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| (Not my bathroom) |
Half of the plans I dismiss nearly instantly based on a few very personal biases:
1) My #1 instant dislike of a house plan is if the kitchen sink is visible from the front door. Kitchens are messy and I wouldn't want my guests--or other visitors--to see mine. Similarly, I don't want to look into a bathroom from the front door either. Yuck.
2) Huge foyers with no coat closet. Another mystery. I guess that's the reason for all the Pins of entryway storage build-outs.
3) Bathrooms without windows. I don't care how big the fan is in the ceiling, it never completely dries out, which equals mold. Not to mention odors. Well, there I did mention odors after all.
4) Dining rooms in the front of the house, completely separated from the kitchen. I do not get this type of layout at all. Is it just for show and people don't use it except for holidays? I think areas like this become dumping grounds and crap collectors.
5) Master bathrooms without any doors. This became popular 20-25 years ago, but does not make sense to me. Bathroom stuff is noisy with water running, toilets flushing, hair dryers, shavers, etc. My own master bedroom has an open vanity area. How can people not disturb their partner if they have a different schedule? They can't. I also hate the requisite giant soaking tub hogging all the natural light from the big window it sits under in every.single.home.plan. Who really uses one?
6) Those weird long narrow dark bonus rooms over garages. I have never personally been in a house that has one. It might be a Midwest thing. We sure get gypped out here on the West Coast because no one has attics or basements. That's why most people's garages are full of stuff and offsite storage facilities are so prevalent. But I digress.
7) Windowless laundry rooms. Why is it that so many home plans have laundry rooms stuffed under stairs, in hallways, or crammed into the tiniest space with no windows? I do not want to trample over dirty laundry on my way inside the house from the garage. Laundry is a Big Damn Daily Deal that needs space for sorting, folding, hanging, handwashing, soaking, and ironing. It is a cluttered and often damp job. I looked at a plan today for a 4000+ square foot house with a two story rotunda entry and the laundry room was miles from the bedrooms, literally 6x9 feet in size, and had a door to the outside, making it a pass through. There was no sink and no storage. Sheesh. Another very large home had the washer and dryer in a hallway closet that was visible from the front door. Classy.
I'd categorize most of these fails as "Looks Good On Paper". And also I'd point the finger at men, because most architects and builders are male. Obviously they are not entirely responsible. However, my dream house would be a lot different from most of the plans I see. I'll show you--when I win the lottery :)
9 comments:
I AGREE!! I live in a house built in the mid-60s...so much of it is poorly planned. And I think we can be pretty darn sure in '66 it WAS a man who designed it. I didn't choose it, I married the owner :/ Your #3 is clearly one of our problems, NO window at all! and the bathroom door, bedroom door and two opposing closet doors all open into each other in a small "hallway" as you go into the bedroom. Happy New Year.
We were lucky, our builders asked their wives for input on the layout of the house we bought. We don't have windows in the bathrooms, but the laundry room has a window, counter space and a sink. It has other flaws, but I can live with most of them. We don't have basements in Oklahoma either, it's not soil it's clay or rock, so basements are hard to build. We luck out in the Midwest, our housing costs are a lot lower than they are on the coasts!
Haha...Well put....The last house that my parents built was actually designed by my Mom and then taken to an architect to have blue prints drawn....After moving and living in over 12 houses in her married life she knew exactly what she did and didn't want.....The house turned out great ...(PS my Mom had no formal training to do this )
I'm lucky to have the bonus room over a 3 car garage for a sewing room. It has 5 windows and a view of the mountains.
I look at Pinterest for mostly the same subjects as you. I laughed at some of your rants as they are so true. The only thing I don't like about my house is the kitchen being visible from the front door. (Yuck!) Oh and the entry is on the small size. But we have plenty of windows (which I curse when comes the time to wash all these huge windows!) with the kitchen and dining room facing south. We do have a loft over the garage but nothing like you describe. It is so roomy, we have the trampoline set up in there in winter, lol. Yes, that big! Anywho! It was fun reading this. Happy New Year and many blessings through out the year. ;^)
My house has so many of the things you don't like, and I'm not overly fond of, but parts of it are so much better than the last house, I just deal with it.
For one, my laundry room is a small room you walk through to get from the garage to the den, but it has a window, and it's not IN the garage, as my last one was. I hated doing laundry there--too hot in the summer time, and had to wear a jacket in the winter to do laundry!
We turned the dining room just off the entry into an office--after taking down the 9-light chandelier I hit my head on every time I stood up. The entry leads into a long living room that I haven't figured out what to do with yet. We could having dining room there, except you can see it from the front door, and the light fixture is in the absolute center of the long room--not where you want the dining table to be.
AND, the builder put louvered swinging doors from the master bedroom into the master bathroom, which has a jetted tub (that I never use) and a single-sink vanity. Definitely a male, and probably a bachelor.
Ah, well, it's now 35 minutes to the grandbaby's house instead of 7 hours, so I'm not complaining. Well, not loudly.
Too visible bathrooms are one of my biggest house peeves. It's fun to try to date houses using their floor plan.
You are so funny! Well, you probably wouldn't like a Japanese house. Let's see. No closet in the foyer... but we have a shoe cupboard for family shoes, does that count? I don't think anyone can see my kitchen sink from the front door... they'd have to stretch their necks a bit. No master bath next to the master bedroom. In many homes there's only one toilet in the house and it goes without saying there is only one bathing area to a house. I agree with you though about not being able to see the bathroom from the front door. I specifically chose a house with the bathroom in the back of the house. The reason in Japan for the bathroom near the front door was so that the cesspool trucks could pull up to the front of the house every couple months to collect their "gold".
Can you believe it? should be the title of your list. I had to laugh at the goofy home designs. After living on the east coast for 30 years, I was astonished to find every CA home we looked at had a doorless master. What were they thinking? Out of the 3 CA homes we have lived in, DH has added a door to 2 of them. The builder of the 1 home flat-out refused to add a partial wall and door to the home he was selling us --even if we paid him. Why was that? The main bath in our present home is even worse. The commode is placed behind the entrance door in such a manner that the door can barely be opened wide enough to get in. Whaaat? If one were PG, it would be difficult to use that little room. I find it hard to believe that this home was passed by the very strict city inspectors. And laundry room? What's that? sigh. We should have studied to be architects, I think.
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