Plans! - A Starting Point

A few weeks passed from our laundry list meeting and we were both getting quite nervous and excited to see the first actual plans for our house. The day finally came around and we headed off to the house builder to see what they had come up with.

Overall, we were reasonably positive but we quickly discovered several things that would need changing. I don’t want this to be a long post as the plans themselves are to be found underneath so I’ll make a list.

1. The overall house was too small

2. There wasn’t really a laundry room on the ground floor, rather a sink space

3. The kids bedrooms needed to be bigger and the access looked problematic and potentially a bit of a waste of space.

4. There is no need for the kids bedrooms to have access to the wood deck. Better to turn that outside space into inside space.

5. Study too long and narrow to have reasonable desk space and bookshelves

6. Upstairs was rather cramped and no pantry area.

7. We had miscommunicated the tatami room and were in fact looking for something around five or six mats in size, enough to have dinner in. This was only 3 mats.

8. The roof terrace access would have been quite tricky (although they stressed this was a work in progress)

In summary, we evidently needed to increase our budget by quite a lot. We had expected this and were prepared to do so but it did bring us back down to earth a bit. We discussed all the likely amendments and it seemed that, by the end of the meeting, both sides had a much clearer picture of what was needed.

I think we had been a bit naïve up until this point to assume that the process would all be unicorns and rainbows since everything was going so smoothly. It was probably a good thing to be stopped in our tracks and to have to think quite fundamentally about the design and the scale of the project.

We concluded that the meeting had been a bit tricky, not perhaps what we had expected but ultimately a positive and fruitful one and, in the following days, the more we talked about it, the more we saw it for what it was. A starting point.

Anyway, here are the plans...

Downstairs on the left, upstairs on the right

A rough translation of the plan above

Side profile looking from North to South

4 profiles of the house