Final floor plan draft - except for the windows

With all due respect, I was referring to the arrangement of the windows in the living room, not about turning my design into a completely different house.

I had a few suggestions regarding this particular floor plan. How you yourself end up using your 90cm wide storage pipe is fortunately not my problem.

That the kitchen door should be hinged the other way, I already mentioned.

That doesn't change the fact that the space behind the door is only usable to a limited extent. That is not a problem in itself and is often seen, one should just be aware of it.

The sloping is drawn as an example. Maybe it will even be angular instead of round, who knows... it is simply meant to bring some light into the room, what de jure says about it interests me little.

The lighting of the basement rooms is relevant in the long term. On the one hand, they will almost certainly be used differently later on, on the other hand, the house might be sold at some point. And then the question arises how many square meters of living space are being sold. As soon as a room in the basement is a living space, the entire basement can be counted as living area. And the state building code is not without reason: A basement window with a slope of 45° is something completely different from one with a slope of 70 degrees.

Why a master bathroom if I access it via the hallway?

There are many reasons for a second bathroom. Some simply find it practical that two people can shower simultaneously, others want extra privacy of the parents from the children.

Why a children's bathroom without a shower?

I wrote that the children's bathroom could be extended at the expense of the master bathroom, implicitly so that there is room for the shower again.

Our approach is an open floor plan, no sliding door fits between cooking and dining.

That's why I wrote sliding or folding door. There are partition walls that hardly take up space when open but still don't look cheap like the DIY folding walls from way back when. This floor plan would allow that perfectly. Then you normally have the open kitchen, but for holiday dinners, or for stewed Brussels sprouts, you can close the kitchen. That is just a suggestion to think about but of course not mandatory.

Regarding the windows: That is actually simple: there should be space for furniture along the wall. So if a side window is desired, it would be practical to place it by the table. If no dining area is planned in the kitchen, I would place the table right next to the kitchen. Since then dining area and seating corner are in opposite corners, their competition for space is somewhat eased. The fireplace would then have to move elsewhere. Of course, the nearly square room with the two functional groups is not optimally usable. Something that might help is a sofa plus armchair instead of the seating group, with the back to the wall and the TV facing into the room, roughly between the two windows.

As soon as a room in the basement is a living room, the entire basement can be counted as living space.

That is - at least in NRW - wrong. Only the room that has actually been designed as living space counts as such.

And why do you take it for granted that the house will be sold later? Reminds me of our first banker, who said everything about the house would have to be changed so it could be sold well later. I thought I wasn't hearing correctly...

That is - at least in NRW - incorrect. Only the space that is also designated as living area counts as such.

I read it differently in a source but only in secondary literature, however, in case of doubt, one should consult a specialist. I was somewhat surprised. The Living Space Ordinance is uniform nationwide but offers nothing in this regard.

And why do you take it for granted that the house will be sold later? It reminds me of our first banker, who said all that needs to be changed in the house so that it could be sold well later. I thought, I didn’t hear that right...

The idea of building a house is to build an individually suitable house, that’s clear. But when you see how many marriages end in divorce nowadays and how secure jobs are, but also how people themselves reorient over the course of their lives, it is almost certain that the house will be sold during the lifetime. Everything else I consider naive. And you have to look at how to design the house as future-proof and flexible as possible for yourself without too many compromises. On the one hand, there isn’t exactly small change invested in the house and you want to get as much out of it as possible, especially if the loan is still running; on the other hand, it does make a difference whether you get 10k more or less when you sell the paid-off house at age 70 to finance the nursing home.

Moreover, the considerations about a possible sale also support the possibility of repurposing the house for oneself in the future.

Then we are probably naive :)

We won't even get the money back in the slightest... and we only built for ourselves.

I have living space in the basement and other rooms are designated differently accordingly.

Thanks, some things are clearer now after I read your detailed post. I do see a few things differently (folding door, basement as living space, possible house sale), but your explanations on the topic of windows help me and actually gave me an idea, thanks. I'll do some more drawing.

Simply wonderful. I was searching for the house pictures thread using the search function and by chance saw my old topic in the results and read through it completely again.

And I was just standing in the house, walking through all the rooms, and thinking to myself again: for us, everything is perfect, just as it should be.

The floor plans posted back then have undergone a few changes:
- the floor-to-ceiling window facing east is now 1.75 m wide instead of 1.50 m
- the storage room has even become narrower (85 instead of 90 cm)
- the walls between the cloakroom/storage room and guest WC/storage room were built at 6 cm thickness instead of 11.5 cm to gain a bit more space; the doors now each open towards the hallway
- the kitchen got some extra space from the study room (wall moved 50 cm); the kitchen is now 3.00 x 3.40 m plus a freestanding refrigerator; the "dead corner" in the L-shaped kitchen is used as an Le-shaped one; the kitchen door is executed as a sliding door on the hallway wall, so it’s not in the way anywhere
- in the utility room in the basement, we have separated off a shower bathroom as a separate room

Rest assured, the stairs, children’s bathroom, and everything else work as well. :)

Cheers!