room every time I need to get to the kitchen from the stairs/mudroom area. Not a good set up. So, I'll see about adding a hallway to the right of the dining room....although this isn't a great solution.

But, here's where I'm stuck. How can I get my kitchen on an outside wall, without having a screened in porch blocking the view from the kitchen, dining room, or living room? We don't mind having the screened in porch off the back of the garage, just don't know how to access it, and my husband doesn't want to entrance through a mud room. Anyone have any ideas?

It's really not difficult if you do it with a fat pen and tracing paper. You do not need to size the cabinets yet.

There is a process to the design of a home that is understandably difficult for most homeowners to grasp and engineers are trained in a very specific kind of problem solving that follows a direct a route to a solution. The design process for a home is not direct nor can it be rushed. I didn't learn it in architecture school; it took me another 10 years to get it.

I find you architect's approach to be odd unless she is compensated under a fixed fee arrangement which is usually counterproductive at this stage of a design. I work at an hourly rate until the design development stage is finished and approved.

I will try to find time today to show you how to make this basic scheme work. No electrons will suffer in the process.

Thank you renovator. :)

Ooh, this could definitely work! Thank you!!!!!

The dining table might turn 90 degrees for easier circulation.

This is just a diagram with some furniture in it; it is not an architectural "floor plan".

Stay at this level of representation and increase the scale until you have the spacial relationships right with reasonably realistic dimensions. That automatically comes with increasing the scale.

Putting the plan on a computer will stop the design process dead in its tracks. An image on a computer screen has no scale; you can zoom in and out at will. It only recognizes scale when you print and that's too late. Architectural design is entirely dependent on scale so the computer is entirely incompatible with architectural design. I use a computer every day; I just don't design with it.

I can draw accurately without using a scale but on a computer I have no idea if something is drawn appropriately without putting the dimensions in from the keyboard. In other words, I can't sketch on a computer. Sketching is the melding of visual perception, spacial knowledge and experienced based intuition without any intervening tool other than the pen in your hand.

Don't go too far without drawing the upper floor, at least in schematic form, so you know if the house needs to be 2 stories or can be 1 1/2 stories and the stair works and the bathrooms are not over the living areas below.

Don't go too far without drawing the elevations or better yet a perspective so you don't get trapped with an exterior envelope with no style or character.

Does this sound difficult? It still is for me and I've been doing it for 50 years. So be sure to make your architect do it for you so you can enjoy the process.