Floorplan help - how to make house feel more spacious
7 years ago
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Please help me with floor plan design for a small Australian home
Comments (20)OP, OKL's plan is better from an energy efficiency point of view than your plan (your plan wastes the northern aspect with bathrooms). But DON'T just flip OKL's plan, as the orientation would then be all wrong! It's important to get the orientation right, this will greatly effect the comfort of your home & your heating/cooling requirements (& hence your bills). Read this. It's all very useful, but maybe focus on the section about orientation first. http://yourhome.gov.au/passive-design Below are some generalisations. As has been requested, it would be nice to know your general location, as climates vary across our big country, so building requirements change. But generally, you want your living areas (& a large proportion of your glazing facing north). If possible, have a smaller portion of your glazing facing south & east, for cross ventilation, & try to eliminate western glazing. Bedrooms to the south & east (if they won't also fit in the north), & rarely used rooms, like garages, bathrooms & laundries to the west. Your verandah is south facing, good, as it won't shade your home in winter. Hopefully you have north facing eaves & they aren't too large. If they are the right size you'll get sun through your northern windows in winter, but the eaves will shade the house in summer, when the sun is higher in the sky. So can you knock out windows & doors wherever you want? Would be good to know where they are currently, the size of the verandah, the block dimensions & any other structures which will influence shading & privacy. I'd also be looking at some tiny house blogs/websites. 72sqm isn't tiny, but you really want an efficient house that works well, & you'll find some ingenious storage solutions that are used in tiny houses. Well designed built in storage is definitely very important in a small home. Can't see if it all fits now, while using the app on my phone. But I'd aim for something like this. The kitchen in the NE corner, running down the eastern wall (so you get good morning sun). An island bench for dining, separating the living area on the northern wall. Master in the NW corner, with the ensuite on the western wall (if it fits - important not to have the master bedroom window facing west). Minor bedrooms (& windows) on the south wall. Main bathroom or powder room somewhere on the southern wall, in the SW corner would be nice if it fits there. No idea is that all fits, just some ideas. If you're not fussed about an easy facing kitchen, you could flip this all, & have the kitchen in the NW corner, & the master in the NE corner. If you're taking off external or internal cladding, this is a good time to insulate you're walls. Also up insulation levels in the roof cavity of they're inadequate. It will greatly effect comfort, is quite cheap & the walls are very hard to do at other times. Edit: as I got the verandah location wrong, then added to my post....See MoreHelp please! Floorplan ideas needed for underneath the house...
Comments (14)Thank you oklouise. That’s very nice of you to offer. We have had a builder provide some advice around some of the structural walls, etc - one of which is that little storage area under the new ensuite. We had explored removing that to make it a double garage but it really would blow out costs and advice was the extended double garage would probably be cheaper. I do very much see your point about spending money on legal-height extra room though - makes complete sense. I would like to do something with the front porch - with the deck and under deck areas, I don’t foresee us using the porch much at all. The exterior house walls are structural though so again, it could be costly to move. There is also a window into Bed2 that opens onto the porch so this would either have to be filled in (there is another one but not sure we want to decrease light or breeze) or built around. I did want to close in the screen door to the living room and build in a bit but it could be a lot of expense for perhaps a metre wide gain!!? I wasn’t sure how we were going to use the storage under the new ensuite but from your design, I think that garage area would be good as the kids play room and that area as their toy/games storage. With family overseas, we usually travel once a year and have luggage for all of us so happy to have just an extra storage room (such as that under the porch). We only really need 4 bedrooms so I still think sacrificing the upstairs study is probably still the best use of space. We were going to do the reno in two stages - garage, ensuite and stairs before we moved in and then downstairs afterwards. Perhaps we hold off on the stairs to live in and feel first....See MoreFloor plan layout advice to make this house feel more open
Comments (33)I'd say it's an easy min. $250K minimum flagfall on a relatively basic/not fancy spec/fit-out in a super good package deal. You're essentially renovating an entire house including moving plumbing, walls replastering, new floors throughout etc....not to mention lights, rewiring etc etc, it goes on and on.......This scope would still cost a builder themselves $150K, not factoring in their own time/labour, paying cash for sub-trades and getting super deals on all materials....and then you could only really potentially roll this type of operation out if you actually have the money in the bank. If you need to borrow then you'd need a building contract which then brings in market rates, profit margins and GST. Take profit and GST out from $150K and there's barely enough left to cover materials alone, when the labour/materials ratio (of a construction cost) these days, particular for renovations is labour being the most significant cost involved.............you can fine tune and perfect a floor plan like you have (which I reckon is pretty good as a plan), but when push comes to shove it always comes back to budget and costs, which is why we always are encouraging people to utilise design professionals who manage the challenge of designing within budget limits. If you separate budget/costs from the design process (rather than integrate it) more often than not it will leads to disappointment and misalignment of your expectations of what is realistic....See MorePeriod Home Floor Plan Improvements and Renovations..please help
Comments (25)Update on this. We have decided to keep upstairs unchanged in terms of layout. We will live in the house for a period before making any layout changes upstairs - 2 Bedrooms will be for our girls, while our son will sleep downstairs in the living room (now bedroom) as this was seldom going to be used. Now we are looking at the kitchen design - photos attached of current kitchen which will be completely refreshed along with the tiling in the kitchen / living area. Looking for any ideas on how to best update the kitchen - notice under the stair case is not currently being utilised but we would like to perhaps have the fridge or pantry under the stairs to include this dead space. From the kitchen window to the stair case is 4950mm x 3200mm approximately depth of the current kitchen. The stair case hangs into the kitchen around 750-800mm. Wondering if it would look silly to have perhaps the fridge built here and this cabinetry would sit proud of the bench space next to it, but we could also install deeper bench space to balance the look... We are planning to have the eye-saw built in fridge space currently in the kitchen removed altogether....See More- 7 years ago
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