Opinion on floor plan

Hello everyone and a warm welcome!

We have been silent readers for a while now, as we have known since the end of last year that we will also embark on the house-building adventure. :-) We are really looking forward to it, but of course, it is also associated with many thoughts and everything around it.

The floor plan has been developed over many weeks and we think it is quite practical. I am very curious about criticism – positive as well as negative – and look forward to every opinion.

So, here is the list of questions:

Development plan/restrictions Development plan, eaves height 6.20 m
Plot size: 620 sqm
Slope: No
Site coverage ratio: fits
Floor space index: fits
Building window, building line and boundary: slightly complied with
Edge development: no
Number of parking spaces: 2
Number of storeys: 3 (ground floor, upper floor, attic, without basement)
Roof shape: gable roof
Style: country house / traditional
Orientation: south
Maximum heights / limits: 6.20 m eaves height, 33 degrees roof pitch
Other requirements: nothing special

Requirements of the builders
Basement, storeys: no basement, 3 storeys
Number of people, age: 4 (37, 35, 5 and 1 year) possibly one more child later
Office: family use
Overnight guests per year: 0
Open kitchen without cooking island
Number of dining seats: 5 - 6
Fireplace: yes
Garage: double garage
Utility garden, greenhouse: yes, would be nice :-)

House design
Who planned it: ourselves

What do you like especially? The living-dining area with adjoining sewing room – you are involved and the chaos can still be tucked away with a sliding door to the living room.
What do you not like? Possibly entrance area too narrow? Bedroom layout with walk-in closet, T-solution in the bathroom cramped???
Price estimate: approx. 360 K €
Personal price limit for the house, incl. equipment: approx. like estimate
Favored heating technology: air heat pump

If you had to do without, which details/extensions
-can you do without:
-can you not do without: kitchen planning, because the kitchen is already there (handmade by us, 1 year old) We found out afterwards that a building plot is available, but we can and do not want to do without the kitchen.

Your opinions on the floor plan would interest us greatly. We know the laundry room is quite small, but it is enough for the washing machine/dryer and the laundry chute. The laundry will possibly dry outside or maybe even in the boiler room or attic (it has to go up there anyway).
At the moment we have a rather small entrance area. We want to prevent this now by having a separate wardrobe in front of the guest toilet. Is the area still too small? Is the distance in the bathroom between washbasin and bathtub sufficient (1.50 m)? Or the hallway between the foot of the bed and the house wall (80 cm)?
The attic currently offers potential for expansion as a complete apartment, for example for a child or possibly a tenant later.

Many, many thanks in advance for your opinions!

Welcome to the forum, one should be friendly. :)

Now, hand on heart, what do you want to achieve with the DIYS floor plan? After 3 threads, there won't be much left of it and you will keep tinkering with the draft. Do you want to build it yourself later? Do you want to please an architect with it? Do you want to show us that you can draw?

And yes, contrary to my usual practice, I took time for this. I haven't gotten far because there were already 2 questions and a technical problem:

[*]5.20 meters length for a garage is extremely tight.
[*]Do you always want to route your traffic paths through the kitchen?
[*]Plan OG is thumbtack-sized, you can't do anything with that.

hm ... unfortunately the measurements on the upper floor cannot be read.

Ground floor .. what kind of special kitchen and corner bench is that in the darkest corner, that a new house is being planned around it? (A better kitchen layout would certainly be possible there).

Absolute bottleneck in the kitchen, where you have to swivel around the refrigerator (side-by-side?), fireplace construction ... how is that really supposed to look) to get around the living/sewing area.

Small windows are often characteristic of Bavarian houses, but only 55 cm wide shell openings for windows leave hardly any glass surface.

The parents' bedroom probably won't work well either, as far as the measurements can be guessed.

180 cm for the sewing room is really tight, but there is a huge technical room. Why is it so big? Because the utility room and pantry are separate, although the utility room with a 154 cm shell size is also not generous.

Positive .. children's rooms facing south ;)

Hello and welcome!

Unfortunately, I also find the proposal suboptimal.

You don’t see much at the top, but despite the classic layout, there are many no-gos for me:
1.) The bathroom in the T-layout is not deep enough. Who wants to squeeze onto the toilet through this gap every time?
2.) Doors are always in the corner of the room. This causes a lot of lost space, especially in bedrooms (there should be 65-70 cm distance from the wall)
3.) You waste quite a lot of space in the hallway
4.) The bedroom as currently arranged is too small. A “real” bed needs more space, so the room layout no longer fits or at least is much too cramped. Also, I don’t see the advantage, since the “walk-in closet” offers less space than a classic wardrobe and also makes the room visually much smaller.

Regarding the ground floor: Unfortunately, everything is solved very unfavorably here:
1.) Garage too short and if I already build the garage onto the house, I also want direct access to the house (priceless in winter and also great for nice family parties. You can also store items there that are not used so often, which you wouldn’t store there if you had to go outside for them)
2.) The entrance area is probably quite dark and I don’t know what to do meaningfully with the space in front of the guest WC. For a wardrobe it would be too tight for me.
3.) To get to the living room you have to walk through the entire ground floor once and everyone has to go directly through the kitchen. Most people try to arrange an open kitchen so that a dirty pot doesn’t immediately catch their eye when watching TV. You walk past it directly on all your routes. This not only bothers visitors but especially yourself if you are constantly reminded of work
3.1) Planning a house around the kitchen personally seems absolutely d... to me, but that is up to everyone to decide for themselves. The fact is that the house remains longer than the kitchen and you can also adapt the kitchen.
4.) The pantry is quite small and why is it in the hallway (longer distances)
5.) The utility room is quite small and in this location rather disturbing (because it takes up a lot of space in the main area. If you really iron or dry upstairs, I would consider moving the utility room upstairs as well.
6.) The living/dining room is very spacious but poorly shaped. What do you do in this room? Kitchen and dining area are squeezed into one corner and the couch in the other corner and in between there is 7 m of space, where I have no idea what you want to do with it meaningfully.
7.) Whether the sewing room makes sense, I cannot judge. Depending on the orientation of the house and the furnishing of the room, such a narrow, tube-shaped room can indeed seem very cramped.

Everyone tries to draft a floor plan by themselves first and no one wants anything off-the-shelf, but there is definitely a reason why many houses have similar proportions and also similar floor plans. It is simply proven and offers an effective use of space. Go to an architect and have a first floor plan made based on your wishes. Based on that, you still have plenty of opportunities to individualize it for yourself. At least I think you will not be happy with your ground floor plan. In addition, the orientation of the house also plays a decisive role. I don’t know which sides are visible from the street, but the north, east, and west sides don’t really look nice. All too restless and asymmetrical. Also, you have planned such peepholes in the north where there is the least sun anyway.

House design Who is the planner: ourselves

Mmpf ... are you sure the design didn’t stop by *elma? Rhineland greetings

Hello everyone,

phew - first of all, thank you very much for your opinions.

I overlooked the draft for the upper floor, it really is tiny. I am uploading it here again.

In our opinion, the entrance to the shower and toilet is not that narrow. Our door in the current house is not wider than 73 cm (?) in some rooms (including the toilet).

Is the bedroom better now? It is definitely more spacious. We probably just got carried away with the idea of the "walk-in" closet.

Regarding the small windows: well, on the north side of the house, a quite busy circular road passes by. That's why there are small windows here. In our opinion, they fit quite well with our desired building style because the reveals there are plastered at a steep angle.

The dining area is intentionally not placed in front of a large window. On the east side, the residential street also passes by and personally, I find it strange to sit with your back to a large window. A small window lets in light and there should be enough light coming in from the south side.

The free space between the dining area and the couch currently simply serves as a play area for our kids; between the two terrace doors there is a sideboard and opposite that the fireplace. Here is also a photo of that. Above the stove bench, an old window is planned into the hallway, which mainly serves as decoration but also provides light. The doors in the kitchen and laundry room will have frosted glass panels. I don't think darkness in the hallway will be a problem.

That everyone goes through the kitchen to get to the living room is known to us and also intentional. We are not the type to constantly have a mess in the kitchen. That is completely fine for us.

: What is *elma?