- a good sized (20'x20') living room that would also be the TV room,
- a den large enough (20'x15') to hold a pool table plus seating,
- a study off of the living room positioned so that we could watch TV or listen to the stereo while surfing the Web or writing email,
- a formal dining room and a breakfast area,
- a fair sized kitchen open to the den,
- two minimum sized guest bedrooms,
- a guest bath which would be convenient to the living areas as well as the guest bedrooms so that we would not need an extra powder room.
- a master bedroom large enough to hold our furniture comfortably without being overly large (e.g.: no sitting room add-on needed).
- a master bath with shower and jetted tub and lots of closet space,
- a laundry room convenient to the master suite.
- all the living areas on one floor so that we would not have to climb stairs in our old age.
The purpose of this page is to give a little idea of how our floor plan came about.
I drew quite a few different floor plans over a number of years before coming up with one that I thought was nearly perfect. Then because of the shape of our lot, I had to completely re-do it.
I won't bore you with pictures of all the floor plans leading up to the present, but above is the one that I was ready to build.
The features we wanted in the house were:
One major flaw with the above floor plan is that the front door opens directly into the living room. I did not consider this a major problem, but Kay did.
Another flaw is that the study only has room for one person at a time. In the study we ended up with, we each have our own desk and are frequently at them at the same time.
The above floor plan was an attempt to solve the front entry problem, but it does so at the cost of a lot of wasted space in hallways. It also blocks the open lines between the kitchen and den. Also, there was not much space in the living room for cabinets, which are badly needed, so it is unlikely that we would have built this version.
After we picked the lot in the Village and went back to Houston to sell our house there, I began working on a new floor plan to take advantage of the views in the front and which I mistakenly believed at the time to be about 120 degrees towards the back.
The lines going across the drawing above were to indicate what I thought the lines of view down the two fairways would be. We made a second trip to HSV a couple of weeks later and I found out that the two views were at more of a 90-degree angle, and I had to start over again.
This floor plan (above) was the one we first gave to builders for quotes. When we found out the cost of building, we decided to remove the study (bottom, right of the floor plan) and use one of the guest bedrooms as a study.
A side benefit of this decision is that the study in the above plan is tucked
into a far corner of the house. In the plan we used, it is right much more conveniently located.
When we deleted the study, we got the square footage down to about 2300, but it soon became clear that the den and kitchen were just too small. The hallway was also too narrow at just 5' wide. Enlarging these places got the floor plan back up to around 2600 square feet, but we just could not find any place to cut back. In fact, we eventually added another 200 square feet.
In this version, we had moved the master bath down and the master bedroom into its previous spot.
The two lines at the top, right corner of the floor plan above indicate the fartherest points where we could place the house on the lot. We needed to locate at the far top-right corner to maximize the views down the two fairways which are at 90 degrees to each other. (Our lot is in red in the map below.)
Moving the master bedroom down allowed us to push the house further into
that top-right corner.
This left the master bath, which has no clear windows, with one of the best
views in the house and the master bedroom with no golf course views. So in the
next plan, we swapped their locations, even though it meant more wastefull
hall space.
This turned out to be the final design. As mentioned elsewhere, this design is not without flaws. (See "Finding A Floor Plan".) But we are very happy with the layout so far.
These are not all the variations of plans that we went through, but this should give a little taste of the process.