Are you getting approval for such a long driveway?
Yes, that’s not a problem. Because:
What I don’t understand is, why can’t you access the property from the west? Is the entrance then on the south side coming from a street there, or does the entrance have to come entirely from the street in the west?
The property is about 2m higher than the streets to the north and west, so a road is being built to the south for this and the properties to the east, running west to east (along the large building). Due to the height difference, there is no other way. But it’s all already planned and approved.
I thought the living room faces south, isn’t that so?
No, see the orientation on the property (the map is oriented north).
You use the stairs several times daily, also with laundry baskets, etc. And you don’t just move in once, children grow and suddenly want 140cm beds, children’s furniture gets replaced with youth furniture, etc. A room height of 240 cm in a room over 9 m wide can feel a bit oppressive. The standard today is rather 254 cm… which means a story height of about 290 cm (the ceiling also has to be overcome) and for that you need a suitable staircase.
Why are your rooms so low? Are you not allowed to build higher? 2.40m isn’t so bad in small rooms, but in your large living room including kitchen it will feel very oppressive.
I really can’t judge that. Higher rooms cost more money, although “only a few thousand euros.” We are very satisfied with the current 2.40 m room height in our current house, but the largest room there is only 4.7 x 6.5 m.
My parents’ house was an old farmhouse where the ceilings were significantly lower.
It will be sporty with the stairs. We have 19 steps and 3.2m x 2.2m to get comfortably to the upper floor. I would like to see the plan of your stairs from the stair builder.
The stairs are currently a bottleneck. You can only get furniture upstairs in parts, and relatively small ones at that. A better staircase costs additional space – which is already too scarce.
Our stairs currently measure 2.30 x 1.50 (!!) m in the same design. It was a bit tight during the move but everything basically fitted. Even now, no one has a problem with it here. So I literally don’t see it as “too tight”…
Shoes in the carport? Are you supposed to leave slippers there and then shuffle under the roof into the house? And in winter the shoes are nice and ice-cold?
The way you say it sounds somehow strange, but yes, that’s actually how we do it currently. Our hallway is always nice and clean because of that.
Open living room… I wouldn’t create three areas that lie next to each other like three furniture cabins in a furniture store and have the fireplace as a bottleneck when entering this room.
How would you solve it otherwise? We actually don’t find it bad (otherwise we wouldn’t have planned it that way).
And home office in the living room with three kids, I simply can’t take that seriously. You should create a proper workspace for that. That also makes it easier to separate work and leisure. And I know what I’m talking about, I have worked from home for over 10 years.
As I said, if it doesn’t work out contrary to expectations (currently it works well), there is still the guest/work room.
It starts with the hallway. For me, the hallway is actually the business card of the house, but here it’s unfortunately a dark and cramped place. When several guests arrive, they first have to be led individually through the kitchen before you can greet everyone. Also, there is no space for shoes here. As a solution, in the future you want to store the shoes in the carport. Is that seriously going to be your mnemonic for the rest of your life? What do you do when you have birthday parties? Make everyone leave shoes once in the carport? Do you have slippers for everyone there or can they go back into the house without shoes in socks through the dirt? I imagine that looking very funny with snow in winter. The carport is probably not locked and accessible to everyone (people and animals) at all times of day and night?
As I said, the only thing bothering me about the hallway is the cramped access, that’s wasted living space.
The door at the kitchen is just to have a short way to the utility room/pantry. The “main way” goes past the stairs to the living room.
Having the shoes in the carport is currently no problem at all, and if we continued renting we wouldn’t change that for the next 20 years either. We don’t have snow or dirt at the moment, because the carport shall, as mentioned initially, be more or less enclosed and therefore dry (like now too). The front side is completely closed and the property is fully fenced, so at most animals can find their way there.
Next with the technical room. 6 sqm for heating, electricity, water, washing machine? That will be very tight and in the end the washing machine will end up in the kitchen due to lack of space.
Of course we want to avoid that. If you place the entrance facing south, you could connect the utility room directly to the kitchen and avoid the long hallway. But then you’d have to come up with something great for the covering to the carport, that is still missing. I’m open to ideas here.
On the upper floor, there was forced, at all costs, an attempt to plan three children’s rooms. I would not want to grow up in "Child 1". Due to the direct proximity to the parents’ bed and the small room, you experience every love play of the parents firsthand. Additional frustration comes once the requirements for the room rise with age. Try to furnish the room sensibly for a >= 12-year-old. (Desk with PC, TV, wardrobe, 1.60m bed).
You don’t need a third kid’s room if you plan for 1-2 children.
It’s supposed to be 2-3 in the end.
The room Child 1 actually serves only as a reserve in case there really are three children (we plan for 2-3). I am for it, my wife is not. We’ll see.
TVs in children’s rooms are actually a no-go for me. And a double bed for a child wouldn’t occur to me, max 1.40 m, but that is actually more of a luxury problem due to double mattress price. My childhood room was sometimes 9 m² with a normal 90 cm bed and I didn’t miss anything. As a woman, you’d probably need a bit more for the wardrobe, presumably given here.
I’m also not in favor of showering the kids with all sorts of luxury and pastimes.
The three children’s rooms also made the parents’ bedroom very cramped. The spouse who is forced to sleep at the end of the bed is not to be envied here. With 2.80 m raw room width, there will be at most a passage of about 54 cm left at the end (280 cm - 6 cm plaster - 220 cm bed). Probably even less. After the person has broken their toe on the bedpost a second time, one should be kind enough to swap sides.
Our bed is 2.10 m long, and we currently have a passage width of 70 cm. The 6 cm less won’t kill us. We don’t want a big bedroom, on the contrary. We only sleep there, it should be as small and dark as possible so that you can sleep in peace and air it quickly. I find this modern style of “as big and as bright as possible” nonsensical.
And with a small bedroom, the mirrored wardrobe is also closer to the bed.
My tip: As some have already written, start again from scratch and consider whether you maybe want to spend a bit more money and enlarge the house a bit. With 10x10 m, such room wishes as a third children’s room or guest room on the ground floor are hard to implement sensibly without affecting other rooms.
We can’t and don’t want to invest much more money. Maybe max 10 x 11 m. But even then you don’t gain much.
Otherwise, I see many things as my predecessors do.
A pity: Living and children’s rooms don’t get much sun, somehow everything is planned opposite to the course of the sun – although it could be done well here.
In the winter months (Sept to April), the carport structure also covers the sun. The rest is done by the roof. Then the walls… it will be a dark house.
So, to summarize:
You have a north orientation and in the west you also block the sun so that no one can look from the south onto your terrace. You also place the entrance in the west, minimizing the last chance of sun in the living room.
I think you urgently need to work on your neighborhood phobia first. You can also create privacy with bushes or planted pergolas. Taking the sun away from your garden is a stupid solution.
Maybe you should draw the building area on your plot sketch so the forum can consider what else might be possible.
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My recommendation: first optimize the plot arrangement for the sun and the west orientation, move outbuildings from the sun, relocate the entrance to optimize the hallway, enlarge the utility room, and consider whether three children’s rooms upstairs are really necessary. Rethink ceiling heights and stairs, and whether it really needs to be 10x10.
That’s a good argument. But I don’t know how to solve that.
We want a
home because we want to be for ourselves. A typical new residential area with 300 m² “space” for everyone was out of the question for us. I don’t want to stir my neighbor’s coffee cup on the terrace, and I also don’t want to have to whisper in the garden. We also want to sunbathe in peace without voyeurs. Privacy is a huge plus for us.
Otherwise, I could stay in an apartment and wouldn’t have to build a house. My home is my castle, and it has moats with sharp sticks around it.
On the plot, there are also many tall trees on the west side, and the house to the south is a large old building with two tall floors and apartments inside, the upper windows at an estimated 6 m height. There’s not much you can do with bushes and pergolas there. The carport or wooden garage is to be about 3 m high and the terrace roofing is planned as not transparent but at least milky.
The building window for the house is unfortunately quite tight:
Frank word: You want too much on too little space. Only modifying the floor plan a bit won’t help. Fundamentally, it has to be clarified whether you can create more space (maybe nibble off some of the megalomaniac carport?) or whether you can give up one room.
But the more I compare the design with the location, the more it becomes clear that not the house but the outbuilding is generously planned.
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You should consider whether you want to give the house such a dominant outbuilding, which from a bird’s eye view looks like a gas station. Probably something like that wouldn’t be approved because it doesn’t subordinate to the house.
The carport is actually our space saver. We currently also have such a huge, half-enclosed one and actually wouldn’t want to miss it at all because it’s simply great.
50 m² with 3 m height are approved in Saxony without a permit, the transition and the extension on the left are to be considered separately and not affixed in one monolithic block.
Maybe we could do without the guest room and instead enlarge the utility room + living room. I have to think about that.