ᐅ Floor Plan Design for a Single-Family House, Solid Wood Construction, 140 sqm in Lower Saxony
Created on: 2 Jan 2023 15:30
-
-LotteS-
Hello dear house building forum!
Here are some details—based on our best knowledge and judgment—about our house construction project...
Development Plan/Restrictions
Plot size 576 sqm (approx. 6195 sq ft) - parcel 17/28 (see cadastral map)
Slope no – the plot has only a few centimeters (inches) of elevation difference
Floor area ratio (FAR) 0.3 = 172.8 sqm (1861 sq ft)
Plot ratio not defined
Building envelope, building line and boundary 24x24 meter (79x79 feet) plot = N-E-S-W 16x18x16x18 meter (52x59x52x59 feet) building envelope
Edge development no, exceptions possibly according to Lower Saxony Building Regulations
Required number of parking spaces not specified
Number of floors single storey
Roof shape gable/hip/half-hip with 35-50 degree pitch
Architectural style classic detached house
Ridge direction specified = ridge line running west-east
Max height limits ridge height 4.0 m (13 ft), eaves height 8.5 m (28 ft)
Additional rules no oil heating, 50% of the south-facing roof must have solar panels, no building allowed between house and street (e.g., no parking or similar in front yard)
The plot has been purchased and the utility infrastructure in the new development area is already completed (our plot is even located on a pre-asphalted road).
Homeowner Requirements
Style, roof shape, building type solid wooden house made of massive log beams inside, blown insulation, and exterior cladding
Basement, floors no basement – only ground floor + upper floor
Number of occupants, ages three, aged 36, 29, and five and a half
Space requirements on ground and upper floors standard single-family home with 3 bedrooms plus bathroom upstairs, open-plan living area downstairs, guest WC, and large utility/housekeeping room
Office: family use or home office? One room currently usable as office/guest room (backup for future child needs), currently neither of us have jobs with home office option
Open or closed layout living/dining/kitchen preferably open
Conservative or modern construction style conservative
Open kitchen, kitchen island open kitchen yes, kitchen island currently not planned
Number of dining seats daily use for 3, but dining nook should be sufficient for more people
Fireplace planned is a masonry stove
Music/stereo wall no
Balcony, roof terrace no
Garage, carport carport with workshop
Utility garden, greenhouse no
Other wishes/special features/daily routine, including reasons why some things are included or excluded
House Design
Who designed the plan: plan based on our principles, then optimized with the manufacturer’s in-house architect
What do you particularly like? Why? We really like the extended dining nook with the surrounding bench; overall, our ideas about room sizes have been well implemented – whether everything will really work as we imagine, we would like to ask here.
What do you dislike? Why? The chimney’s position might be bothersome in the children's room? Or is that negligible in daily life? We are still not satisfied with the kitchen and bathroom upstairs and are currently looking for a good furnishing/decorating solution.
Price estimate according to architect/planner: Since we are not working with a general contractor but will handle contracts ourselves after the shell is built and do a lot of work ourselves, we don’t have all numbers yet. The following trades are currently being costed.
Personal price limit for the house including fittings: 400,000 up to move-in ready, excluding everything outside the building itself, plot is paid
Preferred heating technology: heat pump with underfloor heating plus photovoltaics with possible storage
If you have to give up something, which details/extensions
- can you do without: We have tried to adapt our demands to the budget as much as possible – does anyone see further savings potential?
- can you not do without: As an absolute last resort, we would remove the dining nook and redesign the ground floor – also, the masonry stove is fixed for us (we just love this cozy atmosphere).
Why is the design the way it is now?
Standard plan from planner? The manufacturer does not offer standard houses; everything is individually designed
Which of your wishes were implemented by the architect? The current plan reflects our wishes quite well. Now we just need fine-tuning, and we hope for your assessments, ideas, and experiences.
A mix of many examples from various magazines... Of course, our inspirations come from many different sources (good and bad…) 😀
What makes it particularly good or bad in your opinion? It feels good to us so far – all our furniture fits, and the things that bother us in our current rented house have been eliminated in the design.
What is the most important/basic question about the layout, summarized in 130 characters?
- Does the layout work as it is, or are there specific arrangements that don’t work?
- Is the position and number of windows sufficient?
- Do the children's rooms upstairs need two roof windows or is one enough each?
- Have we missed or overlooked anything important?
- Can a U-shaped kitchen be sensibly planned in the existing space, or do we need to adjust walls downstairs first?
- Are the door positions appropriate regarding width, wall distance, and opening direction?
- Is the utility room (unfurnished room behind the laundry on the north/east side of the ground floor) dimensionally adequate?
- What knee wall height is recommended upstairs? Currently at 40 cm (16 in), we plan to raise it because otherwise, especially the upstairs bathroom will be problematic (though we don’t want a large bathroom, just “as big as necessary” – we would probably place the bathtub in the northeast corner of the room – would that fit?
- We’d like to add a laundry chute from the upstairs bathroom to the utility room – does anyone have a good idea for the best location?
One final note on our general concept:
We intend to buy the house from the manufacturer including insulation, cladding, and roof structure. Assembly will follow the “master carpenter assembly” principle (the company provides two experienced workers, plus 4-5 helpers from us – full warranty and savings of around 15,000-20,000 euros, about three to four weeks of hard work). The manufacturer’s “basic package” also includes windows and the front door, as they must be specially installed due to the house settling.
We plan to contract the foundation slab, roofing, and plumbing work separately. Electrical work (in consultation with the local master electrician), interior finishing (room doors, screed, underfloor heating, floor covering), and small tasks can be done by my partner (trained electrician, highly interested in almost everything, skilled and experienced with wood). I work professionally in an office of a building materials supplier, so I have access to good conditions, storage capacity, and established contacts in the industry. We also have great friends and a large family who are all enthusiastic about our project and willing to support us. We know this will require a lot of work, strain our time, nerves, and budget—but we want to give it a try.
We are now looking forward to suggestions, critical comments, and anything that can help us avoid as many mistakes as possible during the process.
Thank you very much in advance!
Here are some details—based on our best knowledge and judgment—about our house construction project...
Development Plan/Restrictions
Plot size 576 sqm (approx. 6195 sq ft) - parcel 17/28 (see cadastral map)
Slope no – the plot has only a few centimeters (inches) of elevation difference
Floor area ratio (FAR) 0.3 = 172.8 sqm (1861 sq ft)
Plot ratio not defined
Building envelope, building line and boundary 24x24 meter (79x79 feet) plot = N-E-S-W 16x18x16x18 meter (52x59x52x59 feet) building envelope
Edge development no, exceptions possibly according to Lower Saxony Building Regulations
Required number of parking spaces not specified
Number of floors single storey
Roof shape gable/hip/half-hip with 35-50 degree pitch
Architectural style classic detached house
Ridge direction specified = ridge line running west-east
Max height limits ridge height 4.0 m (13 ft), eaves height 8.5 m (28 ft)
Additional rules no oil heating, 50% of the south-facing roof must have solar panels, no building allowed between house and street (e.g., no parking or similar in front yard)
The plot has been purchased and the utility infrastructure in the new development area is already completed (our plot is even located on a pre-asphalted road).
Homeowner Requirements
Style, roof shape, building type solid wooden house made of massive log beams inside, blown insulation, and exterior cladding
Basement, floors no basement – only ground floor + upper floor
Number of occupants, ages three, aged 36, 29, and five and a half
Space requirements on ground and upper floors standard single-family home with 3 bedrooms plus bathroom upstairs, open-plan living area downstairs, guest WC, and large utility/housekeeping room
Office: family use or home office? One room currently usable as office/guest room (backup for future child needs), currently neither of us have jobs with home office option
Open or closed layout living/dining/kitchen preferably open
Conservative or modern construction style conservative
Open kitchen, kitchen island open kitchen yes, kitchen island currently not planned
Number of dining seats daily use for 3, but dining nook should be sufficient for more people
Fireplace planned is a masonry stove
Music/stereo wall no
Balcony, roof terrace no
Garage, carport carport with workshop
Utility garden, greenhouse no
Other wishes/special features/daily routine, including reasons why some things are included or excluded
House Design
Who designed the plan: plan based on our principles, then optimized with the manufacturer’s in-house architect
What do you particularly like? Why? We really like the extended dining nook with the surrounding bench; overall, our ideas about room sizes have been well implemented – whether everything will really work as we imagine, we would like to ask here.
What do you dislike? Why? The chimney’s position might be bothersome in the children's room? Or is that negligible in daily life? We are still not satisfied with the kitchen and bathroom upstairs and are currently looking for a good furnishing/decorating solution.
Price estimate according to architect/planner: Since we are not working with a general contractor but will handle contracts ourselves after the shell is built and do a lot of work ourselves, we don’t have all numbers yet. The following trades are currently being costed.
Personal price limit for the house including fittings: 400,000 up to move-in ready, excluding everything outside the building itself, plot is paid
Preferred heating technology: heat pump with underfloor heating plus photovoltaics with possible storage
If you have to give up something, which details/extensions
- can you do without: We have tried to adapt our demands to the budget as much as possible – does anyone see further savings potential?
- can you not do without: As an absolute last resort, we would remove the dining nook and redesign the ground floor – also, the masonry stove is fixed for us (we just love this cozy atmosphere).
Why is the design the way it is now?
Standard plan from planner? The manufacturer does not offer standard houses; everything is individually designed
Which of your wishes were implemented by the architect? The current plan reflects our wishes quite well. Now we just need fine-tuning, and we hope for your assessments, ideas, and experiences.
A mix of many examples from various magazines... Of course, our inspirations come from many different sources (good and bad…) 😀
What makes it particularly good or bad in your opinion? It feels good to us so far – all our furniture fits, and the things that bother us in our current rented house have been eliminated in the design.
What is the most important/basic question about the layout, summarized in 130 characters?
- Does the layout work as it is, or are there specific arrangements that don’t work?
- Is the position and number of windows sufficient?
- Do the children's rooms upstairs need two roof windows or is one enough each?
- Have we missed or overlooked anything important?
- Can a U-shaped kitchen be sensibly planned in the existing space, or do we need to adjust walls downstairs first?
- Are the door positions appropriate regarding width, wall distance, and opening direction?
- Is the utility room (unfurnished room behind the laundry on the north/east side of the ground floor) dimensionally adequate?
- What knee wall height is recommended upstairs? Currently at 40 cm (16 in), we plan to raise it because otherwise, especially the upstairs bathroom will be problematic (though we don’t want a large bathroom, just “as big as necessary” – we would probably place the bathtub in the northeast corner of the room – would that fit?
- We’d like to add a laundry chute from the upstairs bathroom to the utility room – does anyone have a good idea for the best location?
One final note on our general concept:
We intend to buy the house from the manufacturer including insulation, cladding, and roof structure. Assembly will follow the “master carpenter assembly” principle (the company provides two experienced workers, plus 4-5 helpers from us – full warranty and savings of around 15,000-20,000 euros, about three to four weeks of hard work). The manufacturer’s “basic package” also includes windows and the front door, as they must be specially installed due to the house settling.
We plan to contract the foundation slab, roofing, and plumbing work separately. Electrical work (in consultation with the local master electrician), interior finishing (room doors, screed, underfloor heating, floor covering), and small tasks can be done by my partner (trained electrician, highly interested in almost everything, skilled and experienced with wood). I work professionally in an office of a building materials supplier, so I have access to good conditions, storage capacity, and established contacts in the industry. We also have great friends and a large family who are all enthusiastic about our project and willing to support us. We know this will require a lot of work, strain our time, nerves, and budget—but we want to give it a try.
We are now looking forward to suggestions, critical comments, and anything that can help us avoid as many mistakes as possible during the process.
Thank you very much in advance!
I consider the door to the utility room unnecessary—at least as a second entrance. A patio door to take wet laundry outside would be fine, though. Otherwise, these secondary entry doors tend to be expensive and still not very well secured.
I would much rather swap the guest toilet and the front door, so the path with grocery bags isn’t too long. This also saves the winding approach to the main entrance.
By the way, I would position the house parallel to the upper plot boundary and definitely avoid placing the carport crookedly next to it. Anything other than a 90° roof becomes unnecessarily expensive.
I would much rather swap the guest toilet and the front door, so the path with grocery bags isn’t too long. This also saves the winding approach to the main entrance.
By the way, I would position the house parallel to the upper plot boundary and definitely avoid placing the carport crookedly next to it. Anything other than a 90° roof becomes unnecessarily expensive.
K a t j a schrieb:
Huh? How about this: -LotteS- schrieb:
If we sign the contract, there will still be a long appointment with a real architect for fine-tuning. He works in the same office as the energy consultant and the structural engineer – we hope to benefit from some synergy effects there. The architectural firm has been collaborating with the manufacturer for a while and knows the construction method well. The point is apparently that the importer’s licensed architect is a locally established architect. Sharing an office with colleagues from related professions is no reason to hope they’ll unofficially contribute without extra charge during coffee breaks. Even if that architect has diligently attended all system training sessions, that doesn’t improve the system itself, because:
K a t j a schrieb:
Unfortunately, I don’t know much about log construction. … in my opinion, neither does the manufacturer know much more. Rather, they seem to specialize in “something with wood, in a look similar to how log houses appeared before the energy saving regulations (but unfortunately with a roof like a dollhouse).” So basically more marketing than timber construction. However, this is not my main reason against this manufacturer choice – see my last comment #99.
I recommend taking off the rose-colored marketing glasses and the “thinking error” hat, and approaching this rationally like cost-conscious self-builders who want to carry out part of the work themselves and contract parts separately:
1. Choose a suitable kit house catalog model from Hebel or Ytong;
2. Ask a general contractor (GC) who sources materials from the manufacturer in question for a price on the standard “weather-tight shell” version of that model, building non-load-bearing interior walls yourself;
3. Have finishing trades tendered by the architect;
4. Hire a regular site-monitoring building surveyor (finding one familiar with unusual construction methods is a challenge in itself).
The self-assessment of the builders does not match this solution approach at all.
https://www.instagram.com/11antgmxde/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/bauen-jetzt/
11ant schrieb:
1. choose a suitable kit home model from Hebel or Ytong;
I don’t quite understand what you mean. The original poster wants a log cabin. Why are you trying to convince them to go with Ytong now?
W
WilderSueden1 May 2023 10:39Probably because planning a log house is quite demanding and requires a professional as the coordinator. Not the homeowner, who wants a custom log house but cannot afford an architect. A production house is already planned and built many times, so there are fewer pitfalls.
ypg schrieb:
For daily tasks like cleaning, mopping, laundry, etc., you go to the utility room about 10 times a day, so it should be centrally located, accessible from the hallway. Yes, definitely—thanks for pointing that out. Eventually, you really start to overlook these details 😀 We plan to install a door from the hallway into the utility room at that spot—whether this will be an additional door or instead of the utility room/kitchen door is still under discussion. I would only remove the secondary entrance door if, as suggested, we swap the main entrance and guest toilet—but I can’t judge yet if that fits spatially. At least this would allow us to remove the second wall by the stairs, making the whole area much more open and less narrow. I’ll try to sketch this out tonight 🙂
ypg schrieb:
My concern is the small utility room (HAR?) at the top right of the plan: it might be too small for the technical equipment or for the installers. My partner has already measured all the technical equipment and played Tetris with it—he thinks it fits as is. We’ll take another close look once the technical plans are finalized to the millimeter for wall preparations—then it’s always easy to shift a wall slightly if needed. Only technical equipment will go in there, and we don’t want the door to open into the room but rather into the hallway, so it should only be accessed rarely 🙂
K a t j a schrieb:
By the way, I would align the house parallel to the upper boundary of the plot and definitely avoid placing the carport so skewed next to it. Anything with a roof that isn’t a 90° angle becomes unnecessarily expensive. The ridge orientation is fixed in the development plan—and unfortunately not only approximately but precisely along the west-east axis, so that the entire south-facing roof area faces directly south. We can’t orient ourselves according to the plot boundary or the street. The carport will be built independently and custom-made, and we had planned a green flat roof for it. Whether, how, and when that happens depends on how much we exceed our budget.
WilderSueden schrieb:
Probably because a log cabin house is quite demanding to plan and requires a professional as coordinator. Not the owner, who wants a custom log cabin but can’t afford an architect. A standard house design is already planned and has been built many times, so there are fewer pitfalls.It’s less about "being able to afford an architect" and more that we don’t want a timber frame panel construction with white plaster and drywall partitions. The alternative is a solid masonry general contractor who does everything, and we can barely do or are allowed to do anything ourselves (which is often discouraged here), and who then makes good money from us. We cannot contribute our craftsmanship skills or my job in the building materials trade, and in the end, we wouldn’t use our only advantages—that would be foolish. Hiring an architect for a solid masonry house exposes us to price fluctuation risks we cannot absorb. I can’t suddenly pay $400,000 instead of $500,000 just for the house, or we won’t be able to build at all. We simply have no expertise in masonry, plastering, installing windows, brickwork, etc. The big advantage for us with a log cabin is that we have a fixed assembly date, so coordinating the trades doing the assembly is easier. We can do almost everything else ourselves, including the technical installations, so we don’t need someone to plan everything for months.
So, completely aside from the fact that we expressly want this log cabin house 🙂
Similar topics