But let's start at the beginning. Husband and I have been playing the planning game for some months now, as recommended in More Straw Bale Building. We've looked at house plans and realizations and considered what we do and don't want in our own home.
The planning game mostly concerns our downstairs, as upstairs will be a bunch of bedrooms and a bathroom, and we don't expect much more than functionality from them.
So downstairs, we wanted a mud room with adjoining wardrobe, a small bathroom/toilet, a very casual and fairly large living room space, a "formal dining", kitchen with an adjoining sunroom/breakfast area, and a spare room which, depending on need, can serve as a TV room, home office or guest bedroom. I always had a pretty good idea of how much space I'd need in these rooms and about the traffic corridors that would need to be considered. But how to put that onto paper always baffled me.
Now I am not an architect. So my thousands of sketches of floor plans rarely expand out of some square or rectangle. But even looking at ready designs online, I kind of had this idea about a kitchen towards the front of the house, with the living and dining areas lining the back wall - ideally, the south facing wall.
But I went back to the drawing board this morning, thinking about the uses of these places. I put formal dining in quotation marks before. That's because, rather than meaning formal in the way of fancy cutlery and chandeliers, I more had in mind the fact that this would be a single purpose room. The vast majority of family meals to be consumed in this house will be eaten in the kitchen or at the small table in the adjoining sun room - the latter is possibly an add-on in future or something we might get rid of altogether when we get closer to go time. We thought about getting rid of an official dining area altogether, because it would be so rarely used. But I cannot imagine my home being one in which I won't be able to host Christmas meals or invite friends around for dinner parties.
Time for the big reveal - if the dining room is to be so rarely used, why should it get south-facing windows!
Taa daa. Seems so obvious now. Can't believe I didn't come up with this so much earlier.
So now I have the planning game, with circles and squares indicating what goes where, drawn up in paint. I even took it further and started to draw in how I'd see the whole thing together.
In the top picture there are really only the rooms, mentioned about, in their rough configurations. The stairs marked in will hopefully be Victorian or similar reclaimed cast iron, and I actually pushed them out to the side a little thinking a bit of rounded bale wall would do nicely wrapping around the staircase.
Through the main entry way (perhaps double doors? Definitely some sort of reclaimed) there'll be mirror and side table to the left - mirror for dressing coats and scarves in, table for wallets and phones.
To the side is a wardrobe, with hooks and other steps taken to accommodate guests' coats, hats, shoes etc, and a cupboard for the occupants' things. I'd like to have this organized, so all the outer accessories are stored and put on here; gloves, shoes, scarves, sunglasses. There's also an ottoman on which one can sit to put shoes on.
As you go through the house, to the left (perhaps more straight on in the final version, as I'd like this to be the hub of the house and for traffic to be automatically directed this way) there is the living room. I predict a mish mash of furniture, I'm hoping for a hanging/swinging chair, maybe a chaise lounge, a couple of chairs and couches. Most of this should be light weight enough to be easily shoved around, closer or further from whatever. I'm happy for an anything goes feel in this room, and if, when entertaining, I get three or four circles of furniture going on as people group off to do their own thing, that'd be mission accomplished.
I'm also not a fan of the traditional coffee table, as it often results in banged shins for me, but I do like side tables and those old-school bars - all of which are light and mobile - so one could pull one up for their coffee and push it aside when they don't need it.
Through some glass bi-folds to the north ;) is the aforementioned dining room.
I'm thinking of putting a buffet in there, my grandparents one, if they give it to me. I was thinking of giving it a face-lift in the way of a new paint job. I was also wondering whether I should invest in a double aspect stove, that way on the (rare) occasion that I'm entertaining with a dinner, the fire can be enjoyed from both living and dining rooms. But this is probably unnecessary.
The point of the double bi-folds is also that, on those really rare occasions that there are like 40 people in the house the table could be moved to go through into the living room with another table or tables attached to the end to make it super long.
I'm Polish. Such events do occur.
You'll notice some lines representing steps. I was wondering if the feeling of "space" couldn't be achieved vertically. That is, rather than having a 20sqm living room, if I could get away with a 12-15sqm space that felt "spacious" because of high ceilings. I'd then go through and take advantage in the dining room, also. But this is unnecessary.
My kitchen faces south. Which is great. In all my previous sketches it was always where the dining room is now. But I spend so much time in the kitchen, it just be silly not to take advantage of warmth and sunshine and windows, which come with a southern aspect. And the sunroom/breakfast area I've dreamed about literally since we had one in the house I lived in at 9 years old will also benefit from this (in earlier plans it was west-facing). Kitchen pretty standard - sink, stove, dishwasher (?), pantry. Either an integrated fridge or an awesome Smeg retro looking one. I also love integrated ovens, but I was thinking of mounting mine in a wall, and not an excessively expensive kitchen unit (I'm hoping my kitchen cupboards will come from a junk yard or for near-free from a website) and having the surrounding wall made up of cubby holes with baskets of kitchen stuff. And lastly my kitchen trolley come island come bar. A must. I need one large, interrupted piece of counter top space for food prep. Years of living in cramped student quarters and shared accommodation has taught me that.
So we exit the kitchen, very quickly, and go to the sunroom. This is my one lux. room that we don't have to have in the house. It cooperates well with Husband's dream winter garden. Both can be treated as an add-on, but by building on the sunroom a bit two could become one. Question then is regarding isolating the inside of the house from the largely-glass room. But we're some way away from the stage of worrying about that... Really this paragraph just served as an explanation of those boxes and lines outside the perimeter of the house.
Next to the kitchen is a multipurpose room which I've drawn up as a TV room - definitely no TV in the living room!! A fold-out couch and some storage space will instantly make this room double as a spare bedroom, it will take a little more imagination to make it triple as an office - but both Husband and I are largely paperless, and one of those IKEA-fixes of offices in wardrobes or hallways will suffice.
Lastly, toilet and sink. Enough said. Actually, no - P-trap toilets (those hanging ones) for optically enlarging the room and easy cleaning, same goes for under-basin cabinet.
The stairs are self-explanatory.
Anyway, so my cousin the architect is going to be cranky that I'm trying to do her job for her... or she might be happy that her client knows what she wants? We'll see...
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