Our House V5

So here it was - a radical rethink - rather than trying to run the living area through the middle of the house between our area and the kids area, we put it all over onto the west side of the house.  This had two key advantages - the bedroom and study fitted much better and the key light areas were now the living areas.

Version Five

In addition to these advantages:

• We ended up with an effective sound barrier between the kids area and the main living area.
• All the kids bedrooms could now come off their activity room.
• The powder room could be screened.
• We actually ended up with bigger rooms for our area and the study/guest and also in the main living area.

In addition to this we had also gone through several iterations downstairs, trying to maintain a good size garage and to fit in the best combination of utility room and laundry in the area that we ended up with downstairs.

Eventually we ended that rather than trying to have a separate utility and laundry room we would incorporate it into one big room.  In that way we could make the "wet" area double up as a kitchenette for the kids if they wanted to have friends down there or if we were using that area for an outside BBQ.

So nearly there - but of course nothing is ever simple and whilst most of the house worked for me I could not get the main bedroom robe and ensuite areas to work for me and was not sure I was happy about the way the pantry linked into the kitchen.

Our House V3 & V4

Versions 3 and 4 continued to fiddle around with the identified "problems".  We experimented with moving the stairs around to make one doorway into the parents area and study/guest room and also with splitting the study/guest into two separate rooms - but that was starting to move towards the "nookie little rooms" that I am not keen on.  We also reviewed the kitchen layout to broach the sound barrier and "walk through" issues and also moving the powder room so you didn't walk past it when entering the house - but it still didn't feel right.

Time for another radical rethink!!

Our House V2

The next version of the house - after much fiddling around - made better use of the study / guest space which also gave a good view from that room of out the back of the house.

The entry was moved up to shorten that space and allowing the pantry to be moved in between the kids area and main living area.  

The disadvantage of this one was that the living room now had two doors off it, the privacy issue of the powder room still was not solved and one of the kids bedrooms did not open to the activity room.  The main bedroom also lost the built in robe.

So still not quite there but it was allowing us to work through some of the things that worked for us and what didn't.

The suggestions we got on this one were;

• the kids study nook is not big enough to be functional.
• the door between the study nook and kitchen would become a thoroughfare.
• the long skinny study / guest might be difficult to furnish.