Our House Plan

For those who are interested, here is the rough sketch of our house design. This was the original drawing that I drew which then had to be draughted into a "proper" design. But this gives you an idea of the layout anyway. I'm not sure how clear it is going to come out but if you click on the picture it should enlarge.

The left hand side is the front of the house so you enter into the lounge room through the front door. The "back" is at the top of the picture and we have sliding doors entering the dining area as our "back" door.

When we were looking at existing designs, we wanted all the living areas to be on one side (the North side) overlooking the backyard. We also didn't want the children's bedrooms to be at the opposite end of the house to our room (given our children are still young). That and the fact that we decided to do away with having an ensuite (and most larger houses these days have them) were the things we found difficult to find in an existing design.

Plus if you've ever looked into transportable homes much - they tend to have very small kitchens and laundrys. I lost count of the number of times I was told "you have a big kitchen and laundry" by people working in these companies. I spend half my time in those 2 rooms so it made sense to me to have the space I wanted there! It's kind of sad the way the kitchen and laundry have become such unimportant places in modern homes.

Since this drawing, we did make a couple of changes. The major one was to shift the master bedroom built in robe to the wall it shares with the laundry. That enabled us to move the door into the master bedroom over and create a privacy door so that the bathroom can essentially be used as an ensuite (even though we only have the one bathroom). I didn't know what dimensions I needed to use for toilets and showers etc so the whole block for that area was left for the builders to complete. We do have the toilet separate from the bathroom though.

Basically there is a sliding door from the family room that opens into a small alcove. Turn left to go into our bedroom, right for the toilet or straight ahead for the bathroom. By shutting the sliding door, I essentially turn the bathroom into an ensuite and can privately move between the bathroom and our bedroom.

In an effort to not waste any space, the only "passageways" in the place are that alcove and a similar one coming off the lounge room to go into either the 2nd toilet or the office.

My biggest concern while we were waiting for the house to be built was whether or not the large open area of the kitchen/dining/family room would look long and narrow (as these houses can't be built too wide due to transport). Fortunately it doesn't and it suits our kind of lifestyle perfectly. Our children love it when we're nearby and I love it when we have visitors and I can be doing something in the kitchen and talking to them at the table at the same time (our last house the kitchen was kind of tucked away more).

So that gives you a little bit of a picture of what our home looks like. :-) I hope you enjoyed the brief little tour. LOL.