Building a House: Picking a Floorplan

Floorplans. Simultaneously one of the most fun and most frustrating parts of planning your new home. At first, it seems so exciting looking at pictures of beautiful houses, imaging yourself in them, mentally placing furniture in all the rooms... but after a while it becomes so daunting. How many versions of 3 bedroom 2 bathroom single story houses can there be?? Craftsman or colonial?? What is a butler's pantry anyway?? It can get very overwhelming very fast.

Obviously I can only help you so much, because each person has their own set of priorities, tastes and budget; but I will share some things that we took into consideration, and hopefully you will too.


On a budget? Then build up, not out! Concrete is much more expensive than wood, so if you want a larger house, make it a two (or even a three) story house. This is a better option if you're young, but it's something to think about for everyone.

Make every corner count! The more corners you have in your house, the more it'll cost you. Of course, an great big rectangular box is not as pleasing to the eye, but a nice front porch or deck will be much cheaper to add than that big turret you were planning to add. You can also add smaller popouts, since smaller corners cost less than big ones.

source: http://hdinspiration.com/luxury-homes-floor-plans/

Think long term. Are you planning on living in the house until your kids haul you off to the nursing home, or is this just part of a 5-10 year plan? Do you plan on having children in the future? Thinking down the road will help your house to grow with you. If you want 15 children, a two bedroom house with one bathroom might not be a great idea. If you want to grow old in your home, a three story house with the bedroom in the loft and the laundry in the basement might become a real problem later on. Are you sure you'll want to devote an entire room to your hobby, or do you think there might be a chance that you'll give it up some day? Don't be stuck with a room that you're paying for over the next 30 years when your hobby will only interest you for the next 2 years.

Remember who gets to clean all of that house.... A bathroom for each bedroom sounds luxurious, but if your children are still very young, or if you don't even have children yet, it will be a long time before you have any help cleaning all those bathrooms. If your children are older, consider what happens when they grow up and leave the home and you're left with that empty nest. Extra hobby rooms, media rooms, dens and offices all have to be cleaned by somebody. Unless you have money to hire your cleaning out, decide if all that extra dusting/vacuuming/scrubbing is worth that little bit of luxury that sounds so enticing now.

Quality is always better than quantity. A feature that is common in old Victorian style homes are lots of very small rooms. Back then, homeowners desired having separate rooms for breakfast, dinner, playing music, and socializing. Unless you enjoy the same tastes, be careful when plans boast having family rooms, living rooms, dining rooms and nooks. It makes the house sound large and luxurious, but how large are those spaces??

The original plans for our home called for a 12x9' living room/enterance, then a partition leading to a 12'11 dining room (with carpet!), then a small 12x11' kitchen, a 12x11' nook and a 14x11' family room. Let me put that in perpective for you. Most couches are between 6-8 feet, so if you plan on putting a couch on that 9' wall in the living room, you're only going to have a foot and a half of space on either side at best. I didn't want small cramped rooms, I wanted space! I wanted to have parties and groups of people! I wanted to be able to see my children while I was cooking. I also didn't want to have to buy another set of furniture for the family room and another table and chair set for my nook. I didn't want half of my family to be hanging out in the family room while the other half of us were in the living room.

The view from the entry back to the kitchen. That little wall you see is the walk-in pantry. The island in the kitchen has an open view to the living room as well as the dining room and playroom to the left behind the stairs. 

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Instead, we kicked out the house 4 extra feet and opened up all the rooms into one big space, with french doors separating the playroom (former family room) from the rest of the house. Isn't all the space just lovely, and it makes having groups of people over so easy, we can all see and hear each other. I can see my children playing no matter where they are downstairs. The second thing people comment when they enter our house (the first being the floors) is all the open space!!

Bedrooms - privacy or proximity? A big issue for us was the bedrooms. Most of the floorplans today offer a private master bedroom on the first floor with the rest of the bedrooms upstairs. This may sound great when you have teenagers, but we are still in our childbearing years. I didn't want to be climbing up and down the stairs each night every time someone had a bad dream or needed a drink of water. We also figured when we do have teenagers, we wanted to be close enough by to be able to hear what exactly they're doing in their bedroom. It's hard to sneak out when your parents sleep just down the hall from you! I grew up in a traditional split level home, with my parents room directly dacross the hall from me. I had plenty of privacy, but knew I couldn't get in to too much trouble with them sleeping so close by. It's something to consider.

Make space count. It would be great if every room in the house could be large and expansive, but sometimes the budget just doesn't allow for that. In that case, compromises have to be made. The first thing we did was enlarge the kitchen and laundry room/mudroom. These are two rooms we knew would get a ton of use, and space is always a premium in those spaces. Now there are two types of usable space in a room. The first is open or dead space. This is the space in the middle of the room. In a bedroom, you won't really use that space much besides walking from your bed to the door, but in a kitchen, that space can be utilized with an island or breakfast bar. The space that's most valuable in a bedroom is usually the second type of space: wall space. Wall space can be used to put beds, dressers, desks or any other type of furniture. Our original plan called for a massive master bedroom, 19x16'. People laugh when they enter our enormous bedroom and say they would love a room that size, but really all that dead space in the middle is wasted. We would be just as happy with a smaller room as long as there is enough wall space for our bed, dresser and tv stand.

Sorry for the poor quality, this room is so large you can't fit it all in one picture and this is the only panorama I ever took. 

What must-haves are in your ideal floor plan? What lessons did you learn after building? I'd love to hear from you!

Building a House: Things you should know

Deciding to build a home can either be one of the worst decisions you ever make, or one of the best. Because I found very little helpful information on the web for anyone who's considering building a home that doesn't have an unlimited budget, I wanted to share some of the important things we learned along the way.

Making a budget is much harder than you think. I priced everything before we made any commitments or signed any contracts. But the problem for most people is, you're entering an industry you likely know little to nothing about.
For example, when my husband called several well drillers in town for a quote, they estimated roughly $5,000 for the job. They didn't mention, however, that they would not be supplying the pump for the well. That wasn't something we even knew to ask, so when we had them come up and signed that $5,000 check, you can image how surprised we were to find out that we needed to hire a different company to install the pump, and that cost another $5,000! The same thing happened when I called our local PUD and asked them to estimate a cost on digging in the power. We pulled up maps on Google, I told them exactly where the house would be, he estimated the distance and gave me a price of around $7,000. But he never thought to mention, and I had no idea to ask, that this price only included trenching in the rough power, it did not include hiring an electrician to actually hook the house up to the box. That was another fun little $3,000 surprise. So before we even had a foundation poured, we were already $8,000 over budget!

Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't make a budget. You really need to! It simply means you need a much larger contingency fund than you or the bank think you will. We were told $5,000 extra would be sufficient. After building, I read an article where someone recommended $20,000 extra!! It may sound extreme, but having $15,000-$20,000 extra set aside for overages is really a good idea. If you can't afford that, either reconsider the size and cost of your house, or reconsider building at all.


If you know nothing about construction, you'd better learn!! It doesn't matter who you hire or how expensive they are, you should never hire anyone to do a job where you can't tell whether they did it correctly or incorrectly. My husband is not in the construction industry, but he does know enough to get by, and thankfully his grandpa used to be a contractor. We were shocked to see how many subcontractors tried to slap together a job and run out before anyone noticed what a poor job they did.  Here are some quick examples of mistakes that our contractors made, that a person who wasn't heavily involved in the building of their house might miss.
This is our foundation after the first pour. The guy came up, built and put up the forms for the concrete, and should have inserted the rebar. This contractor, however, somehow measured incorrectly. He poured the footings for the garage in the wrong spot, and had the forms for the pony wall hanging completely off the footing. This also made the rebar sit to the side of the concrete, and not on center. He never said a word of this to anyone, and our construction supervisor only came up after a job was completed, not during. Thankfully my husband knew this was wrong, and called our contractor. While they tried to stall and make it still work, the concrete guy came up to start pouring his poorly laid pony walls! My husband told him to stop, and not to continue any work until he talked to someone. He finally was able to contact the engineer directly, who was very upset to hear how the foundation was being poured!

We also contacted our county inspector who put in writing that no further concrete could be poured until the foundation was re-engineered and done correctly. Now again, it was a good thing that my husband took time off work to go down to the building site and watch the foundation being laid, because when they drilled in the rebar, he watched them slather the epoxy on the rebar and stick it in. That is not right at all!! If rebar has to be drilled in and isn't in the cement when it is initially poured, you must drill the hole, then blow the dust and dirt out of the hole so the epoxy can adhere to the cement and not the dust.

Then you are supposed to put the epoxy in the hole first, and finally insert the rebar. My husband came up behind them and was able to pull out all of the newly inserted rebar using just his hands. Is that the kind of foundation you want your house laid on??

This is a picture of the joists which will hold up our floor on the main level. Out of I think 28 boards, something like 24 of them were cut short. Now, the sub insisted that it didn't matter if they were short, it would still work, but we bought and paid for that wood. Those are our boards that he wasted, and whether or not it works, a job that we pay for ought to be done correctly. These guys were just being lazy, but once we pointed out that we knew they were being lazy, they started stepping up their game and made their cuts a little nicer.
Where the sheet rock meets the window is called the reveal. In my son's room, there is at least a 15 degree slope on the reveal. If he puts one of his trucks up there, it immediately rolls off. This is very poor quality craftsmanship, and several of our windows had very ugly reveals. It seems obvious once you've seen it, but if someone doesn't point it out to you, most people would never pay attention to the slope of the window sill.

These are just several of the snafus we had during our building project, but we were able to catch them because we had a decent idea of what we were looking at. I can't imagine someone who hires a contractor to build his house, and then steps back and never inspects the property again until it's all built! Believe it or not, many of the contractors we shopped had lines written in their contract that you are not allowed on your property until they are finished! It's just the same as getting your car fixed, or having surgery. Very few people take mechanics or doctors at their word, most of us want to make sure they're right before they do anything. The same thing should be done with your house. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying to be rude or pushy or assume that everyone that you hire will try to cheat you. I'm simply saying that during the construction of your home, you will have lots of people working on it's construction. Some will be honest, hard workers and others will not. If you can learn enough about construction to keep up with what's going on, you'll be much more likely to catch the bad ones that come through.


Don't rely on your inspectors! Inspectors are great, they are your friend, no matter what your contractor might tell you. Their sole purpose is to make sure that your house is built correctly and won't immediately fall down two weeks after you move in to it. Buuut.... unfortunately they are human! They don't catch everything, especially during the summer months (building season), when they might be especially busy. Our inspector admitted that they tend to show up, check for a few obvious things and call it good. And of course, just because it's up to code doesn't mean it's the best possible job, it usually means just good enough to pass. It's good to remind yourself, you're not just trying to pass each individual inspection. Your goal here is to build a house that will last for years after you've moved on. Someday your house will be an old fixer-upper. Would you like it to have sagging floors and leaking windows in 10 years, 50 years or 100 years? The quality of work your contractors do will help determine the length of your homes overall life.


Be prepared to go sloooooow. As soon as you pick out that floor plan, your fingers will start Pinteresting, your mind will start decorating and designing and you'll be raring to get in to that fresh new house. But do everything you can to be patient! Fast work often means sloppy work, and if you catch sloppy work and make them do it again it will take even more time. Again, keep yourself focused on the bigger picture of a quality long-lasting home and not on the short term goal of just getting in it.

If you're worried about your house not being big enough, go smaller!Wait, what? I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but take a moment and think before you start adding those additional feet to your plans. Unless you're incredibly rich and can hire your housework out, remember that you will have to clean and keep up every square inch of that house. Every website selling house plans I checked out touted these massive 3,000+sqft houses with 5 bedrooms and a matching bathroom for each one. But who's going to scrub all those toilets? Who is going to dust those ceilings? You may have children now, but do you intend to stay in that house when they're gone? Our house is 2,334 sqft with 4 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms and I am glad we didn't add a single additional square inch. I spend a lot of time cleaning, and sometimes even find myself missing our tiny 800 sqft apartment.

 Also consider property taxes, light, water and heating bills. Can you afford to heat 3,000 sqft all winter long? I watched an interesting documentary once on lottery winners. Nearly all of the winners they followed ended up bankrupt within a few years. Why? Most of them bought large mansions with sprawling grounds but found that they couldn't afford the property taxes or the utility bills that came with them. Make sure your new house is a blessing to you and not a burden.

What lessons have you learned about building that you wish you'd known before you had started?

Building a House: Your options

Building a house is a disaster. Unless you have unlimited time and funds, there's no way around it. My goal here is to tell you as much about our experience building and what we learned so that you might have a slightly lesser disaster.

First let me tell you why we decided to build. We live in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Our town is located on a small strip of land sandwiched between the ocean and a mountain range. The difference between north and south here is a matter of a few short miles. To the east and west, we are virtually isolated by state and private timber land. There is one smaller town within 30 minutes, after that there is nothing for over an hour. As idyllic as it sounds, it makes purchasing a starter home here a nightmare. The housing market crash did not really reach our isolated town. Home prices stayed relatively high, although interest rates were low. After two years of home shopping and watching home prices rise rapidly in our area, we saw that the only homes left in our price range were manufactured homes, a route our real estate agent strongly advised us against. So, we thought about building.

I spent hours trying to research building a home, but found almost no information. You can't find any information on cost or pricing because it all "depends". Contractors won't give you a cost until you have a set of plans and you've chosen your finishes. But how do you know what size of a house you can afford to make up plans for? Let me help you get started.

We shopped several local contractors and home builders in the area. We quickly learned this was more of the luxury home route. These homes are designed, built, and dictated exactly to your specifications; and you pay for every penny of that. You first need to find a set of plans (which you have to buy) or hire an architect/engineer to design for you. Then you hire a contractor who will then help you pick out finishes. We didn't chose this route because there was no easy way to determine price for us. Because everything "depends", we couldn't tell if we could afford to have an architect design a 1,000 sqft home or a 3,000 sqft home. These contractors were very reluctant to give any sort of idea as to pricing, but when we asked what the cheapest home we could possibly build would cost, they gave a price range of about $85-$200 per sqft.

Another option of course is to build your own home. We did not chose this option for several reasons. First, it is very difficult to get financing. Banks want to know that the home they might inherit if you foreclose is built correctly! Most will only lend if you use an "approved" licensed/bonded contractor for the entirety of the job. The other reason we didn't want to build was time. We had one child and another on the way, and my husband didn't want to spend the next five years building. Every weekend, every holiday, every vacation, every night after work would be spend building. We wanted to build our home, get in it and be done, move on to other things. Finally, we were advised by many people who had built their own homes that one of their big struggles was finishing. Meaning, once you get building, you can't wait to get in. If there's no bank holding you back, you will most likely move in before the house is even finished. Then once you're in, you lose your motivation and start moving on to other projects. This is where you find homes with unfinished trim work, exposed wiring in the ceiling, rooms that were sheet rocked and taped but never textured or painted. For many families, this was a stress in their family and in their marriages. We decided this wasn't for us.

Seemingly new to the market are home builders who advertise what I describe as "Costco houses". They offer a select set of plans to chose from at a SET PRICE which you can fully customize (at a cost, of course). They claim to be able to build these houses inexpensively because they build the same houses over and over, and therefore can buy the materials in bulk at discount prices. These builders also have the homeowners do a large portion of the work, either themselves or they can hire out. Usually the Homeowner To Do's (HTDs) include excavation, getting roads,electric and water in, painting and landscaping. Most of these homes range in price between $40-$60 per sqft. We chose this option because it was easy to determine what size house we could afford and what finished we could afford to put in it. We could have a relatively set price on a set plan BEFORE we put any money down or signed any contracts. It seemed perfect for a young starting family.

Of course there are also housing developments, where developers sell you the land and the house which you are then able to customize. These houses do have relatively set prices (unless you chose upgrades), but you will have to live in a neighborhood of similar looking houses on the land that the development is in. You obviously can't chose your own location or build on land you already own. Since we already owned our property, this option wasn't for us either.