First of all, thanks for all the many replies already!
Then I’ll explain what we each thought about it, and you can say whether it makes sense ;-)
How is the price of 450k composed? What are considered pure construction costs? I mean, 10x10m is already very small for the number of rooms you want to accommodate, and this is immediately reflected in the rooms being too small, especially regarding bathrooms and bedrooms.
Ideally, actually everything. Even the kitchen should already be included. What can be left out is the outdoor area. We are still unsure about whether we want a prefabricated garage or want to have it built. The price will probably decide in the end... And the plot has already been bought and paid for.
In reality, the interior walls will not all be 17.5 cm thick, especially not around the laundry shaft.
Yes, we know that. But we have no idea which walls will be thinner. That's why we prefer to plan with the thicker walls. And if in the end there are a few cm more – great. Otherwise, it would be bad :-)
The building envelope should be identifiable, and so should the height gradients on the plot.
We don’t have height gradients on the plot. It is really completely flat. I will upload a file with the building envelope later, after lunch.
How does this (too small) dimension come about?
If you mean the house size, then it is purely a financial matter. We want to build as big as it fits and is not cramped, but also not so big that in 20 years without children it is only used half...
No, appearances deceive. Doors with widths of 60 and 80 cm are drawn in.
We actually made a mistake there. We only measured the door without the frame... We will change that and include it in the new plan.
From memory when looking at the PDFs just now, a child's room only has 2.60 m room width. The pantry has a meter width. The staircase at 190 cm width is not even suitable for a townhouse. The toilet has 60 and 80 cm width, one of which is enclosed by a too long wall. The dressing room is in the beautiful south, toilet rooms are not stacked (who cares? Nowadays that is somehow doable). What is lacking in living space on the ground and upper floors is too much in insignificant rooms in the basement. The garden in the east is very scarce, although there is a field? pasture? nature?
We would have liked the kids’ rooms to be 3 m wide. But then we wouldn’t have fit the second children’s room... It was important to us to have as rectangular and straightforward rooms as possible to be able to use them as flexibly as possible.
Making the pantry wider would mean the kitchen would become smaller and the pantry too large. The pantry is meant to store food supplies, a water carrier/crate, cleaning supplies/vacuum cleaner, and kitchen appliances not used daily but too often for the basement. Since the pantry layout isn’t quite perfect for us, we thought of putting a deep 60 cm shelf behind the door, as well as on the west side, and then a narrow continuous 30 cm shelf with a tall narrow window on the north side.
I wanted our bedroom ideally in the north because I don’t need a heated-up sleeping room. The bathroom mainly needs light in the morning, so also east. That’s our reasoning...
We intentionally placed the garden in the west. Although there is currently a field in the east, the city intends to develop a residential area there. And we don’t want to give up a better view and the nicer garden for maybe 10 years due to the sun. We wanted the largest possible garden area in the southwest.
We really experimented a lot with the toilets not being stacked but couldn’t find a nice solution without ruining the floor plan upstairs or making the kitchen awkward... We’re very open to ideas here! We’d definitely prefer that too.
I wouldn’t call the basement rooms insignificant. The workshop is a room we already have and need/use like that. As said, the hobby room will mainly be a music room since my husband enjoys playing the guitar and I banished his collection from the living room... We aren’t fixed on the room sizes, especially for the technical room and utility room, since we can’t really estimate how big that must be...
According to internet information, the toilets should be at least 80 cm wide. We didn’t quite manage that downstairs, although we plan a glass element so you don’t feel too cramped. The wall on purpose is longer. We thought this might be a nice separation between the cloakroom and the stairs instead of just putting a cabinet there... Upstairs it’s the required 80 cm. We’re also considering whether to make the shower shorter in favor of this width...
I don’t find the children’s rooms of 12 and 13 sqm too small. The office will be somewhat smaller than the children’s rooms but still usable. Moving the dressing room to the south as a dead space is a matter of taste; I would rather swap the bedroom and dressing room so you don’t sleep next to the shower and it might be quieter in the morning,...
As I said, I didn’t want the bedroom in the south. And we also don’t want to enter the bedroom through the dressing room. One consideration might be to swap bedroom with dressing room and bathroom. But then the laundry chute downstairs wouldn’t fit in the ground floor again...
Does it have to be this square floor plan? Is your heart so attached to a city villa design? A hip roof also makes things a bit more expensive than a simple gable roof...
Definitely swap dressing room and bedroom! Although I am increasingly less enthusiastic about bedrooms in the south...
Overall, the upper floor has a functional layout with usable rooms, but you can tell there is simply too little area for your desired rooms. Room width of 2.6 m is not generous.
How likely is a third child?
If that is rather unlikely, I would rob the relatively large basement rooms for the home office/guest room and allow myself the space for children’s rooms and bathroom upstairs.
Or make a slightly bigger bedroom and do without the dressing room.
The stairs are way too narrow and small for me; that is more like a chicken ladder.
No, it doesn’t have to be a square floor plan. Especially for cost reasons we will forego the hip roof anyway. But bigger also means more expensive... and wider may only be possible by a few cm due to the plot. With a rectangular floor plan towards the south, we block off the south garden and couldn’t achieve anything really nicer (with the same square meters).
The bedroom situation was also our consideration. We don’t want the bedroom in the south and don’t want to have to go through the dressing room to enter the bedroom...
The narrow rooms upstairs are actually too narrow for us. Unfortunately, we have no better solution yet.
The third child is still very uncertain, but regardless, we want an office that is not in the basement. Ideally, we wanted that on the ground floor and big enough to function as a bedroom in old age. But that was simply way too big... We also, as said, frequently have overnight guests (especially family). Even now in the apartment regularly with six people. And the kids haven’t arrived yet, they’re just coming... So we do need an additional guest sleeping option.
We made a mistake about the stairs but have now found some that are “only” 30 cm wider. This width would still fit. We want to check it out with the stair builder tomorrow.
What does "WA" mean? Laundry chute? If yes, then it gets interesting with the piping for wastewater in the upstairs bathroom. Around once...
I would put the guest room directly in the cellar.
WA stands for Wäscheabwurf (laundry chute). We haven’t looked into ventilation etc. yet. We first have to check what needs to be considered there. For us, it was first important to know if we can manage with our ideas, our budget, and the house size ;-)
We would only reluctantly put the guest room in the basement because it should mainly be used as an office and maybe later even as a children’s room. The basement is pretty bad for that.
Important factors especially are:
- is the whole thing statically feasible at all and if yes, how would the desired section affect construction costs (e.g. how are the ceilings made and where do they rest (load-bearing walls...), are beams necessary (if I look at the large open kitchen to the living room...))
- where do all the supply lines run? There is basically no wall exactly above another...
- stairwell 2 m wide ... won’t work ... there are corresponding minimum dimensions that must be observed (expect rather 2.4 m)
- how does the house look from the outside? The windows all sit "somewhere" which in the end (imo) doesn’t look so nice.
We haven’t really looked at the statics yet. Especially the open kitchen will probably be a problem. But we still have to consult a structural engineer or architect. Though with an open floor plan you probably have to insert a lintel anyway...
The middle wall from west to east is aligned in all three floors. At least the parts where there are walls. But we don’t know if that really helps statically.
We consciously planned the house from the inside out. The fine details of the windows are not finished yet. But it is important to us that the windows work well inside – even if it goes at the expense of the outside view. We probably can’t get both.
Additionally, after longer observation, I find the views of the building very strange for me (if I look at the windows and their positions like this). E.g. on the upper floor to the garden side only one window (in child 2)
On the upper floor, a second window on the south side will be added. Unfortunately, we forgot this in children’s room 1. This room will get two windows to fully use the light. Still, it is true that the windows will not be symmetrically aligned from the outside.