Friday, March 18, 2016

Planning the Layout

Our home is a 4 bedroom, 3 bath, 3 car garage, with a formal dining and a formal office.  As both of us occasionally work from home, and we have three children over 18 that don't live with us, it was helpful to have two guest rooms and two separate offices.

My recommendation is to take the house plans and draw them in SketchUp or use a room planner application or other software and make sure that the space will adequately hold your furniture. Or go in your back yard, mark room corners with stakes, stretch string and place boxes for furniture and walk through the space... or measure your existing space.  Remember everything needs to be to scale -- we've all seen furniture that is way too big for the space, but the opposite can also hold true as well -- the goal is to create a comfortable and inviting space.

Additionally, make sure that the kitchen layout works for you..... so when all was said and done, here is what we have discovered.  

Kitchen -- place your refrigerator where you have plenty of space to open the doors and drawers without causing a traffic jam.  (Note: the original layout was far worse than our layout)

Dining Room -- our dining room is 11'2" x 11'4"; we really needed 12' x 13' to comfortably fit the dining room table and antique china cabinet.

Master Bedroom -- 15' x 15' -- this room is perfect for our queen size bed... a king would fit easily as well.  We don't have an extra sitting room, but we have plenty of space.  Will easily hold a small desk, a mirrored dresser, a large chest of drawers and a bench at the end of the bed.

Guest Bedroom -- 11'6" x 11' -- placing a queen bed in here, plus a mirrored dresser, night stand and chest of drawers makes for an extremely tight squeeze.  I would recommend a minimum of 12' x 13' for a guest room if you are planning to place a queen size bed in it

Office -- 11' x 11'6" -- this is a bit small once the gun safe went into it -- again -- measure your furniture or layout your ideal furniture -- all of the major companies provide sizes and many of them have products already drawn that you can insert into SketchUp

Living room -- 17' x 19' -- this seemed reasonable, but once you deduct all the walkways, this room is very small... we have not figured out what to do for furniture yet

Accessibility -- Door width and stairs -- consider if you are going to move furniture upstairs, can you get a mattress or dresser up the stairs?  Also, having at least one bathroom and bedroom that has a 36" door may prove helpful if you or a guest might ever be in a wheel chair.

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