A House Design

[mishalak]

This is an itty bitty thumbnail of the ground floor for what I think may be my ideal house plan. I knocked it together on paper while I was out at my parents' house on Tuesday and Wednesday. It works out to be 1,368 square feet (127 square meters, but I designed it in feet since I'm in America and if I actually build this thing I'd use local standard) in 36 by 38 feet front to back and side to side. I have planed out to have a half upper floor. Two or three rooms including the media room stuffed under the roof. And here in Colorado is only costs a very little more to have an unfinished basement than a crawl space. Plus that gives a place to stick the mechanicals.

If you link through to look at it there are a few things that are not obvious just from the rough plans I've made. First I plan on nine-foot ceilings, as that seems to work out well with the stairs and not being excessively big. On the plans light green is countertop of some sort probably with cabinets under. The big green square between the kitchen and living room is a non-standard island, more like a big kitchen table with the storage far underneath. If I can afford it that will be the one countertop made of marble and Colorado Yule marble with the pretty green veins if I can get it. Dark green are cabinets without countertops and go from floor to ceiling.

That red square over at the side of the living room is the fireplace/woodburning stove. If actually building the house I'd check on the legality of running the wood pellet stoves on red air quality days in Denver because I envision using it a lot.

The dark gray all along the walls in many rooms are open shelves. There will be lots of places for my books in my bedroom and plenty of places to put dry goods in the pantry. The light grey fans are the doors if that isn't obvious.

The conservatory will have lots of windows and skylights where it doesn't interfere with the room that will be toward the center of the house. I'm also planning that it would have a big heavy concrete floor, the better to deal with water in a room with lots of plants, and to hold heat from the daytime.

Naturally this plan probably won't ever get built, but there it is. Part of my ideal house.

Comments

[mrpsyklops.livejournal.com]

Nice. The only comment I have is that I would arrange for a half bath or a door to the guest bath that doesn't require walking through the guest bedroom. It can be convenient to have evening guests while someone is staying over, and a public half bath or second doorway preserves the overnight guest's privacy.

Just a thought.... Pretty plan!

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

The trouble with the direct door to the bathroom is that then the bath needs to be bigger. And that square over there is only 12 by 12 feet so I would think that the spare bedroom does not have a foot to spare. Unless the while house gets bigger I don't see any better way to work it.

If I'm hosting a party I'll just direct them into my bathroom if I have to. Or put one upstairs.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

But...but... there doesn't seem to be a Library.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

The whole place is a library. Plus 100 square meters of basement. I mean I'm going to put bookcases on nearly every wall of my bedroom. Plus some freestanding furniture type ones in there as well. And more in the living room though I only thought of it later. They'll go with sitting in front of a nice cozy fire.

Plus I've not done the upstairs stuff I'm going to cram under the roof. Bookcases that can swing open to reveal more storage space under the parts of the roof that are too low to walk under. That's the general idea that I'll work on when I do the upstairs.

But seriously, unfinished basement. That screams book storage with gorilla shelves or something.

[bureinato.livejournal.com]

Have you ever looked at the Not so Big House? It's an interesting book. And they seem to have a web site now:
http://www.notsobighouse.com/

I tend to agree with the a bathroom needs to be accessible for guests thing.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Maybe the living room can give a bit. Though I resisted that because I had those nice simple load bearing walls set twelve feet apart. What about a walk through from the bathroom to the guest room?

Never heard of Not So Big House before now. Not sure that it would be useful to me. While I like smaller houses, as proven by my design which my dad called impossible to sell because it has under 2000 finished square feet, I don't particularly like neighbors. I don't want to sit out on my front porch and get to know them even if they are not conservative nutballs. I'd rather stay inside and read a book or putter about in my backyard with the vest pocket birch forest I dream of planting.

Best of all with a media room upstairs I can avoid ever going to a movie theater again.

[bureinato.livejournal.com]

You can get not so big house from the library. It's worth a look, she tends to build in bookcases :) She's mostly arguing against those tract mansions that are cluttering up the landscape.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I'm with the other commenters; you have to have a toilet that is accessible from your public space without going through a bedroom. I'm sure

I understand the impulse to have a big through living room/kitchen, but if you don't actually cook you don't need a kitchen half that big, and if you do cook seriously then you need some way to shut the kitchen off from your living space unless you plan never to cook fish or burn toast. Given this space I would seriously consider swapping the kitchen and formal dining room and putting a screen of some kind between living room and formal dining room which can be pulled away when you want to entertain a lot of people. This would also have the advantage of making the plumbing run remotely sensible. You'd then have the double doors from the (new) dining room through to the conservatory.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Unlike most Americans I cook. And I cook rather a lot and I would guess I'd do it even more if I had a boyfriend on a semi-permanent basis. Plus the dishwashing machine thing.

I left the kitchen open to the living room because I've found the huge cooking and entertaining space thing to work out very well my parents' (gigantic) house. The cook isn't totally left out of the action off in the kitchen while everyone else is in the living room. And it doesn't seem to be a problem with cooking either fish or burning things.

I don't get where switching the kitchen and the dinning room would make the plumbing run more sensable though. Seems to me that it would just put pipes on both sides of the stairs. Maybe I'm just not seeing it.

It definitely gives me things to ponder with the different perspectives. Maybe I'll figure out a way to just eliminate the dinning room and assume that I'm not the sort to throw formal dinner parties now, so why would I start just because I've got a house? Informal parties around the kitchen table on the other hand could work out just fine. If I can figure out how to do this sensibly then I can also have more than enough room to fix the bathroom problem.