Moving Advice: Make Sure Your Floor Plan is Right For Your New Home

Whether you are dealing with small house plans for a starter house or a vacation home, or plans for the huge mansion of your dreams, you need to work hand-in-hand with your architecture and design team to make sure you are getting the layout that is right for you and your family. Even if you are considering purchasing and moving into a home that has already been built, or a home in a large development where you have little control over the floor plans, it is important to make sure the floor plans of any house you are considering are right for you.

When you look at the plans for your new home, the most important consideration is how the proposed or available layout matches your lifestyle. A retired couple with an empty nest and a young couple with one child on the way and two more planned have very different needs when it comes to housing. The retired couple may well want to run a business out of their home to provide extra income and keep themselves sharp and productive. A home suitable for such a couple may well feature one large bedroom for sleeping, a smaller guest bedroom or two for visiting children, and a very large room that they can use for their office and business storage space. It could also feature a large dining room and living room if the couple enjoys constant visits from children and grandchildren, or a smaller one if the couple's family prefers to have its reunions elsewhere.

Certainly, the same layout would not suit a younger couple. The bedroom layout might be the same, but the two smaller bedrooms, or perhaps three, would be in constant use once the children have reached a certain age. A home office would not be as important to a younger couple, since chances are that both its members pursue careers that keep them out of the house during the day and wanting to spend time with each other and with their children as they grow. The space taken up by that hypothetical home office would best be split into a large playroom and a small storage room. That storage room would serve the family for years, as a repository for toys, schoolbooks and hobby supplies as the children grow. The playroom could also evolve into a game and computer room, and it should be insulated from sound in case any of the children decide to take up musical or otherwise raucous hobbies during their teenage years.

Regardless of particular needs, some other aspects of architectural planning with which buyers should especially concern themselves include storage space, windows, and bathrooms. A home can never have enough storage space, and nothing compares to the natural light streaming through large windows on a beautiful, sunny spring day. Bathrooms, even the most fashionably designed ones, are not meant to be near the kitchen, and the traditional first-floor laundry room may be inefficient for a young mother in a home where everyone sleeps and changes clothing upstairs.

Modern house plans allow for a great deal of flexibility and variety. Make sure your home, whether it is your first home or the home in which you plan to live your golden years, is laid out as you want it and as best fits your lifestyle.