Our floor plan design for an affordable house

You can hear the sewing machine upstairs through the open staircase and it would also be disturbing while watching TV. Downstairs you are right in the middle of everything and can also use the dining table. In the bedroom, I would have moved the wardrobe more towards the bed and created a small office space behind it. It also wouldn’t look untidy then.

We have often read your argument here like "we currently don't have that, we don't need it, we do it completely differently." I didn't always respond to optimization points like swapping the living room with the kitchen back then. But if the people involved here tell you that storage space is lacking, then that's how it is. You may come from a 50 sqm place without a basement. These are simply empirical values that we have all experienced here. That you don't want to hear it because then your floor plan will be messed up and you don't want to build bigger is clear, but it doesn't change the fact that it will be this way and no other way with 2 children.

It is a large property and obviously 1-2 garden houses/sheds are planned. That somewhat eases the storage situation. Although there are simply things I don't want to keep in the shed because I need them more often or because, for example, they shouldn't freeze. I'm thinking of various drinks (beer and wine can withstand a few degrees below zero, but soft drinks burst the bottle; kitchen appliances that are not used as often, like raclette sets, I also don't want to fetch from the garden, for example.) Good for such a garden house: skis, children's vehicles, bikes, Christmas decorations, etc.

What strikes me extremely: you sell your needs as if they were yours all together. Is that 100% true? In your first post, it only says 4 people, not how old the kids are... with this extreme openness you might be imposing your ideas on your children? That’s okay too, you pay for the house, not the kids. But maybe as a teenager you sometimes want to quietly play games downstairs on the PC while you watch TV on the sofa, you disturb each other just as much as when he/she wants to Skype with a holiday fling and mom overhears everything. I just want to point out that even with "we want everything open, we like each other so much, we are a family, etc..." - people like you might have family members who sometimes want a retreat, independently of the kids’ rooms. I like ’s floor plan better. You can open/leave open a door, but you can’t close one that isn’t there.

we really like openness

That reminds me of the living room... we made sure not to place the sofa with its back to the dining table... I think that brings a lot of openness, otherwise you’re always staring at the backrest and the living space doesn’t feel open either... I was just surprised that you wanted to place it that way. We find it much nicer to be able to look from the sofa to the dining table/kitchen.

I think an open concept is conditionally good. Our ground floor is also very open, on the upper floor there are retreat spaces for everyone. It would have bothered me a lot as a teenager if my mother sat outside the room sewing, always unintentionally with an ear on the door. Just as little do I want my office stuff in the living room. No one needs to know what's on the last pension statement.