Derive
This is our latest house design. It’s currently under construction at 417 Trevor Court in Bonne Terre, MO with completion scheduled for an October time frame.
(click for large size)
As I’ve noted before I’m trying to get away from the typical design seen on a ranch in our area. To that end, when I started designing this layout I kept a couple things in mind:
All else flowed from these ideas. Now, let’s begin a more detailed look at the floorplan.
To start out, I almost always use “room boxes” like this:
As I lay out the room boxes I keep in mind different rules of thumb that I’ve learned are important such as good minimum sizes for a garage, bathroom sizes, bedroom sizes, bedroom locations, and dining room table sizes. Instead of taking the easy route and just laying the rooms out end-to-end I spend some time figuring out how to locate the rooms in a compact manner so that I end up with a more-or-less square layout, in the end my work coalesced into the above.
Now, the software I use for plan design can take my room boxes and generate a floorplan from them. I then do lots of fine-tuning to get things arranged and positioned as I wish. When I finished I ended up with a house of around 1300 square feet. Where I’m building this house currently has a minimum square footage requirement of 1500 so I did some tweaking to up the size and ended up with this:
(click for large size)
Now, let’s focus on a few areas that I fine-tuned to give the home more character.
Notice how on the right side of the house I extended the bedroom, bathroom, and laundry beyond the basic footprint of the house. This wasn’t done for space considerations. Originally the plan had the same rooms constrained to the basic square shape of the foundation. The reason for the bumpout is to add character to the home. Without the bumpout that side of the house from the exterior would just be a large expanse of vinyl siding with little interrupting it. Now it will look something like this:
Some additional nice features of this home include: