General layout and schematic finalized!

 

I know it's been a while since my last post, but before I talk about where we stand, I want to plug the excellent ESPN documentary on the Fab 5. Having Chris Webber's participation would have been icing on the cake, and it seems to be lacking due to his absence, but it was still well done and brought back a lot of great memories. Hopefully, this year's Michigan team will channel some Fab 5 as they hit March Madness. Anyways...

Since my last post, we've been going back and forth with our architect regarding the layout, spacing and dimensions of the main floor. After several iterations, we decided the first one worked the best for us.

The issue that we couldn't resolve was the layout of the master and second bedroom. Having the bedrooms on the same side as the garage was proving to be a challenge (and a pain). After going back and forth with this and struggling to come up with a solution we could agree upon, we asked the architect to draw us a completely different schematic that preserved the design elements we liked, but put them into more of a traditional layout. This is what he came up with:

As you can see, this is a more traditional (common) layout that preserves the open, high ceilings in the great room and kitchen. Now that the bedrooms had a whole side to themselves, it opened up a lot more flexibility in terms of possible layouts and design. We also liked the small hallway that separates the bedroom wing from the rest of the house. I actually really liked this design and was ready to run with it, but my wife felt otherwise. The main things she didn't like were the orientation of the kitchen and the loss of the front door-to-back window gallery that we had in the initial schematic. She also didn't like the lack of spatial separation between the great room and the kitchen. 

ARRRRGGGHHHH!! Frustration is starting to creep in at this point, and I'm almost afraid we have to start from scratch. We  can't make the initial design work and now the boss is essentially nixing this design. But wait, let's preserve the elements we like in each design and try to come up with some sort of hybrid/compromise. So, with a little image manipulation using the above two schematics, Frankenstein is born!

This is a composite image I created by cutting and pasting elements of the two schematics. Now we're talking! We feel like this is it! What we really liked about this layout was the unobstructed front-to-back and east-to-west galleries. The front-to-back gallery also serves to separate the great room from the kitchen. We think we're close in terms of the layout. Of course, scale is another matter but we'll leave that to the expert. But will this work from a design standpoint? We shoot our Frankenstein schematic off to the designer and wait with hopeful anticipation. Several days later, we get these sketches back:

Main floor

Loft

After some initial concerns about the size of the kitchen and great room that were put to rest once we had some actual dimensions, we realized our only input was in the smaller details. We had finally come up with a rough layout that worked for us! This was a revelation and a huge relief. The input we had on this set of drawings was as follows:

1. We'd like to keep the master bedroom door out of view from the long east-to-west gallery for added privacy.
2. We'd like the second bedroom to have an attached full bath. We would then use the space currently occupied by the full bathroom as the guest powder room. This would allow us to get rid of the half bath next to the mud room and pantry and use that area for added mud room or pantry space.
3. We'd like to push the front door out more towards the front of the lot so that there's more of a foyer and the stairs are not immediately off to the right hand side as you enter the house.
4. Once we start designing the master suite, we'd like to have separate "his" and "hers" closets.

As you can see these are design specifics and we no longer have any big issues within the context of the more general layout of the house. The architect will now work on preliminary plans with more specific dimensions and measurements. We should have these by the end of the week. We're finally moving on to the next step, and based on what our architect is telling us, things should start moving very quickly from here on out. Awesome!

Oh yeah, he also drew a very rough sketch of what our house will look like from the outside:

Very cool, indeed!