The specifications defined by your home’s floor plan, aid and inform its progress from inception to completion. These minute details on room size, layout, and traffic patterns are vital to turn your vision into a living, breathing, habitable space.
A floor plan plays such a fundamental role that the term itself is often used interchangeably throughout the home building process as both an aspiring ideal and a technical blueprint.
When a customer tells us they want a home geared more for hosting and entertaining guests, we know how this will translate into the exact measurements and style of floor plan. Conversely, if a customer favors a layout with more privacy and the flexibility to create more individualized rooms without sacrificing on traditional space, we know this takes more than just adding a few walls or breaking open areas into subdivided niches – it’s a completely different approach to a floorplan.
With over three decades in the custom home building business, at Schumacher Homes our team of New Home Consultants can do more than marry the emotive wishes of our customers with an inside-the-box custom home design. We turn the dreams of our customers into their dream home with a floor plan that not only meets their current needs but provides them with a blueprint for growing a family, aging in place, or starting a business from a home office.
If you’re embarking on a custom home journey, how can you bridge your lifestyle aspirations to your budget and other more practical considerations? We hope this list of floor plan dos and don’ts will help show you the way.
What’s in the value of a square foot? What you’re really asking is, how do I quantify the space needed to flourish? Your floor plan’s size should be at the top of your “do this” list. A floor plan that’s too small might curtail your grander hosting and entertaining ambitions. A floor plan with underutilized space still needs the same TLC and maintenance over time (e.g., that guest bathroom that only gets used during the holidays when company’s in town). And while yes, the bigger the space, the bigger the budget – a thoughtfully executed floor plan that maximizes potential can generate savings for future upgrades. There are some things you won’t be able to change later and that’s where our team can help; we don’t pursue a supersized approach to customization, we bring a lifestyle-first mentality to building a home that turns your specific needs into the precise measurements for living your best life from floor to ceiling. The floor plan size of a family of five with one more on the way looks very different than that of a smaller family with older children getting ready to leave the nest. Size matters, as does a little foresight.
Building any home requires a floor plan. Creating a forever home, demands floor planning. Remember when you thought your work from home situation would only be a couple of weeks? Two years later, that room where you temporarily set up shop probably takes more conference calls than your desk at work.
No one going into custom home building is expected to be clairvoyant. But there are factors to consider and questions you can ask that future-proof your home to fit you long term lifestyle needs.
Your life today will inevitably look very different tomorrow, that’s for certain. What’s not for certain is everything that’s outside of your control.
When buying an existing home, you can assess the structural integrity and wear and tear from the previous owner’s disclosures or from a home inspection. For a custom home build, pending the invention of an actual real live crystal ball, how can you anticipate what your home will have to endure in the next five, 10, or even 20 years?
Start by understanding the area where you plan to build. Whether it’s on unimproved land or within an existing neighborhood, our builders have deep expertise in the best way to position your home for the long run. Optimal lot positioning can allow your home to be built for protection against (or to embrace) certain environmental factors like solar exposure, elevation, and drainage.
If you’re planning on building on a busy street, your floor plan should include a layout with bedrooms away from traffic noise. Larger windows facing south can create natural lighting and warmth on a wintry day in colder climates. The opposite happens in a hotter region when the heat from that same size window drives up energy bills during summer.
Understanding the climate of where you choose to build should be of heavy consideration into things like window placement, roof style, and room positioning.
What’s a do’s and don’ts article without at least one double negative? Building a custom home is best attested to by those who’ve already gone through the experience. Just like buying an existing home, talk to neighbors and others in the area to understand the lay of the land and things you might not be able to get with only one or two visits to a site. Our Custom Building Home Owner Testimonials offer perspectives from customers all over the country and in very different stages of life – all who chose to build a custom home.
One bit of unsolicited advice you might receive when consulting current custom homeowners is on storage space. That’s why it’s a major “Do” on our list, because it often falls under the category of “don’t worry about it” for everyone else. There seems to be an infinite and inventive number of ways to supplement existing home storage with space saving how to’s and semi-annual decluttering rituals but that’s because creating actual storage space into a floorplan after its initial design is very difficult. Unlike the potential maintenance and cleaning that comes with excess living space, we don’t hear many customers tell us they regret having excess storage space.
Reputation. Experience. Expertise. These things matter when it comes to picking someone to build a home for your family. Having a process that’s clear and favors collaboration, open communication, and transparency, is what we believe separates us from others in our industry.
When you’re ready to talk, we’re ready to build you a custom home that captures your passion and unique character in a way that is lasting and timeless.
About Schumacher Homes
Schumacher Homes, based in Canton, Ohio, is America’s largest custom homebuilder, with operations in 22 locations in 11 states across the country. The National Housing Quality award winning company has built over 20,000 homes, customized to fit each family’s lifestyle, since its founding by Paul Schumacher in 1992. Schumacher Homes takes each customer’s inspiration and gives it a home. Each Schumacher Homes location includes a one-stop shopping design studio and model homes displaying the latest in architectural and product trends.