Plans in Hand

Even before you find your property, you will want to be designing your house plans, so you will be ready to hit the ground running once your construction loan clock starts ticking. As I mentioned earlier, some adjustments may be required to fit the house plan and the site together. On the sale notice, our property advertised that “some easy site preparation may be necessary.” See my Jan. 1 entry for a definition of “easy” which applies here. There are lots of factors to consider when planning your site design. First the septic field has to be at least 100 feet from any well or surface water (such as the lake adjoining our property). As is typical, our neighbors had installed their well a short distance from our property line, so the only thing we could do was put our well adjacent to theirs on our side of the line. There was just space to fit in our septic drainfield at the opposite end of the property from the well while keeping within our boundaries. We also had to figure out just where to site the house, taking in the view of the lake, while trying to minimize the number of trees that would have to be cleared and leaving room for a driveway. We decided to set the garage back from the front of the house, which was a good choice, as it makes it easier to turn a vehicle around in front of the garage and makes the house look less like a box in its design.

We created our own house plans right on our computer using Turbo FloorPlan 3D software by IMSI. There are many different software programs available to use, and I think they all require some level of a learning curve to work with them well. It is a pretty simple matter to drop in walls, windows, doors etc. Selecting your roof design and pitch and other details can be a little more complicated, but if you can figure out the program, you can add about any feature you can imagine. A nice feature of the 3D programs is that once you have laid out your floor plan, you can pop it up into 3D mode, 'walk' through the house or look at it from the outside. We spent some time making sure windows and doors were not only functional for the inside of the house, but also looked balanced from the outside of the house.

While designing your home, you'll find yourself noticing architecture like never before, like the lovely old houses built downtown in the 40s, or some atrocious boxes with miniature windows randomly located here and there. We were looking to build a relatively modest home with a small footprint, so we began with looking at mobile home floorplans that are very space efficient and minimize hall space. We started with a 24' x 30' dimension, which gradually expanded as we worked to make things fit in like stairways and a decent sized kitchen/dining area, and we finally settled on 28' x 40' with a full basement and half loft, which gives us close to 2400sf of living space. It is recommended that your dimensions be a multiple of 4, as most building materials, like plywood and sheetrock are in 4' widths.

At one point, we staked the dimensions of the main level out in the backyard (in the snow) to visualize what size we were really representing on our computer screen or printed plans. That helped us decide to allow a little more space for the kitchen/dining area. Another great thought we had was planning the stairway to the basement to fall immediately below the stairway to the loft, which added efficiency to our use of space. We also put the majority of our plumbing in one wall (between kitchen and bath on the main level and between bath and laundry immediately below in the basement). We made that an 8” thick wall which helped with fitting all that plumbing in (and also allowed a built in cabinet in the main level bath). Because both of us were involved in the design, I got to make sure it included features like linen, coat and utility closets that not all men would think of adding. (I say this because I once dated a contractor who built his house shortly after his divorce and included none of those features. There wasn't even a door into the attached garage from inside the house.) Because radon is relatively common in our area, we also planned to install a passive venting system to let radon escape from below the basement out through the roof. Those are some examples of things we did really well to plan out from the beginning.