Smaller House Plan

OK, reality has set in - the house has to be smaller! Here is a smaller version of my house plan - basically, I've squared up the basic house and chopped off the downstairs bedrooms and extra bath. But I could not make this work since there was no place for our study (what we now have as a computer room/office and library). Before, one of the downstairs bedrooms was going to be the study.

So I added a study and I've moved the screened porch to the southeast corner, behind the study. This lets me simplify the roofline and if we wanted to someday enclose that porch, it will be easier. With that in mind, we'll probably not brick inside the screened porch, just use Hardie lap siding. Right away, we would not have a porch on the east side of the house, but I'll probably have them pour a concrete pad on the east side of the house. Then down the road, we could roof over that side for an open porch - or put on awnings to direct rain away from the doors on that side.

Now the plan will be to go ahead and finish out the bath upstairs and maybe one of the upstairs bedrooms. I have not drawn up the upstairs plan since my idiotic program has decided to stop showing me where the cutoff for 8' walls is. Before we had gables out the front and back, but I've decided that to save money we'll do one wide gable with a hipped roof only to the east (back). This means no Jack & Jill bath up stairs because the plumbing would be complex, but that is OK.

This is not a finished plan by any means, but here's the changed design:



This cuts the downstairs from 2270 sq. ft. to 1978 sq. ft. Frankly, I have no clue how big the upstairs will be - my sketchy plan right now is about 700sq. ft. but I do not know if that is realistic considering the roofline. I consider the minimum for a bedroom to be about 12x12' and a bath about 5x8' so that would be a minimum of about 350 sq. ft.