I promise we are getting close to the end of the “Obsessively talking about floor plan ideas” phase of this creative process, but we’re not done yet. I warned you in my Thursday, September 12th post that if you’re not into floor plans and obsessing over floor plan possibilities, you might want to wait a while and join us again in a couple weeks. So I’ve already warned you. I’m about 12 days into those two weeks, so I promise this won’t continue indefinitely. But for those of us who love to obsess over every detail of floor plans, I wanted to share a few lessons I’ve learned from the 21 floor plans that were submitted last week.
I spent the weekend studying every detail of each floor plan, discarding the ideas I knew wouldn’t work and separating the other ideas into “Definitely keep it” and “maybe” and “Probably not” Lots. It was really a fascinating exercise to see how people who have never been in my house but have only seen it in photos (and possibly videos if you follow me on Instagram) imagine how our home can be better organized. And I learned some really good lessons from this exercise.
Lesson 1: I have some incredibly talented readers.
I’ve known this for a long time. My readers’ talents span countless genres, but at least a handful of you have an amazing talent for space planning. There were some plans that had ideas I would never have thought of in a million years. My mind just couldn’t “see” some of those possibilities.
One person said in the email accompanying their floor plan that it’s much easier to do this for someone else than it is to do it for your own home. I totally agree with that. When I had my decorating business, I found that to be true with decorating as well. I always found it easier to decorate other people’s homes than to decorate my own. I think there are two reasons for that.
First of all, I think it’s easier to design or decorate something that you don’t have any emotional attachment to. If I had the chance, I could come up with a decorating plan for someone else in a couple of hours, implement that plan, take pictures of the nice finished room, and then walk away satisfied. But when I’m the one who has to live in it, the process is much deeper than just decorating a nice room. I have to “feel” it. I have to want to live with it and look at it every day. It has to feel like “me.” There has to be some kind of emotional connection there, and that can take time and a lot of trial and error.
Secondly, I think that when we live in our own homes for a while, we develop a kind of “blindness” to the possibilities. When you’ve lived in your house for years and years and you’ve become accustomed to things being arranged just the way they are, it can be very difficult to think outside of that order, even if the current order is a little odd in places. Just as we become “blind” to our own clutter, I think we also become accustomed to those awkward problems in our own homes to the point that they seem normal to us.
So I say all this to say that it was fascinating to see the possibilities through the eyes of people who had no emotional attachment to our house and who saw no obstacles that my mind has naturally created over 11 years of living here.
Lesson 2: It is virtually impossible to create a 100% functional floor plan without walking through the space and seeing it with your own eyes.
In every single plan that was presented to me there was at least one idea that I really liked and seriously considered. At the same time, in every single plan there was at least one idea that I didn’t think would work at all. And every time I came across one of those ideas, my first thought was: “If this person could stand in this room and look around, it would be clear that this would not work.“
There is a huge benefit to walking around and looking at a house to see how the rooms can best be used. I mean, that’s obvious, right? Houses are so much more than just floor plans. Those 2D floor plans actually have elevations. I don’t know if you’ve ever visited a new house when it’s being built and seen it when it’s in the foundation phase before the walls go up. Every time I’ve seen a house at that stage, no matter how many square feet it will be when it’s finished, my mind always goes, “Seriously? This is all? This is tiny!“So my brain, in that 2D phase of real life, always sees things smaller than they really are. Others can look at the blueprints and visualize things as larger than they really are.
I think that’s definitely the case when people suggest things like turning our front living room into a guest bedroom. When this room is open to the entry, it looks quite spacious. But if you had to put up a wall to separate this room from the entry, it would look very small and cramped.
The same goes for the suggestion to turn our pantry into a guest bedroom. This room may look larger in the photos (and I mislabeled it as 2.40m x 3.60m on the floor plan when it’s actually 2.10m x 3.60m), but if I tried to put a bed in here, it would look more like a prison cell than a guest bedroom.
And for a long time now, people have repeatedly urged me to convert the storage closet in the studio into a laundry room. But again, I think the photos and floor plan can be misleading. If I put my washer and dryer in here, and with the HVAC system in here, I don’t know if there would be enough room to open the washer and dryer doors while standing in the closet.
So there is a definite downside to not being able to physically walk through a home and see the actual rooms in person to get a sense of size, flow, feel, etc. I mean, that’s obvious, right? But my point is that there were so many really interesting and creative ideas that I knew right away wouldn’t work. I was really hoping that some of them would work, but when I stood in the room, visualized it, and used my tape measure to measure the area, it became clear to me that some of those amazing ideas just weren’t possible.
Lesson 3: The plan I rejected most quickly at first turned out to be the most influential.
I found this really fascinating. There was one particular plan that I opened, took about three seconds to review, and rejected it immediately. The first thought that ran through my head as I reviewed it for those three seconds was something like, “Ha! Well, that’s nonsense. I can’t do that.”
But for some reason, I couldn’t get that shot out of my head. I kept thinking, “Hmmm… is this nonsense? Or is it actually feasible?“So, about an hour later, I looked at it again with an open mind. On that second look, I realized that it wasn’t nonsense and it wasn’t just doable. It was brilliant! The idea was something that would never have occurred to me. If I had been given a thousand chances to come up with a plan, my mind would never have thought of it. And because it was so different, my immediate reaction was to reject it. So it took me a while to get out of my own way and realize how much sense that plan made.
And in the end, that plan that I immediately rejected became… he plan for a very significant portion of our new floor plan.
Lesson 4: Homes are much more than just floor plans.
I know I’ve said this before, but I want to reiterate it. Looking at the possibilities of floor plans and rearranging rooms within them is so much fun. I’ve loved looking at floor plans since I was a teenager. Even back then, I would spend hours looking at books of floor plans, rearranging them in my head to make them better (or so I thought ) and dreaming about the possibilities.
But houses are much more than floor plans, and one of the main obstacles to rearranging rooms, moving walls, adding additions, etc., is the roof structure. If I didn’t have to worry about the walls supporting the roof of our house, there would be unlimited possibilities for arranging the interior rooms. I’ve often wondered what I would do if I could tear down all the interior walls of the house and start from scratch, arranging the rooms however I saw fit.
But that is not the reality. The reality is that in this house there are many walls that support the heavy load of the roof. In fact, those are the load-bearing walls of our house.
Of course, the load-bearing walls of a house can It’s not impossible to move the load-bearing walls, but once you get into that terrain, you’re faced with some very expensive structural changes. And if money were no object, we’d be building a 1,200-square-foot addition right now at a cost of $250,000.
Also, beyond the load-bearing walls, the actual roof structure dictates what can and cannot be done on a lower budget. Again, if money is no object, you can redesign the entire roof and make whatever additions you want in the process. But if you want to do things as cheaply as possible, the last thing you want to do is make changes that would require changes to the roof. So when I looked at some of the proposals and literally went out to see how the current breakfast room roof connects to the roof of the main part of the house, and tried to imagine how I would have to change the actual roof to make those proposed changes, I knew that some of those proposals would be cost-prohibitive.
These things fall into the category of lesson #2: things you really have to see in person to understand how it all works together and how they can limit possibilities when budget is a limiting factor. But they’re also worth mentioning in a separate category.
I had a lot of fun looking at everyone’s ideas and I can’t thank you enough. All of that input resulted in a final plan that I’m very happy with. I’m not ready to share it yet. I need more time to sit down and think about it, dream about it, and plan it out. I want to meet with an architect friend and have him draw up actual professional plans to see if my ideas will actually work. I want him to do elevation drawings to show me what the roofline will look like. I want him to review the space planning and make sure nothing stands out to him as being “out of place” or not feasible. But most of all, I need a little more time for my own ideas without any input from others. As I told my mom, the public input phase of this creative endeavor is over. But I think, thanks to so many of you, I have a fantastic plan that I would never have come up with on my own. Never in a million years could I have dreamed this up on my own. You guys are the best!
Addicted 2 Decorating is a place where I share my DIY and decorating experience while remodeling and decorating the 1948 home my husband Matt and I purchased in 2013. Matt has multiple sclerosis and is unable to do physical labor, so I do most of the work around the house alone. You can learn more about me here.
