Our targeted floor plan - please provide assessments

We have made some progress again. Due to a rather uneasy feeling for various reasons with the second provider, the second draft that I had posted here will no longer be considered for the current selection, and we are back to the first draft, i.e. the first file attachment.

At the moment, we imagine widening the house by 1 meter to the right. This gives us a total of 18 sqm in the ground floor and upper floor together, at least.

However, the room proposed as "guest" on the plan would be designed as a kitchen; with the planned widening it would have about 15 sqm and that should be enough to plan the kitchen as I envision it. So as a separate room where you can also eat.

Consideration: A sliding door between kitchen and living room?

The TV wall would then of course be on the other side. Accordingly, we would prefer to forgo the window there and instead put it in the kitchen.

Are the attachments not helpful?

If I were to widen the house, it would be to the left and the kitchen would stay where it is. Otherwise, I find the distance too long, the living room also becomes a bit bigger this way, 31m2 is not really much. And upstairs it benefits the children. Your bathroom is already big enough. But now I will tell you my personal opinion about this floor plan: 08/15 standard – not meant negatively! Quite a few solid house providers have it in this or a similar form in their program. And it certainly works. But when I look at the price – the widening and the basement are still added – then I would ask myself if for that money there isn't something that is personally tailored to me, my wishes and needs. With widening, you have 170m2! And I am quite sure there are other possibilities besides this floor plan. I would never be willing to spend that much money on something like this. For the money your house will cost, you can also get a tailor-made suit.

Thanks to you first.

We have meanwhile had a site inspection with the civil engineer and we are moving away from the basement.

What would you alternatively recommend as a way to the floor plan? Yes, you will indeed find similar designs with a similar room program and comparable construction specifications at a similar price from practically every construction company. What would be your alternative?

Completely free planning? What would be the advantages here? An architect himself advised us (people who have no clue, don’t have much time during the day) rather against an architect's planning with awarding the trades. He also said that nowadays it is rather a misconception to think that this is the financially cheaper way. I have no idea, I'm just passing it on.

For us, this floor plan would also be completely fine. I’m a bit pragmatic about it and think that you can find possible weak points in practically every floor plan and I know enough people in single-family houses who say that after some time in the house they noticed that x and y were not ideal after all. It may be that this will also be the case with us and the floor plan. That’s why I find opinions here so exciting, nothing is set in stone with us yet...

So, what do you think, can we implement such a floor plan more cheaply in construction reality?

So I also don't believe that free planning with architects has to be cheaper, but it can be. This house you chose does not come cheap, and I am sure that an architect can at least achieve something at a similar price. The advantage is that he develops something with you that corresponds to your wishes and also takes the plot into account in the planning, an important aspect. We have built twice. Private circumstances led to the sale of our first house. A well-known solid house provider had built it. We lived in it for 10 years. Square, practical, good! For the second one, we gathered all our courage and went to an architect... he sent us away, saying we should first find a plot... the second time we were a bit better prepared. The plot was found, and one or two books about cost-optimized building and floor plan planning were also read. And not the great colorful prefab house magazines from the supermarket shelf! We shared our wishes, said what our budget was, he drove with us to the plot, and it started. Not that the first draft blew us away, but we developed something great from it and it was fun to participate. You are completely free in your planning, well, the budget and plot set the direction, otherwise only you. When I compare the two houses today, I wonder how we were able to do something like that back then. We wanted cost certainty and paid dearly for it! The same house back then would have been created for us by an architect at significantly less money at that time, provided we had found one who even did such quality! Many people do not dare to go to an architect because they think it is too expensive anyway and they do not really know about the process — but the architects themselves are partly to blame for that. Single-family houses are often not financially lucrative for them; you can earn more with a school, a hospital, etc. But there are quite a few who still know how to do single-family houses. I do not want to talk you out of your house/floor plan, our first house was quite similar, and yes, you can live in it. If you feel — yes, that’s it — then do it. I just wanted to show that there is also another way to build a house.

Hello again everyone ... Thanks again for the many opinions and suggestions - that helps us a lot.

I'm also a bit bothered by this gut feeling that we've been pushing this floor plan back and forth for woooooeks and it still doesn't really fit. But we have also looked at floor plan options from other providers and so far I haven't seen a floor plan where we said: perfect! That's it!

Since the currently favored provider advertises heavily that everything is individually planable, we will soon have a meeting with the architect who would be responsible for us here. We have a long list of questions and ideas and in the end we just have to see what offer comes up. I now fear that the base price in the catalog plays in an expected range, neither extremely expensive nor extremely cheap, but 10 redesigns might financially break the deal maybe we simply want more than the budget allows. I didn’t think we were financially badly positioned. But I also don’t want to, and the last post here went in that direction and probably quite rightfully so, completely redesign a floor plan of a building series and afterwards end up with a much higher final price than, for example, a somewhat larger house from another provider, with whom we also worked together, and which in the standard would include a lot more than the currently favored provider ... All of that is difficult.

Current considerations:

- We combine the living room and guest room and build an open kitchen with space for a table and also living room. Widening is questionable, but 5 sqm more would surely help.

- Our bathroom upstairs of 15 sqm is pointless. It will ultimately be lost space that we don't need. I think you can nicely furnish a smaller bathroom as well. The idea would be to make two bathrooms out of the large bathroom plus possibly some widening. Then we would have two bathrooms upstairs. The advantage would be that no one has to run downstairs in the morning and the space would simply be used more sensibly. If a shower bath can be realized with 4 sqm or even less, surely something could be done with 15 sqm, right?

- If this concretizes, we could set up a small guest WC downstairs instead of the almost 5 sqm shower bath and save the remaining sqm for the utility room or possibly hallway?

- Another idea: we make the office upstairs into the bathroom. 11 sqm will be enough, the bathtub could go under the sloping roof. Then I would have a bigger office, which could functionally certainly also be used as an additional guest room.