Husband and I are getting estimates on a floor plan that we LOVE. It's based on my aunt and uncle's mountain home, so we've see how it works in person and think it is perfect for us. Background: we'll be building on my family's 600 acre farm, so we don't have any lot restrictions. We're expecting our first child any day now, and will hopefully have 2-3 more down the road. Since we're building on family land, we need this to be our long-term home and wanted to build on one level to avoid issues with stairs in the future.

However, our cheapest estimate so far is still around $80K over budget, so we need to think about some serious changes. My husband is handy so we'll be doing as much DIY as possible (floors, bathrooms, trim, etc). I know that part of the reason for the cost is that the house is sprawling and all on one floor. My question is: would it give us significant cost savings to make some portion of the house two stories and shrink the footprint? Perhaps by eliminating one of the wings and doing a two-story wing for the secondary bedrooms? And, have you seen any pictures/plans of houses that successfully combine a two-story wing with a 1.5 story main house (the main section will have approx. 17ft cathedral ceiling) without looking ridiculous?

Any thoughts on this or other ideas would be greatly appreciated. Pictures are below, thanks again for your help!

Here is our current floorplan and front elevation:

Here is the potential elevation if we somehow plop the bedroom wing over the garage wing:

Does it look ridiculous? I was using this picture as hope that it could be done:

Front

Rear

What if everything was put under one roof? The many corners and the wings are much more expensive than just having it under one roof.

In general, however, I think you to rework a number of things about this plan:
-Your master closet will seem very cramped with only 2' of walking space (clothes take up 2')
-Your stairs pretty clearly are not long enough (they look like 8', they need to be more like 12 or 13, depending on ceiling height), but if you make the stairs longer, it will cut into your dining room
-The hallway by the kid's room's wing is very long and wastes a lot of space
-The kids rooms have no closets--you'll have to put closets on the wall between the hallway and room, but then all the kids rooms will share walls and so noise will travel between them a great deal. Plus, although you've got a very spacious house, the kid's rooms will be very narrow.
-Your breakfast room is a very long ways from your kitchen. Breakfast nooks are supposed to be convenient spots to sip coffee and have toast--you won't want to walk 15 feet to do that. Plus, the area between the two is a strange waste of space.
-9x7 is NOT enough for a nursery. Our nursery is 9x11, and it feels pretty cramped. The walls are pretty much filled with a bookshelf, crib, rocker, toy box, and changing table.
-The powder room is very narrow

I think you can generally have the house you want, but you need to rework it significantly. Some specific suggestions:
-Reorient the kid's rooms to take up the hallway and 3/4 bath, and put a jack and jill bathroom between the kids rooms for two of the rooms.
-Maybe put the kids rooms above the garage/master bedroom, take out the little connector between the main house and the garage wing, and push that section up against the main house (like in the picture above).
-You also have A TON of windows. It looks like you could easily remove a third, and that might save you tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the quality you are using.
-I think you will need to move around the main section of the house a bit when you put proper dimensions on the stairs, but even if you had no stairs, I'm not convinced the current plan works terribly well. Does the house you love have the front door open up right into the dining room table? The layout is almost symmetrical, but not quite, which would bug me.

I'm posting a link to Robt E Lee's home where they did that with a grand entrance. Not that this is your style, but the concept might work for your site. I'd also try to reverse the layout so the front rooms with the view are the primary living spaces.

Lower level guest room w tray ceiling

Lower level exercise room w tray ceiling

Staircase to the lower level is in the foyer

Was thinking about your plan. Ask yourselves whether you want both a breakfast area AND a formal dining area. With so many stools at the island, it seems to me that is where many informal, quick meals will be (the typical coffee and toast). If you were to ditch both dining areas, and just have a nice, big table to have all of your meals at, it makes your main plan much more flexible. Particularly in such an open floorplan, where the formal dining area is not separated from the kitchen, it seems redundant to have both. Then you could have your dining area in the front, to the left of the door, the kitchen where it is, and have the living room take up the area to the right. That would shorten your main area, saving lots of space, and would allow a great symmetry to the room. The stairs could go in the middle. At any rate, I think you need to get that main area working well, then you can definitely get the wings working, but the flow between the kitchen/dining/living/entry are the trickiest parts. You may find, as we did on our first couple of plans, that your desired shape simply does not allow a good enough flow. But I think there are some options here!

I'm also wondering about the wisdom of placing of kids' bedrooms so far from the master. Since you are just starting your family, you may not realize that some kids need their parents at night for years and years. Before their bladders mature they wet the bed and need their sheets changed, sometimes they try to get to the bathroom and don't quite make it, leaving a bit of a mess to clean up. They have nightmares. They get lonely or feel insecure, etc. If the next baby comes along in a couple of years, and you need to put your then two year old in one of the bedrooms, it's a long walk for you, and a long and scary walk in a quiet, dark house for the child, when that child needs you. And if you eventually have three kids, spaced every two years or so for example, and they routinely need you in the night until they're about 6, that equals a decade of making that long walk in the middle of the night. I think that would get old fast.

Where do you anticipate their play area to be? In the loft? In the basement? Really little kids usually want to play close to where their parents are and you'll need to keep an eye on them anyway, so make sure there is enough space in that area for you to comfortably hang out too. I wish I'd had a dedicated play area near the kitchen.

The most efficient configuration would be a 2 story main structure since the loft as shown would not be of much use (if it is even a legally habitable space). The next most efficient configuration would be a 1 1/2 story main structure.

Getting rid of long corridor would save quite a bit. The kitchen island is too wide for practical use.

Cam -- I think you may be right about the redundancy of all the dining areas. Is the attached plan similar to what you were suggesting? I eliminated the middle dining area and scrunched the whole thing up a bit, eliminating about 200 sqft. It's funny that you would suggest putting the stairs where the dining area is, because that's exactly where they are in the house this plan is modeled after. We weren't sure about putting them there because it cuts off the openess from the kitchen to the living room.

What are people's thoughts on spiral staircases? I know they can be expensive, but seem like they would save SO much space.

I'm not crazy about the way the foyer juts into the living space, but I'm not sure what can be done about it. I know most house plans have additional rooms along the same wall as the foyer, but one thing we really like about this house is that the living room and kitchen/dining area have windows on both sides of the room, allowing sunlight all day.

Annie -- your basement is STUNNING! (as well as the rest of your house). Our north/south slope is very gradual and will probably be leveled -- the hill drops off more steeply on the east end, so if we do have a walk-out it will probably only be on the east corner of the house. However, it is worth thinking about putting a bedroom in that spot.

RedHouse -- very good point about the kids' rooms, and one that has been mentioned by a few other moms as well :) This is one of the reasons I was trying to brainstorm ways to plop the kids' rooms over the master wing. My husband and I may end up living in one of the bedrooms in the east wing for a few years, then moving into the master once the kids are older. We were anticipating that the loft would be the play area once they are a little older. Thanks for the mommy perspective, it's very useful!

It seems like it would not be difficult to have your kids bedrooms above yours/kitchen. You will just have to decide if you want a split floorplan for kid care.

And, I agree that your nursery room is too small to function as a nursery.

If you are going to dine where your dining room is placed on the new plan, that is still too far from the kitchen. Why not put the table in that space between the dining room and kitchen? Then you could get rid of the dining bumpout, save lots of a square footage and cost.

I question the idea of living in a kids room. 10 or 11' is REALLY narrow for a master. And if you don't, you'll have to climb a set of stairs every time you put a kid to bed. If you have 4 kids, that's a lot of years of stair climbing.

What if you made the house into two mostly equal wings? Two wings that look about the same size as your current main house? If you kept them to a nice, simple shape with few bumpouts, that would help minimize costs. I'm envisioning essentially an L shape. Then you could ditch the nursery and just use a child's bedroom. I just really question whether master suites on different floors or far from kids rooms is smart for someone hoping to have 3-4 kids. (Or you could be like us, and give up on putting the kid in the crib and have him co-sleep, in which case the kid's room is superfluous!)
I guess what I'm saying is that your house shape could become so much more efficient, I question whether you need to add a second story if you don't want to climb stairs.

As I've said, I still think your house is really quite big, such that you don't need to move to a spiral to save space. You've already got some real layout problems, I don't see pushing a spiral staircase into your plan fixing much. Plus, it would be awful to carry furniture up and down...

Oh and forgot to mention, best of luck on the delivery, when it happens! BTW, my wife loved the whirlpool before she could get her epidural, in case your hospital has one available. :)

Thanks again everyone for all your helpful advice!

If you are wedded to the plan and can't consolidate it, then other "interior" cost savings will be minor by comparison. Just a thought--good luck!

I also included a mock-up of the exterior, because I'm still a little worried that it looks wonky with the one wing taller than the other. I was really hoping to do all this without an architect, but I may have to involve one so that our house doesn't end up looking like a cobbled-together mess! I guess this is why people don't typically draw their own houses...

Anyway, thanks again for sharing your wisdom and advice, and for the kind words about the baby! Could be any day now... yikes!

Going forward:
-Try to draw up a very accurate version of the house you like and post it so the experts here (not me) can see the effect you're going for
-Look online for some stock house plan that somewhat matches what you're going for, particularly with the huge open main area
-Consider seriously increasing the depth of the main section, and then play with rearranging things. Consider adding *some* walls to create a separate foyer, a coat closet, etc. If you do this, maybe redo your main plan at floorplanner.com--it's pretty user friendly and you can easily put in dimensions, wall thickness, etc. There are too few dimensions in this plan to understand it very well, and I suspect a number of your estimates are off tremendously (your spiral staircase, for example). Then you can put in real furniture and the like.

Don't be disheartened, as I mentioned, I had several different plans with lots of time invested in them before I figured out the one I now love. These drafts help you figure out what you want in a house. And when you get a plan that's closer to working, you will get lots of fantastic suggestions on specific things. Don't worry, this gets a lot more fun and rewarding the closer you get. You've obviously got the budget for a really neat house, you've just got to figure out what that house is! (And keep us updated on the baby!)