A plot plan
I know what you’re thinking. “Letti, why are you still on this?” or at least “Why are you designing an arrangement for a plot of land when you haven’t even bought one?” and you would certainly have a point.
But apparently I’ve gone a bit mad, so I’ve gone and done it anyway.
The house would look best on a corner plot, or at least up one side of whatever plot it is on. There are only three windows on the right side of the house, the majority of action is on the left. There maybe wouldn’t need to be so much room on the right of the house. The left side only has so much room because there are legal requirements for on-plot parking spaces now, although they confuse me. We’d have a maximum of 2 cars until our kid was a teenager anyway, and one of them would be Will’s mum’s if she lived with us.
Even though this plan shows the house from above, I left the front door in as a marker, and also the downstairs WC window to show me where the skylight over the stairs above it would go.
This is the kind of roof we are going for, but the first floor walls would come out just as far as the ground floor ones:
Hopefully somewhere our there is an approx 15 x 21 metre plot that is not going to cost the bulk of our budget. I’ve seen smaller houses on much bigger gardens. I don’t really care about where the plot is, although we will presumably want it to be within Hampshire for personal and career reasons. Between Andover and Soton should be perfect for seeing all our important people. But I don’t care if the plot is an infill on an existing street, a disused industrial thing that currently has loads of junk on it, etc. I just want to build our house and be content in our nest for the rest of our lives.
If we end up with a ridiculous amount of money to spare, like I’ve said before, I wouldn’t change the house but I might want to do more with the land. E.g. a small swimming pool for physiotherapy in an outbuilding, a garden office for the charity so that people could actually come to us, maybe even room to keep a dang horse at home.
One day I might do a master post of our entire house idea in one place instead of split up into all these different blog posts. I don’t feel like it right now though.
This plot idea should be 315 m2, although on self-build sites I’m finding that they expect a whole 400 metres will be needed for a 4 bedroom house, even though I’ve fit a 4-5 bed one here (5th bedroom now created by an accordion wall when needed instead of being there all the time). I know I’ve tried to keep the house small (but spacious) and not make a McMansion of it, but I’m slightly worried that nobody else seems to think you can fit so many rooms on a house of this size. Anyway.