A House plays a significant role in your life. We tend to spend a lot of time in our own homes… everything from being with loved ones, to where we sleep, eat, and share memories. It’s also a place where you can go and have “me time”. Now while we are right deep in the middle of Covid-19, how to you get your “me time”? If you are working from home and the kids are not at daycare or in school, it’s very hard to get that time to just be alone and relax.

Knowing that when a house has that much influence in your life, it is so necessary to invest your thoughts and time into the design of a proper floor layout. After deciding to build your own house, the first step will be finding the right contractor. We’ve written a blog about that here.

Once you have committed to a design-build company, they will want to work with your ideas, inspirations and other features that you can do with a custom renovation or new home build. Share these with your builder. The builder can share your ideas with the architect as well as the interior designer.

7 Mistakes with Floor Plan and How to avoid them:

Failing to look at Room Placement.

Bedrooms and Bathrooms are an essential to your house. Having the half bath in a highly travelled area, like the kitchen, is not ideal when doing your meal prep. What about your bedrooms? Do you want them on the side of the house that has the busiest street? Probably not. Take a moment and envision where you want your rooms and how they will affect the function of your house. What problems will arise? What will annoy you?

How much is too Big, How much is too Small?

Always take care of the measurements. Measure your current bedrooms, your kitchen, your living room; then go in your current back yard, or go to the Stadium Parking Lot (if your yard is too small) and figure out how big you want your bedroom and measure it out on the pavement right there. Know how big it will be. There are standard sizes for a bedroom. (11′ x 12′, accommodates a Queen size bed) Often people find those sizes fairly small. If it’s a nursery or a child’s bedroom, then it will work, but having a child sized bedroom (11′ x 12′) as the master, that will be a mistake that won’t be easy to fix.

The Front Entrance.

If you are looking to make a statement with company coming over or if you want to sell your house in 10 years, don’t forget about the front Entrance. It is one of the most impactful features of your house. It is very common to have high ceilings in this area, or to have great sight-lines to capture a city/country view. We will talk about this a few points further down.

People do so much talking at the front entrance of the house. Do you ever notice when you have family or friends over, and they get up to leave, it still takes them another 30 minutes to leave? Because they spend alot of time in the front entrance talking, getting shoes, grabbing coats, getting their kids together, etc. etc… Having a large enough front entrance to accommodate this would show tremendous foresight. Some of the best conversations are had at the front entrance of a house.

Bringing the family in.

Building a new home is not just for yourself. It will be a change for your kids as well. If they are able to understand the 3D virtual tour that we offer in our design package, this will help them see their room sizes. Ask them if they like it? Ask them if they would want anything different? Ask them what color they want there room to be? Sometimes kids have the most creative ideas and it is good to listen to them.

Not enough Storage.

When a homes gets built, no matter how big it is, a few years down the road, it gets filled up and feels cluttered. This is more of an organization tactic than the actual size of the house. Finding where to store certain items in your house is key to keeping it bright, airy and fresh looking. A great idea for storage is making your garage a bit deeper/wider, so you can have shelving in there for totes and other misc. items. Even having a taller ceiling in the garage can help for putting up ceiling racks. Check out this ceiling rack from Wayfair. It is economical and would be easy to install. Also, your mechanical room. Having storage in there is always great.

At Contegrity we always drywall, paint, lay flooring and install baseboards before the furnace, water heater and any other mechanicals show up. This way we are not trying to fit drywall in behind a furnace or squeezing it around an breaker box. Get your builder to install shelves in there. Usually 24″ deep, it can just be some 2×4’s and plywood. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy, you will not regret it.

Seeing Sight-lines.

What is a Sight-line? Simply put, it is an imaginary line extending from an observer’s eye to a viewed object or area. The term is to detail what can be seen from any given point in the room to describe efforts to create spaces that are as visually appealing as possible. Normally, the first view you get of any room is the one from the doorway. For many of us, that initial glimpse is enough to form an opinion on the space. So sight-lines are important. You don’t want to be walking into your home and see the toilet seat in the master ensuite!! When we use our 3D virtual touring of our designed home, we can show you sight-lines of each room in your home.

Furniture Sizes.

Lastly, and probably the most common mistake, is not knowing the size of furniture that’s going into your home. For any size of house, furniture placement and size is so important. For each room, it gives a magnificent and luxurious look to the interior of your house. It is very crucial that you should take proper measurements of the furniture that will be going into the space. Sharing these sizes with our architect will be beneficial as they can draw those sizes into the room, and it can be shown in our 3D modelling.

We believe these 7 mistakes can be avoided if you consider the advice given in each point. The worse that can happen is building a house or doing a major renovation and not having it function the way you like. Too many times you hear of people saying, I’d change this or I’d make this room bigger or this room smaller. This is unfortunate, especially when you are spending a-lot of money. It would be disappointing to have regrets. With our process we take those fears of having regrets away. Each step is taking your ideas, our expertise and bringing a concept to life and completing it.

If you would have any questions or want to learn more about our “Free Design”, give us a call or contact us on our form.