City villa floor plan 160 sqm - Please provide tips!

A different point – I don’t care how the house looks from the outside

I think a nice overall appearance is very important.

You can arrange the children's room windows nicely symmetrical, I see no reason to accept such a bad exterior view. In the living room, you can shift the sliding window so that it aligns with the center mullion of the upper window. Your guest WC window is very small, as are the windows in the living room corner.

Best regards
Sabine

The two floor-to-ceiling windows of the children's rooms are both 1.71 m from the outer wall on the left and right. We will shift the sliding windows. The guest WC window will also be enlarged, from 76 cm to 101 cm. Which living room corner do you mean? In the living room, there is only the small floor-to-ceiling window in the south.

A different point - why should I care how the house looks from the outside? How often do I stand in front of the house and think it looks good, and how often am I inside the house and have to look out and sensibly arrange the furnishings? Am I building the house for the neighbors to look at or for myself to live in?

You come home yourself several times a day and don’t want to think in the driveway “what kind of ugly house did I put here”.

More like: “wow, and this belongs to me...!” ...
I’m still doing this after 5 years

Is that really the case? Basically, you always have something poorly planned somewhere that you get annoyed about when moving in or a week later – after half a year no one cares anymore.

I usually don’t come home several times a day, and at the moment it’s dark both in the morning and in the evening.

So for me, something has to be practical and useable in a sensible way and not just look nice for the neighbor so I can say I have the cooler house; I find it honestly pointless when there are floor-to-ceiling windows everywhere that are then covered up so no one can look inside.

For me, something has to be practical and reasonably usable and not just look nice for the neighbor so I can say I have the cooler house; I honestly find it pointless when there are floor-to-ceiling windows everywhere that are then covered up so no one can look inside

Practicality does not exclude beauty. You don’t have to think about what neighbors will say when building your house. Apparently, you seem to always consider what others might think about a purchase. But it’s up to you: if you like it better, you can just build an (ugly) house only for the neighbors.

It is primarily about not being on the neighbor's boundary; shifting the house doesn't help in that regard.

The idea was: garage at the boundary; from the house to that boundary it would be, if I understood correctly, sixty-eight - hence the impulse to shift linearly by 80 cm to keep the garage at the boundary, not to inflate the garage to a special size, and as a result move about 80 cm further away from the other boundary.

Again regarding the room height: if I increase it by e.g. half a brick, I have to enlarge the windows too, right? So the proportions are correct.

By "half a brick" you probably mean half a row of bricks (?) - that would be one course in 2DF. Two courses in NF would come closer to the height of a stair step. But an "adjustment" of the window heights is not required for optical reasons. The connection would rather be seen in the measurement between lintel and underside of the ceiling.

The window topic is really causing me headaches....if I follow the room design, the exterior view looks bad. If I follow only the appearance and symmetry, the windows don't fit the respective rooms. :-(

This can be balanced out, but requires a kind of "green thumb". For a general contractor I find the views relatively good. With you can see how it can also look good asymmetrically.

Guest WC window will also be enlarged, from 76 cm to 101.

Which fare-dodger should want to climb out there? - Nonsense, 76 is almost always enough.

Hello everyone,

The building application has been submitted, meaning the exterior dimensions and position of the house are fixed. It has now become clear that it couldn’t be done otherwise. The 3m building boundary on the east has a slight kink and is narrower at the front than at the back in the garden. We are "touching" this building boundary with a corner (where the guest WC is). So pushing the house further toward the street is not possible due to the building boundary, without reducing the 9.60m width of the house. Also, the initial suggestions here to place the garage in the east don’t work, because then the house would also have to maintain 3m to the neighbor on the west – so again the house would have to be reduced.

Honestly, I’m really glad about these requirements now, I don’t have to rack my brains about how and what would be better.

So here in the forum it will be about the interior of the house once we finally get the new plans.

Another point: Yesterday we received a letter from the survey office stating that new boundary markings on the property were made at the request of the municipality already in December! That means our plot will be reduced by a few sqm (about 5 sqm), apparently a few centimeters on the east side because of the sidewalk. Allegedly, we were invited to a meeting for this reason but did not attend (according to the survey office). I am shocked! We were never informed about this, let alone invited! Of course, no one answers the phone at the municipal building authority...
We don’t know what to do. Suing over these few sqm is probably not worth it, I think. We would get the price per sqm refunded. On the other hand, it really annoys me to just accept this without being informed beforehand.

Edit: The notary fees are calculated based on the purchase price. If the purchase price is reduced retroactively, we probably won’t get anything back for the notary fees, right? Could that be an argument in a lawsuit? Would then all the documents have to be changed as well? So consequential costs for us...