When my husband Jay and I started designing our house, we had only been together for maybe a year, in 2018, but it was an exciting dream we shared. We knew we wanted certain elements, and quickly came up with a sketch (this is of the ground floor only).
The Initial Sketch Ground Floor (2018)
Over the next years, we would occasionally think a bit about it, but it wasn’t until Covid hit, and Jay lost his job, that we decided to really go all-in about learning how to construct ecologically, and started an online course about it called Solution Era. (That really threw us for a loop: Jay got fully into high performance and energy efficiency, while I was still very into natural materials, which can be two very conflicting perspectives).
We tried to take what we were learning and apply it to the interior layout of the house. We consulted with friends who are architects, learned about public and private spaces, loud and quiet spaces, and eventually we put all the rooms we wanted on post it notes, with different color codes for those things, to try different configurations.
You should do this too, if you’re involved in designing your home! You want to make sure people won’t be traipsing through your private space to get to a more public one: a common one for example is having a bathroom attached to a bedroom, so people have to go through your bedroom to use that bathroom (At some point, every available bathroom in a house will probably be used by guests!) You also want to consider the sunlight: are you a morning person who wants an east-facing window in your bedroom?
For a while, we were working on a version of the house where we only have one floor, where there was a bedroom on the ground floor, then a version where we had a second floor, but no basement. We must have made at least a dozen different sketches with possibilities, and in the end, we settled on something we were quite proud of (and got an architect to finalize):
The Final Plans Ground Floor (2022)
And when we looked back at that original, first sketch of the ground floor, it was almost identical. Just goes to show… well, fill in whatever parable you want.
I think the main take away for me is that, even if the answer is right in front of you, you still have to go on the journey to find that answer. Test your hypothesis!
But maybe we could have just trusted our gut instincts, haha. Sometimes you have an intuitive understanding of something, with good reasons, but you just can’t immediately articulate those reasons.
-Pip