lawyer_51
2025-10-16 08:47:25
- #1
First of all, I would like to point out that I really like the appearance of the house from the outside.
I grew up in a house of a similar size with 3 siblings. However, I moved out 15 years ago, but I would like to write you a few things that strike me here when I compare it with our family life back then. Whether that applies to a patchwork family you can better judge.
First of all, thank you very much for your words, the reflection of your family life, and the pleasant way you express yourself :)
My parents have three garages and a carport. These were not arranged in a blocking way, yet more parking spaces were still needed, because: family celebrations were always at my parents’, often still today, simply because when each of us comes with a partner and children, that means 2 parents, 7 adults, and 6 children. 15 people practically do not fit into any of the rental apartments we live in. Two of my siblings still live with my parents today, my little brother is a single dad with his twins in a now separated apartment.
This point is important and absolutely understandable. We will try to make the garage on the north side a double garage and place another double garage on the south side (the land there needs to be filled anyway) for vehicles that are not used so often. The street on the south side of the property seems to me to have enough space for parking for the rest of the family and friends along the street. It is quite quiet here. An alternative would have been to shift the house completely towards the south to create more parking space in the north. However, this would mean that we could not keep the building envelope. Unfortunately, not an option for us. :(
When I look at your plan, I see:
The basement is full of rooms that were not used by us. A playroom in the basement will sooner or later become a storage room. The guest room in the basement will probably be taken over by a child during their teenage years.
We only have girls, who at least for now still really like a gym room (they also have this in the current house). But you are probably right, in the long term this room will become a storage room...
The guest room will certainly be occupied quite often by my mother, who lives an hour away.
The sports room is much too small.
Yes, totally. We want to outsource the pool technology and thereby generate at least 18 sqm of sports room.
On the ground floor the garages where cars are supposed to park one behind the other are unsuitable. My mother now goes to her horses 2-3 times a day, no one dares to park their car in front of her garage. Let alone in the garage in front of her car. Therefore, nowadays (all children being adults) cars are parked in different spots on the property so as not to block each other.
Understandable and will probably be solved as described above in this post.
The dining room would be much too small for me. When my parents have a birthday, not only the core family (15 people) come, but also other friends and relatives. You can of course move the living room a bit aside in your plan, a table fits by the sliding door, but it blocks the only passage. At Christmas there will probably also be a Christmas tree there. The main family life takes place here. I would plan this more spacious and brighter. What always strikes me when all our children (between 2 and 7 years old) are there is that they often play “in a circle.” This is difficult to explain and I would not have considered it important before, but they either run around the freestanding stairs or out one dining room door, through the kitchen, across the hallway, and back through the other doorway to the dining room. In your plan, the rooms are all dead ends.
I also want to address this topic, maybe we will move the dining and living rooms further towards the garden so that there is more than enough space. Another consideration was to swap the stairs and the office or to move the office completely to the upper floor.
If there is only one passage to the pantry, a door hidden behind a kitchen front is often a bit difficult because you always have to pass through it with a shopping basket, so the door can well be a 90 cm door. A 90 cm wide kitchen door always looks very bulky. I would find a double door as drawn super impractical because then you cannot have anything in your hand when you open the door towards the kitchen.
Good point. I would like to discuss this with the kitchen planner.
Considering the size of the house, I find the only bathroom on the ground floor quite small.
We will probably rotate it 90 degrees, make it bigger, and plan a “wine room” next to it, accessible from the hallway. I attached an example photo :)
The number of “non-car” vehicles must not be underestimated either. Bicycles, Bobby cars, scooters, later also mopeds, scooters etc. A lot of “covered but unheated space” will be needed.
Regarding the attic, I think that can be quite fitting now, but I would suspect that one or the other child might want to stay longer than planned. I would at least try in principle to create a more private living feeling here. At my parents’, the house had one more floor, and thanks to an initially existing outside door, after 15 years by inserting a wall and installing an outside staircase, an individual apartment was created.
Understandable, and this point came from a few people here. However, we do not want a real granny flat. And I never find an additional outside staircase really nice. But we will pass this idea on to the architect.
As I said, whether this helps you is for you to decide, but this is how the family life I remember was. My parents had the advantage of building one more floor “with daylight” thanks to a slope. So basement, then two floors, and then an expanded attic. We older children were in the attic, my two younger siblings were with my parents on the upper floor. The ground floor was the kitchen, living room, dining room, and utility room with laundry chute (my mother would always do this again), in the basement on the daylight side were the office and hobby room. Storage room and technical room on the slope side.
The laundry chute is planned and will definitely be implemented. We are considering swapping the utility room and storage room so that the laundry also ends up in the utility room and not in the storage room.
You should also not underestimate that hobbies are added with age. For example, my father now has two cars and a walk-in cooling cell because he is a hunter now. By the way, I am super jealous of the sloping plot because he has direct access to the basement where this cooling cell is but also, for example, his large workshop.
That is of course super cool and indeed enviable :cool:
Without any planning skills, I arranged rooms as I could imagine them. The pictures are attached as well :)