House #2: Creating a floorplan

Preston Floor Plan

Trying to figure out the floor plan of a house you plan to live in, within budget, with young children as well as with teenagers, is a little bit mind boggling. Touring numerous model homes helped us out here quite a bit.  We knew that we wanted a few things from each of the floor plans. From the Preston, we liked the idea of uniform #2 and #3 bedrooms.  

Sheffield Floor Plan

We really liked the Sheffield floor plan but we didn't like that the kids couldn't access their shared bathroom without walking near the foyer. We also didn't like the idea of a powder room that would be one more thing to clean and take up valuable square footage. I also was really hoping for a larger laundry room.

I loved this open breakfast area and the shared bathroom that also could be a powder room with a pocket door. The dining room wouldn't work for us at all as we plan to use it as an office, at least until we are able to build a large garage with carriage office later in life. 

So, what we did was combine all the elements we liked into our floor plan. We sacrificed some dining room/office space to have a larger laundry room as well.

I think that I mentioned that I am a bit type A (there goes Jeff laughing again)... So, to make sure I liked the flow of the new house, and to ensure that we had taken everything we could think of into account, I made a 3D model of our floor plan. The software was only 150.00 but it was well worth it. After laying out the original kitchen, it was evident that we would not be able to see the kids playing from the kitchen. Since our goal for the main living area was a loftish/open feel, we decided to skip some top cabinets, focus on island storage and knock out part of a wall that was on the Sheffield plan. So, what we ended up with was this floor plan.

We made a couple small revisions after this plan. A door was added to close off the laundry room, an 8 foot arch was added into the #2/#3 bedroom area and the windows on the master wall have been placed next to each other to accommodate a future screened in porch.