February 11, 2011

Floor Plan-Basement

February 11, 2011/ Michelle S

Our "inspiration" plans didn't have a basement so this was all us....and the lumber company.

We knew we wanted a living area and a guest suite...and some storage.

We ended up with this...

The large family area is currently a little akward because we aren't really sure how we want to use the space. Kind of depends on that whole kid factor that I mentioned earlier in the week. A pool table would also work well. :P

The 4th bedroom and bath works great for guests.

The 2 storage spaces are also nice. Great places to store stuff and forget about it...until garage sale time... or when you can't open the door anymore.

Floor plan week is over! Next week I'll share some of my recent OCD projects and maybe a sewing project....if my sewing machine doesn't take me down before then.

February 10, 2011

Floor Plan Metamorphosis- Exterior

February 10, 2011/ Michelle S

It's amazing the design of the exterior of our house went from this....

Image found here

To this...

The changes resulted from the following...

Neither of us loved the original plan's drawing.

It was a little too contemporary and bland for us.
I'm still not "in love" with our exterior but it's the inside that counts, right?

We reversed the plans to better fit our lot.
We added an extra garage stall.

I originally fought against this addition but Nate can definitely say "I told you so" on this one. It's nice for him to have that once in awhile..it doesn't happen often.

We added extra square footage in a couple of locations in the house.

Tomorrow we will end floor plan week with a look at the basement plans!

February 08, 2011

Floor Plan Metamorphosis- First Floor

February 08, 2011/ Michelle S

Metamorphosis is a funny word.

Floor Plan Week continues with the first floor.

How did we get from this...

Original plans found here

to this....

We reversed the plans to better fit our lot.

We added a mudroom. Our first house lacked any area to place your coats/shoes when walking in the door. We stored our shoes in the pantry. That's sick. We knew a mudroom was a must-have! Especially with our lovely Iowa winters.

After much debate, we added an office. We had originally planned to use the dining space as an office but changed our minds because:

Other homes in our price range have dining rooms and although we plan on living here forever, we didn't want to do something to hurt the resale of the home.

Adding square footage increases the building cost but also increases the value of a home. We had to look very hard at our budget when making this decision.

Offices are usually messy (at least ours is) and that would be the first thing you see when you walk in the door.
I fell in love with an office in a Parade Home. It had a double sided fireplace and it was perfect and cozy and I needed one just like it! Enough said.

In the kitchen we added a few more cabinets and an island. We had an island in our previous house that we loved. The island also provides additional seating for entertaining.

We added a pantry inside a support column to increase storage space.

Most everything else stayed the same! That's why we chose this plan as our inspiration...and the circular staircase and 2 story living room had me drooling all over my keyboard. Seriously. It was gross.

Tomorrow we will look at the changes on the 2nd floor.

February 07, 2011

Choosing a Floor Plan

February 07, 2011/ Michelle S

WARNING: If floor plans bore you, check back next week because it's FLOOR PLAN WEEK!!!

Most of the blogs I read (and there a lot) discuss renovating houses.
There is little information regarding building your own house.

Granted, I realize that building is not an option for most people but I think you may be surprised at how affordable it is if you have the right knowledge and skills (or at least your family and friends do!).

One of the first steps in building a house is choosing a floor plan.

Choosing a floor plan can be difficult. There are many things to factor in when making your final decision.

This week I will share with you how we ended up with our current floor plan and the decisions we made to get there. Hopefully you can use these posts as resource to help guide you through the decision making process if you ever decide to build a house or when searching for your already-built dream home.

This was our second time building a house so we used what worked/didn't work in our old home to help shape the design of our current home.

Choosing a floor plan for our first home was simple. It needed to be easy to frame (because we were doing almost all of the work ourselves) and the square footage needed to be around ~1300-1400 to fit into our ~~small~~ extremely small, 1 income budget. That was basically it. We built that house with the intention of selling it in 2 years so we just needed something we could live with in that time frame.

That criteria led us to this...

Plans found here

We loved this house. A lot of blood, sweat, and even a few tears went into this house. It was the house we lived in right after we got married. It was the house that we brought Ike home to. Memories.
There were also things that we didn't love...but that was okay...we were going to move anyways!

Our second house required some more thought with regards to the floor plan.
We have good intentions of living in this house forever so we wanted it big enough to grow into and have good bones. We knew we couldn't do everything that we wanted right away but as long as the structure was good, we could slowly add design. (Even though our house is new, I sometimes feel like we are fixing up an old farm house. Weird.)

There were a few features that we knew we wanted (and some that that we didn't even know we wanted) while searching for floor plans on-line.

What we wanted: