Avoid mistakes in the second house: Home construction company or architect?

Someone wrote in my post 4 years ago that our all-purpose room was too small – after all, it is 60 sqm. Or rather, there would be too little space in this all-purpose room. At the same time, I have also often read again that our floor plan wastes too much space and that the whole thing could fit into much fewer sqm. Our all-purpose room is a rectangle – so not an L or something around the corner. Would that perhaps have been the better choice? Can you get more out of the sqm that way?

You can get more out of square meters. You have proven that by doing the opposite consistently. Fat padding square meters / empty square meters cost fully and serve no purpose (using the dance floor to accommodate a home office in the bedroom is not counted as a "benefit" for once). Simply inflating or letting a floor plan get out of hand neither creates space nor generosity. This applies to every shape.

Does that now mean that we should make the living area even bigger, or how can it be planned better?

To answer that, one would need to know what the room actually looks like now (including furniture) and which areas particularly bother you. For example, I can always well imagine separating the sofa/TV room and having it "somewhere" on the ground floor. And for that, dining/cooking generously combined by the terrace.

Someone wrote in my post 4 years ago that our all-purpose room was too small – after all, it is 60 sqm.

You read that wrong: the person who wrote that had read the wrong figures and corrected their reading mistake! If you are already referring to your house here, please post the plans here. Not everyone here is willing to hunt down your floor plan through some roundabout way, especially since it is not even certain that it was built that way. Regarding the size of the all-purpose room: 60 sqm is very generous! However: if you allow yourself 5.45 meters in width, then with 11 meters you have to expect that with a deep kitchen and a wide dining table, the sofa area will be too short. L-shape is not always the solution: how the all-purpose room is planned depends on the property. And that you should not build the garage in the west, but in the east, and thus change a lot about the floor plan – that was also advised.

The sqm are not everything. There are dimensions you simply need.
Kitchen unit is 60 cm deep
Kitchen island 100 or even 120 cm deep
Table 120x300 needs 320x500 cm
Sofa has dimension x
Wall unit y
space in between

You can tell now where it’s tight for you.

By the way, with 4 children I would plan the living room separately. Possibly smaller and a large eat-in kitchen.

And besides that, the benefit of additional square meters is not linear. You have more need in some areas and more need in others. But the box is enlarged across the entire width/depth. And in large rooms, you very quickly create dead spaces. Depending on the floor plan (I haven't looked at it now), you can also waste a lot of space through walkways or minimize them.

I can well imagine our 49sqm even with double the family size. If I made it 1m deeper, the additional increase in area would hardly translate into usable space.

And apart from that, the benefit of additional square meters is not linear.

...yes, I believe that with a floor plan of the "all-room" like this one


.. the all-room would not perform worse with 45 sqm compared to 60 sqm "only". Because here too, for example, there is space for a dining table at least 120x300 cm large .. if necessary with a bench at the top of the plan.