My wife and I recently purchased a lot to build our house on.  Since it is a flat piece of dirt right now, something will need to go on it.  You see, our current house is a nice enough home.  We have decided that while staying here is doable, we want and can afford something better.

So I am nearly done with the design work on the home we want.  It has been a lot of fun, but also a lot of work.  With all the questions about how big to make everything, how to relate the rooms, traffic patterns, aesthetics, maintenance, even sound transmission this has been a multi-revision project.

The hardest question up front, and one I had wrong to start, was how much should the house have?  I don’t mean how big the budget, the size of the master suite, or anything like that.  I am talking about how many rooms and what they should be for.

My initial vision was for a true McMansion.  5 bedrooms, 5 bath, over 6000+ square feet, large garage plus workshop.  Pretty much everything I wanted maximized.  Essentially, it was a home of dreams with a lot more than we will need or want to take care of.  The design has been significantly scaled back now, although it is still a significantly larger home than we have now.

The difference, is that what is left is what we will use.  6 rooms were completely eliminated from the design.  The rest were rearranged and resized.  Now, each room has a specific function or two based on what we do today as a family and what we expect our family to be like in a few years.

I think the process was best summed up by our discussion about having any type of formal room.  Yes, a sitting room and formal dining room certainly look good in the magazines.  Yes, they used to be important rooms for social events and different activities.  In the end, it is a remnant of a bygone day for us.  We would not use a formal room more than once or twice a year.  The rest of the time it would be a waste of space, a waste of energy, and an increase upkeep that we do not need.

Our choice was to build a house to live in, not one to show off.  Now that the design has been wrapped up, it is time to begin turning the plans into blueprints and finding a builder and architect who can take on the challenge of turning our vision into reality.

I expect this to be an interesting time, since we have quite a number of energy efficient and comfort living changes we want to see built into this home that are uncommon in this area.  Things like hydronic whole-home radiant heat, SIP construction, possibly a CIF basement, and mini-duct air conditioning. Our goal is to have our bigger home cost less in utilities than our current home.  Green living helping us keep green in our pocket.