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Thanks for all the feedback, y'all! There's a lot here I didn't even consider. Planning house layouts is hard.Anne Whateley posted:Master bathroom is small, plus it has that hotel layout, which I think will feel weird. I would take the upper left bedroom and call that the master (it's already bigger), extend it farther down the lower left, and add a bathroom. This also gives the parents separation from the kids plus control over the stairs. If you move the door down perpendicular to the stairs, then the back half of the hallway could become a walk-in closet or the bathroom instead of wasted space. Good point on that hotel layout. The reason I put the master bath where it is, though, is to try to have all the utilities close together. I didn't do a great job of it -- the laundry closet is pretty far from everything else -- but putting a bathroom on the left side upstairs would basically mean running extra water and sewer lines across the entire house. If I'm going to do that then I might as well distribute everything a lot more. Honestly, trying to keep all the water utilities close to each other is the hardest part of all this (so far anyway). quote:On the ground floor, where's the entrance(s) to the house? The dining room is bigger than the living room, which I don't think you'll want, but I don't really get the distinction of living room vs. media room. The bathroom opening off the dining room isn't ideal. Right, so, this is one of those things that I intentionally didn't decide because the orientation of the entrance depends on the land the house is built on. Certain rooms should have the best views -- in this case my thinking with the lower-left room was to give it high ceilings and a window wall. But e.g. if the house is built on a downslope then that means that that room would be facing away from the road, while if the house is on an upslope then that room would be close to the road. I do think that either the front door or a side door should be located fairly close to the kitchen, for unloading groceries. quote:I don't think you'll want the media and laundry rooms next to each other, since laundry rooms produce white noise and I assume anyone spergy enough to have a media room is spergy about intruding sound. I'm also very strongly on team Upstairs Laundry. You could also do that with the upstairs hallway -- folding doors along the back for a combination laundry closet and linen closet (you'll want one regardless).  Yeah, that positioning of the laundry with respect to other elements was kind of dumb. I'd never considered the possibility of an upstairs laundry room though. I guess it makes sense from the perspective that you're washing clothes close to where they'll be stored. It'd be a pain in the rear end to haul the machines up the stairs for initial installation, but that's what contractors are for.peanut posted:It will be stronger if the walls line up so you can have beam continuity across both floors. Lemme try a sketch... That's a good point too. So much to consider, ahhhh!  peanut posted:Our kitchen is 9x12 feet and is considered huge by my friends. The sink and stove are on a semi-open peninsula, with the dining table against the counter to easily pass dishes over. The living room is in the foreground... I shouldn't've named that thing a media room. Should've just called it a bonus room. It'd be the room that has the least-well-defined role, so it can flex depending on needs. Play room for small children, computer room, guest bedroom, etc. I hardly ever use my TV, so I'm not terribly worried about viewing angles or glare or whatnot. Worst case, slap some drapes on the windows. wooger posted:Rather than talking about a cantilevered top floor extension, why don’t you start by just making it the same size as the ground floor? That space above the living room would go a long way to making the bedrooms bigger, or just making the layout better. I’d want a bigger bathroom, especially if you have a family. I like the idea of having one room with high ceilings, a window wall, and a bunch of skylights. I had a great photo (sadly now I can't find it) of a room in a Craftsman house where a nontrivial portion of the ceiling was skylights next to each other, and it looked great. And I'm big on natural light. So while the skylights/high ceilings aren't a hard requirement, I don't want to reject them out of hand.
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Apr 7, 2018 19:14
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Good luck and stick at it, I spent 3 months with an architect before we got mine settled, and even then I had to adjust things on the fly.
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Apr 7, 2018 19:33
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I don't think a big house is that important as long it's big enough that the kids can have their own rooms when they grow older. What's to me more important is the yard and secondary buildings around the house. You need room to house stuff, like a shed, a garage/workshop, room to grow berries (currants, strawberries, raspberries etc) and preferably to plant some fruit trees as well and other garden related stuff. And just plain trees and stuff, lots of green space to live in is essential IMO or I would go insane.
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Apr 7, 2018 19:47
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Good point on that hotel layout. The reason I put the master bath where it is, though, is to try to have all the utilities close together. I didn't do a great job of it -- the laundry closet is pretty far from everything else -- but putting a bathroom on the left side upstairs would basically mean running extra water and sewer lines across the entire house. If I'm going to do that then I might as well distribute everything a lot more. quote:Right, so, this is one of those things that I intentionally didn't decide because the orientation of the entrance depends on the land the house is built on. Certain rooms should have the best views -- in this case my thinking with the lower-left room was to give it high ceilings and a window wall. But e.g. if the house is built on a downslope then that means that that room would be facing away from the road, while if the house is on an upslope then that room would be close to the road. If the laundry moves upstairs, you could turn the existing laundry room into a mud room or utility room and have the back entrance through there. I'm a big believer in mud rooms too. quote:
quote:I like the idea of having one room with high ceilings, a window wall, and a bunch of skylights. I had a great photo (sadly now I can't find it) of a room in a Craftsman house where a nontrivial portion of the ceiling was skylights next to each other, and it looked great. And I'm big on natural light. So while the skylights/high ceilings aren't a hard requirement, I don't want to reject them out of hand.
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Apr 7, 2018 20:08
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i like nice words
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I'd rather have a large garden with non-living space (garage, workshop, storage for garden tools etc) relegated to auxilliary buildings than a large house trying to fit everything under one roof.
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Apr 7, 2018 20:15
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Anne Whateley posted:Bingo, it's worth schlepping the machines up once so you aren't schlepping laundry up and down every day. The biggest reason these appliances are so heavy is usually a concrete block in the base for stability. Apparently they’ve recently had the idea of forgetting the concrete, and just putting a big (empty) water tank in the base, which you can fill once you’ve installed them. Will make the schlepping easier, and will save millions in shipping apparently. Anne Whateley posted:The tradition of putting them in basements definitely came from guys who didn’t want to re-plumb their entire homes after washing machines were invented. FTFY. Many houses were about long before washing machines were common.
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Apr 7, 2018 20:25
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Anne Whateley posted:Bear in mind this will be super expensive to heat/cool, so people who can afford that will probably also want more space than the current layout. I'm in California, and have no real intent to leave the state anytime soon. Our climate's pretty mild, so I think I can get away with having one room that has a lot of glass. The real trick around here is finding land to build on. After three false starts, here's a revamp of the basic concept -- looping ground floor with four main rooms, three bedrooms and two baths upstairs. The laundry's upstairs now too; the eastern half of the north wall is where all the plumbing would go. Ground floor is 28'x28', second floor is 28'x22', total 1400sqft. I didn't mark out much in the way of storage on the ground floor, but I feel like it should be easy to add closets in later.   (The closet doors show as sliding glass because that's the closest analogue I could find to a sliding panel door) I feel like a good front door location would be directly in front of the stairs, basically turning that area into a small mud room. If I did do that then there'd be a dividing wall (maybe only half-height) to separate the entry area from the bonus room (reducing the bonus room to ~10'x12'). The problem is -- with this layout, I'd want the best views to be on probably the top side, for the kitchen and dining room. If the best views are away from the road, then no problem. If they face the road, though, then the best front door location is actually on the back of the house! Collateral Damage posted:I'd rather have a large garden with non-living space (garage, workshop, storage for garden tools etc) relegated to auxilliary buildings than a large house trying to fit everything under one roof. Yeah, I agree. I'm not opposed to having an attached garage, but I feel like most other utility structures (workshops, greenhouses, garden sheds, etc.) should be detached from the main house.
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Apr 7, 2018 20:35
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wooger posted:FTFY. That explanation also doesn't make sense when you consider bathrooms. There are a ton of colonials and Victorians where I grew up, but none of them still have outhouses. The replumbing already happened; they were totally fine with replumbing and repurposing rooms for bathrooms and even upstairs bathrooms.
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Apr 7, 2018 21:04
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Basement washers also make more sense when you've got a housekeeper doing it all for you.
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Apr 7, 2018 21:14
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[quote="TooMuchAbstraction" post="482909633"] Could you fit the master closet in the dead space above the stairs?
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Apr 7, 2018 21:22
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wooger posted:Could you fit the master closet in the dead space above the stairs? Possibly! I'd need to see what kind of headroom there'd be when walking on the stairs. As a tall person I'm always nervous when the stairs have a low ceiling; I get worried I'll whack my head and then fall down the stairs.
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Apr 7, 2018 21:40
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Washing machine upstairs is better if the floor is built for it but I can't help but think most houses would reverberate like hell when it hits the spin cycle. Comedy solution bolt it to a structural wall 
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Apr 7, 2018 22:03
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cakesmith handyman posted:Comedy solution bolt it to a structural wall Do you have any non-structural walls?
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Apr 7, 2018 22:22
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Jaded Burnout posted:Do you have any non-structural walls? I'm not sure if I'm missing something here or are you just used to using different terms down South? "structural wall" = "load bearing wall". If I bolted a washing machine to one of my upstairs internal non-structural walls I suspect that the wall would be down before the end of one wash cycle (some/parts of mine are lightweight concrete blockwork that is built over or spans over the floorboards and the top stops at the ceiling joists)
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Apr 8, 2018 00:44
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Tomarse posted:I'm not sure if I'm missing something here or are you just used to using different terms down South? "structural wall" = "load bearing wall". I'm being a bit of a prick about it I'll admit, but a wall being load bearing or not doesn't have much impact on how good they'd be to bolt machinery to since the whole point is they're built to bear load, i.e. have a bunch of weight put on top of them. There's no difference in my house which walls are load bearing and which aren't except for which bits of the roof they're under. I've got non-bearing walls made of double-layer brick and cheap block bearing walls you could push a pencil through. Jaded Burnout fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Apr 8, 2018 |
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Apr 8, 2018 01:13
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My interior walls are all drywall. You have to find a stud to attach anything, except the places I specifically requested wood panels for shelving.
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Apr 8, 2018 02:13
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Jaded Burnout posted:I'm being a bit of a prick about it I'll admit, but a wall being load bearing or not doesn't have much impact on how good they'd be to bolt machinery to since the whole point is they're built to bear load, i.e. have a bunch of weight put on top of them. There's no difference in my house which walls are load bearing and which aren't except for which bits of the roof they're under. Only the exterior walls in my house are load-bearing and therefore structural. The rest are merely to separate spaces and are not designed to bear any load.
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Apr 8, 2018 08:00
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Anne Whateley posted:Nope, this is the US and our housing stock is super young. Average age is 35 (or was in 2011, I think it's gotten younger since). I'm from the oldest area, and even then it's only 50–60. Stackable machines weren't a thing, and most houses don't/didn't have space for a dedicated room or closet large enough for a washer and dryer back near the bedrooms. They were also loud and likely to have piles of dirty clothes and other things you don't want your guests stepping over, so pushed into work areas like the garage, kitchen, or basement they were.
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Apr 8, 2018 09:21
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Yeah, quiet washing machines are definitely a recent (like, last 15 years or so) thing.
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Apr 9, 2018 05:27
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I'd always want to stick laundry in the basement or lowest level just for the flooding risk alone.
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Apr 9, 2018 19:24
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Baronjutter posted:I'd always want to stick laundry in the basement or lowest level just for the flooding risk alone. Are laundry machines any more flooding-prone than your average bathroom?
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Apr 9, 2018 19:33
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Nope! There are also pretty obvious failsafes like drain pans. The noise level near bedrooms wouldn't have mattered in the past because, whether you're envisioning a housekeeper or a 1950s housewife, the loads would have been run during the day when they were the only person home, like vacuuming. It's only now you typically do those chores in the evening after work.
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Apr 9, 2018 19:34
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The laundry machine in our building is in the basement. I need to set a 15 min timer when I start a load to run down mid-cycle or the floor will flood. The washer empties into a huge work sink, the biggest the landlord could get. It's big enough to handle the full output of one cycle of the washer, but not two. The pipes here are old and he kept having them jam up from the lint the washing machine was putting out into the drains, so instead he makes them drain into a sink with a mesh lint trap on it. Usually you just clean this out before/after a load and it's fine, but we got a new washer that seems a bit more aggressive and is generating enough lint that the drain gets plugged after the first cycle, and then the sink floods on the 2nd. So laundry now includes rushing into the basement with a toothbrush and frantically jamming it into elbow deep water to unclog the lint trap or an entire rise cycle will end up on the floor.
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Apr 9, 2018 19:44
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The basement is a good place to put something heavy, noisy, and full of water - when our upstairs neighbor's washer hits the spin cycle, it rattles our kitchen. That said, I don't miss carrying laundry up two flights of stairs at my dad's house, though it was nice having a jumbo washer and tumble dryer combo. I'm stuck with a European-style combo washer/condensation dryer, which is basically the cruelest invention ever - it takes five hours to do a tiny load and everything comes out insanely wrinkled.
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Apr 9, 2018 20:10
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My parents' house (1969 New England post-midcentury contemporary? IDK what you call it, the parts they didn't ruin in the '90s-00's rule) has the master bedroom directly over the laundry/mudroom below. There's a hatch cut into the floor that empties into a cabinet over the washer and dryer. Dumping the laundry down the chute was always such an adventure as a kid. At one point my sister decided to travel down it too- fortunately without bringing down the wall mounted cabinet in the process.
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Apr 9, 2018 20:17
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Magic Hate Ball posted:The basement is a good place to put something heavy, noisy, and full of water - when our upstairs neighbor's washer hits the spin cycle, it rattles our kitchen. That said, I don't miss carrying laundry up two flights of stairs at my dad's house, though it was nice having a jumbo washer and tumble dryer combo. I'm stuck with a European-style combo washer/condensation dryer, which is basically the cruelest invention ever - it takes five hours to do a tiny load and everything comes out insanely wrinkled. Yes mine too! How do you prevent this, it can’t be by design
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Apr 9, 2018 20:28
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You're supposed to line-dry outside ?????? unless it's frozen hellscape winter.
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Apr 9, 2018 20:42
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Lol my neighbors will hate me but I might do it anyway
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Apr 9, 2018 20:45
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A MIRACLE posted:Yes mine too! How do you prevent this, it can’t be by design Alas it is, where "design" is compromise. The drum can't be big enough to dry properly without being too big to wash properly.
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Apr 9, 2018 20:47
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Anne Whateley posted:Nope! There are also pretty obvious failsafes like drain pans. Women started entering the workplace en masse in the 70's, and you already pointed out that most of the US housing stock was built after that. So noise level would have been a concern, as would have been/is just having space for the machines. As much as everyone rolls their eyes at the size of American houses, you pretty much have to give up a bathroom's worth of space for laundry facilities and most people would rather have easy access to a toilet than the washer in the middle of the night.
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Apr 9, 2018 20:54
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Meanwhile in England the clothes washer is in the kitchen because the pipes are (tiny like their dicks) already there and it's close to the back yard for line drying. Btw floorplan goon, I found it fun, helpful and interesting to re-create houses I've lived in and visited often. It helped me notice things like closets, trashcan placement and flow of movement. You might be able to clarify your likes and dislikes.
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Apr 9, 2018 21:07
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peanut posted:Meanwhile in England the clothes washer is in the kitchen because We prefer utility rooms off the kitchen when there's space for them!
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Apr 9, 2018 21:18
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peanut posted:Btw floorplan goon, I found it fun, helpful and interesting to re-create houses I've lived in and visited often. It helped me notice things like closets, trashcan placement and flow of movement. You might be able to clarify your likes and dislikes. This is a good idea, thanks. In particular I feel like I should bring a tape measure the next time I visit my parents' house, so I can get a feel for room sizes in the house I grew up in.
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Apr 9, 2018 21:21
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:In particular I feel like I should bring a tape measure the next time I visit my parents' house, so I can get a feel for room sizes in the house I grew up in. The number one most useful tool I had during my renovation was a laser measure, if you've got the spare cash it makes life so much easier.
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Apr 9, 2018 21:23
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peanut posted:You're supposed to line-dry outside ?????? unless it's frozen hellscape winter. No backyard and even if I could do that, I probably wouldn't because the "stuff left outside" theft rate is so high around here, not to mention I live in Seattle so that's just an invitation for even wetter clothes. A MIRACLE posted:Yes mine too! How do you prevent this, it can’t be by design I've gotten to know what I can and should take out early, and sometimes lay out out on the bed or hang it up around my room when I'm at work - dress clothes I take out damp and hang, understuff I let wrinkle because, you know, who cares. It's really amazing the power of wrinklage it has, I've never seen a thick sweater wrinkle before but oh boy can they!! And it basically is by design, as indicated above the standard practice is to line-dry. Tumble dryers are ecologically wasteful but emotionally comforting. Magic Hate Ball fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Apr 9, 2018 |
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Apr 9, 2018 21:32
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there wolf posted:Women started entering the workplace en masse in the 70's, and you already pointed out that most of the US housing stock was built after that. So noise level would have been a concern, as would have been/is just having space for the machines. As much as everyone rolls their eyes at the size of American houses, you pretty much have to give up a bathroom's worth of space for laundry facilities and most people would rather have easy access to a toilet than the washer in the middle of the night. I don't think they take up a bathroom's worth of space unless you want an actual laundry room. Have you seen them in practice? My aunt's condo had a laundry closet that was literally just a normal double closet with bifold doors. Not stacked or anything, but it was the '90s so maybe the machines were smaller than current ones? Top-loading washers are also less likely to walk/vibrate iirc.
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Apr 9, 2018 21:36
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That is one of the few nice things about living in an ultra dry desert. You can hang, dry, and fold a load of laundry faster than the dryer can dry a load.
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Apr 9, 2018 21:37
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Hot Tip: Fold the wet clothes in a basket and let it sit for 10-20 minutes to minimize wrinkles when line drying. I fold as I remove them from the washer.
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Apr 9, 2018 21:45
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canyoneer posted:That is one of the few nice things about living in an ultra dry desert. You can hang, dry, and fold a load of laundry faster than the dryer can dry a load.
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Apr 9, 2018 21:57
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Anne Whateley posted:Yeah, that part was about fitting them into preexisting buildings. I just repaired a 25 year-old dryer. May it continue to wobble through another quarter of a century. And I did mention that large closets are an option for the big old machines, but they're not always something a house has back by the bedrooms where extra space would go to closets for clothes and bathrooms. I've never had a front-loading washer and the idea that they walk/vibrate more is terrifying.
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Apr 10, 2018 02:32
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