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Creating the Perfect Floor Plan
Creating a great floor plan is essential to building your
dream home. Let's assume you have decided on the basic structure
of your home, such as cabin style, chalet, ranch, cape cod, or
traditional.
And we will also assume that you have created your "must
have" and "want if possible" lists of features
for your house.
With those things done, the next task is to fit all the pieces
of the puzzle together into a floor plan - one that not only
meets all your needs, but actually excites you! After all,
you're going to be living in your home for many years to come,
so it's critical to get everything right before the building
starts.
In some cases, your floor plan may be completely flexible within
an empty shell, constrained only by the outline of the external
walls.
If you are starting with a clean sheet like this, it can be
difficult to know where to begin. One useful technique is to
start with your existing house and consider what you like about
its layout and what you dislike. What works well, and what have
you always wished you could change?
It doesn't matter if styles of your old and new house are very
different... here you should be thinking about things
like:
-The absolute or relative sizes of the different rooms.
-How they are positioned in relation to each other.
-How the daily traffic flows between rooms and around the
house.
In most cases, finding the perfect floor plan is achieved by
taking some form of pre-designed layout and adapting it to suit
you more precisely. Just how much you can modify the plan will
vary from supplier to supplier and home design to home design.
So, the first thing to establish is exactly how much flexibility
you have.
Ideally, there will only be a few structural elements than can't
be moved or changed, but there may be other reasons why your
ideal home layout can't be achieved. The most common obstacles
are cost (it may be prohibitively expensive to do what you want)
and officialdom (there may be a building code that is violated
by your ideal layout). So, it's always a good idea to get your
rough layout checked before you get too attached to it!
Let's look at some of the factors to consider when arriving at
your perfect floor plan.
Room Sizes
Most off-the-shelf plans allow you to move internal walls around
to change the proportions of different rooms. But you have to be
sure that each of the resulting rooms is adequate for its
purpose. Use the dimensions of your current rooms to help you
get an accurate feel for what the dimensions on the plan really
mean.
How Many Rooms
Think carefully about how this will apply to your
lifestyle.
Use All Three Dimensions
While some homes are only story, many have multiple levels, and
you may also have a basement to include in your planning. This
means you have to consider not only the layout of each floor,
but also how these floors relate to each other vertically. For
example, keeping water supply and waste drainage on one side of
the building is most cost effective. Your home builder can be of
great help here.
Storage
Few home designs include enough built-in storage to begin with,
especially those that are based on designs for vacation homes.
Be realistic about how much storage space you need, again using
your existing home as a starting point.
Extra Spaces
Designing a home gives you the chance to include some different
forms of space that add little to the cost of the home, but can
greatly enhance the flexibility of the design. The first space
you might plan in is a loft that can be used as an extra living
room, a guest room, an office -- or with a little planning,
perhaps all three.
The other space to include in your planning is a porch or deck
(or both). If you plan the location of porches and decks
carefully and integrate them into the internal floor plan, they
can add lots of value and enjoyment.
While you may be satisfied with sketching your plans out roughly
before handing them over to the professionals, you may find it
useful to look at some of the low cost packages for home
computers. These can be very powerful and will allow you to make
many trial modifications to your floor plan. Most will even give
you a three-dimensional view of your new home design.
And using home design software enables you to hand over a very
accurate representation of your vision to the architect or
designer to make sure the finished building is just what you
planned.
Another place to find great floor plans is to simply search on
the internet. There are many floor plan websites that offer
thousands of plans. They can give you some really great
ideas.
And, of course, perhaps the easiest and simplest way to come up
with a great floor plan is to just ask your builder to come up
with one for you. They will be glad to take your input of home
features that you want and create a design that will meet your
every need.
Remember, with just a little thought and planning, you can
easily create your own perfect home floor plan.
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