Thoughts on our house plans, please?

   / Thoughts on our house plans, please? #31  
My 2 cents. Take the garage all the way back as far as you can. It would be cheap since you're only bumping it out.

This will give you a pretty good size work shop, OR you can do a Game room, Man cave, bomb shelter/ tornado hurricane safe room, etc.etc.

Also quite a long walk carrying groceries from the car to the kitchen. If the kitchen was up front of the hose, lose the one set of steps, flip the Utility and dining, and you end up with an extra room where the kitchen was---or a large sun room/ green house.
 
   / Thoughts on our house plans, please? #32  
OK, I started to post this a couple of times, then changed my mind, then changed it again, so here goes.

I'm sorry but I have to be blunt. The house just doesn't work. There is an immense amount of wasted space, poorly placed doors, improperly sized walk in closets, an exterior with three types of siding, a sun room pushed up against a garage, and a hugely expensive roof. It will cost a fortune to build, and would be very difficult to sell at anything but a significant loss. I get the distinct impression that it was drawn by someone who doesn't really understand how to design a house.
 
   / Thoughts on our house plans, please? #33  
I don't feel picked on. *I hear what your saying but its a hard pill to swallow. One of my favorite sayings is a person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still. Usually I'm not on the recipient end though! *

Eddie I respect your opinions although I think they might be a tad on the harsh side. I get the difference between building for your own tastes versus building a marketable house. ...

Thanks again,
Nathan
Nathan,
You are doing the right thing by requesting feedback on you house plans. I posted the ugly details of my entire house build in my thread, At Home in the Woods. We moved into the house a year and a half ago. I know very well how painful it can be to put your heart and soul out on the web for people to take jabs at your project. However, the more objective you can be reading people's responses, the better off you will be.

First of all, you should carefully absorb Eddie's comments. He made some suggestions when we were building our house that helped us greatly. For the most part, Eddie's comments regarding your house plans are spot on. I would call your plans a "rough draft". They are far from production ready. Like you, we drew up our own plans using some house plan software. When we thought we had finished our design, we ended up scrapping it and starting over because House #1 ended up being too large. We then drew up plans for House #2. Our house is 1 1/2 stories with a full walkout basement like yours. House #2 only had 2 bedrooms on the main floor. We did not intend to ever finish the upstairs and might never finish the basement. Thus, a house as large as ours with only 2 bedrooms would be odd. Plus my wife got pregnant so she wanted 3 bedrooms on the main floor instead of 2. So we scrapped House #2 and designed House #3 which is what we built. We ended up partnering with a house designer to assist us but we were deeply involved in the process.

It sounds like you are on House #2. I believe that you, like we did, need to move on to House #3. I gave my wife fits when she wanted to scrap House #2 and work on House #3, just like your wife may do to you. While your second stairwell seems kind of neat, it is going to end up costing you tens of thousands of dollars, maybe $100K+, over what a comporable house with the same usable square footage would cost. I suspect that part of the reason your architect ended up designing a 5600 SF house, was because a massive house is required to support 2 stairwells and a kitchen with an island.

If you are like most people, this house will be the largest investment you make in your life. As such, it needs to be something you can sell if you need to. Being 34 years old, you may not foresee that possibility, but life happens. You are just only one significant life event away from all your plans changing direction. That could happen tomorrow (illness, career crisis, economy, family issue, etc.). So you don't want to invest a significant chunk of your life savings in something you will have trouble selling. I think you would have trouble selling a 2650 SF house with two stairwells. If you ever have to sell that house, you might lose your shirt. You should get a sense of this possibility already based on multiple comments from people in this thread. It would surprise me if you could find someone else willing to pay so much money for a second stairwell.

When looking at people's comments in this thread, I see one word or thought that keeps coming up: "inefficient". Your house plan has a lot wasted space in it, for example 2 stairwell landings, the large empty space in the middle of the second floor, etc. Carrying groceries from the garage to the kitchen will not be fun. Ideally, the door from the garage will open into the kitchen. Your master bedroom is larger than the living room. The island in that size kitchen will cause a traffic jam if you ever have a family gathering at your house. The fridge and pantry should be closer to the stove. Getting food out of the pantry or fridge and carrying it around the island to the stove on the opposite wall will make for a long trip. You need counter space beside the fridge to help loading groceries into the fridge or to help pulling leftovers out of the fridge.

Like your house, our main floor is 2000 SF. However, we have 3 bedrooms, a formal dining room, an eat-in kitchen, a grand piano, both a tile shower with 2 shower heads and a claw foot tub in the master bath, and lots of space for entertaining guests - all on the main floor. We can have 20 people inside our house for a gathering without any crowding issues. You can see our house plans here. We obviously have more yard work and landscaping to do.

278421d1346174634-home-woods-img_3314.jpg

I'm not implying that you should build a house like ours; our tastes may not be yours. However, I'm just trying to show you an example, following Eddie's comments, of what you should be able to do with only 2000 SF. Your house plans are 2650 SF and you will have trouble fitting a significant gathering of people in your house at one time.

Also, your house with a 2000 SF main floor adds only 650 SF if you finish the entire upstairs. Our house with a 2000 SF main floor will add 1700 SF if we finish the upstairs. Our house with the same footprint as yours can have 1000 SF more living space than yours. The extra 1000 SF adds up to big dollars when it comes to resell. That's one reason your two stairwells may cost you $100K+. The other reason our house has so much more space upstairs is our garage is located adjacent to the house so the space above the garage is just a continuation of the rest of the space in the upstairs. One person mentioned that square/rectangular houses have some very practical advantages. Our house is a traditional rectangular house but it has a great room floor plan so we get some of the advantages of old and new designs.

Please understand that I'm not trying to say that my house is better than your house. That's really not my intention. If I have come across that way, please accept my apology up front. I'm just trying to give you some practical suggestions and give you some examples to back up my suggestions.

Good luck with your project and please put up a thread when you start building. It sounds like it would be fun to follow.

Obed
 
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   / Thoughts on our house plans, please? #34  
reading artisan post. and looking at placement of all the bathrooms, sinks, kitchen, showers, etc.... your plumbing is going all over the place. and you also noted forced air for heating and cooling. you may not have much of a basement left. with current design. to deal with all the hot / cold water lines and sewage lines and then the large duct work for heating and cooling so you can plow air into rooms and suck air back out of the same rooms to obtain your air circulation in the rooms.
 
   / Thoughts on our house plans, please? #35  
Obed, do you by chance know what post number your floor plans are in or could you post it on here? I have followed your whole thread but can't find it easily while searching on my phone.
 
   / Thoughts on our house plans, please? #36  
   / Thoughts on our house plans, please? #37  
Thanks. When I clicked on the link through the tbn app it went to post 200.
 
   / Thoughts on our house plans, please? #38  
I designed our house but I also had three years of drafting in school including one year of house design. I also keep/kepted up reading trade magazines. I have forgotten how many designs we went through before finding a builder but it was dozens of plans. Once we found a builder we trusted and liked, we started working through the money side of the design we had. The design was a two story and cost too much, so we went to a single story, and started the design process over again.

It took us years to get our design just right. There are only a few things we would change but then we work through the cost of the change and we get right back to what we built. If you want to design your own house take the time to get it right.

Hallways and stairs are very expensive, single use space. Minimize them as much as possible.

Windows are expensive. Not only are good quality windows expensive they need to be placed so that they do not limit the use of a room. Floor to ceiling windows used to be popular which I never understood since you could not put furniture in front of the windows. Think carefully of the window sill height and placement in the room.

Be careful of your window sizes in the bedrooms. They look small. I think by code the window has to be 16/18 inches wide. The windows look to be 4 feet or 8 feet but the inspector will be looking at the size of the window that can be opened. I don't agree with their interpretation of the code but I lost that battle.

A 12x12 bedroom is a good working size. Anything with a 10' side is smallish and tight.

Doors should be 36 inches wide. Smaller doors are a PITA. Doors take up space and limit a rooms usefulness so pllace them carefully and minimize them where possible.

Bathrooms and kitchens are expensive. Think hard on how many bathrooms you REALLY need and how large they should be. Having said that, if you think you this will be the last house you will live in then make sure you design for accessibility in at least on bathroom. The work flow in a kitchen is important. Figure out the work triangle and follow it closely. A bigger work triangle is not better.

If the CAD program allows, create furniture in the rooms to see how it fits. How will people flow in the room? Can you fit your current furniture in the rooms? If the program will not do this then print out the design or the rooms at some scale such as 1/4 inch is 12 inches. Then take 1/4 graph paper and create scale "models" of your furniture. You can then place the "model" furniture in the room and see how things will work. Or not. For instance, it seems that in your family room the interior walls would hold the TV or the TV would be over the fireplace. In either case the TV would not be centered and people would be looking at the TV at an angle. The door to the porch is not really needed and it limits your space in the family room. There are guidelines as too how much TV you need for a given viewing distance. Make sure you have enough room to install a large enough TV.

The closet sizes are problematic. They take up lots of space but they are not very usable especially on the second floor. The hall closet especially. I suspect if you had a shallow closet in the hall you would get more storage space. Walking closets are wasteful of space. You have to provide room to stand in after all. Use the space in the room or the hall to stand in while reaching INTO the closet is much more efficient. Having a single door in the one bedroom is going to make it hard to reach most of the closet space.

Those two stairs are costing quite a bit of money for no real use.

The fireplace is on an external wall. If the fireplace is to be used, a chimney on the interior of the house is better for moving the smoke. Fireplaces really stink, no pun intended, for warming a house. A wood stove is better. We use a wood stove to heat our 2400ish sf house. You should install a pipe to bring combustion air to the fireplace or wood stove.

To be useful porches need to be at least 8' wide. Six feet is enough space to walk on but if you have furniture to sit on 6' feet is not wide enough. Depending on your wind patterns, six feet wide might allow your porch furniture to get wet in a driving rain.

Minimize notches in the house. There are quite a few in the plan. While this might save some money the impact those notches will have on the roof plan is going to be expensive.

If you have a clear southern exposure, I would strongly suggest designing the house to pick up solar heat during the winter. It is not rocket science, it works, it is cheap, and it does not have to make the house look like something from science fiction.

Start reading the information on Building Science Information. Also buy the Lstiburek's book that covers your geographic area, Builder's Guides, and use said book for your building details.

Later,
Dan
 
   / Thoughts on our house plans, please? #39  
Wrap-around porches can be a mixed-bag. They can be very attractive. However, I went into one house that had a porch along the entire front of the house and the rooms adjacent to the porch were dark like caves. The porch roof kept most of the sunlight out of the house and made the adjacent rooms depressing. The deeper the porch, the more functional but also the darker the rooms inside the house will be.
 
   / Thoughts on our house plans, please?
  • Thread Starter
#40  
Sorry for not replying for a couple of days. This has been a busy week. I'm reading and taking notes as this thread goes along. Formulating strategy...
Thanks,
Nathan
 
 
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