Mod House Design – Canning NS.6

Lets head upstairs for a look at the upper level floor plan.

An excellent design technique for building small is to create rooms which serve more than one purpose. This ties in directly with being very honest with yourself about how you really live.

For instance, do you seldom have overnight guests?  Then perhaps a guest bedroom can serve another purpose on those 351 or so days when you have no sleep-over company. In our plan, Michael’s music studio/office, designed with 14 feet of work surface, a place for his piano, plenty of storage and great light, will serve as our guest bedroom.  This room will also make an excellent second bedroom for future owners without need of modification.  There is a full-sized closet, room for a queen sized bed and lots of storage.

Upper floor landings and halls are great spaces to use for other activities.  I find them to be nostalgic places.  As a child, it was the perfect location for playing with Lego or curling up with Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever.  It was an un-room and, there, I felt connected to all household activity, both up and downstairs.  In our new home, our upper landing will be my art and design studio.  There’ll be great north light, a long work table (#3 on the plan) and storage for my art supplies and roll-out easel (#4). There’s additional storage in the adjacent room with built-in drawers for large paper and canvases.
If laundry is not one of your passions, perhaps a home without a designated laundry room will suit just fine.   Many feel this way and washers and dryers in bathrooms are quite common, so that is where ours shall be.

As I wrote in an earlier post, some concessions must be made so I’ve had to let go my vision of a large, clean minimal walk-through closet leading to a spacious en suite bath.

Spacious en suite bath:

Large, clean minimal walk-through closet:

Reality check:
When we consider how we really live, what we need is clever storage that makes our belongings easily accessible.  We opted for regular closets so we could gain more floor space in our bedroom and large windows with lots of built-in drawers beneath.

Next up is the budget.  Last week, Builder Nick and Architect Vincent sat down together to discuss the plans and the budget.  We look forward to /dread seeing what the numbers will look like.   We may be in for another reality check.