latest floorplans for the new house

It's floorplans galore at the moment. Hot on the heels of *finally* getting the finished plans for the cottage, after nearly a year's hiatus we now have revised plans for the dream house being built next door.

Here's roughly how it all fits together, with the cottage and dream house - along hopefully with a shed for Dave - helping to create an almost fully enclosed "secret garden" area. We're doing up the cottage first to live in before starting on the dream house:




Now focusing on the dream house...

Here's the ground floor:



The Study will double as a Dining Room for big occasions like Christmas.

The Study/Reading room wing is now bigger and more clearly separated into rooms. We did this partly to get extra wall space for bookshelves, and partly to make it easier to convert to a bedroom, if God forbid we ever had to sell or found ourselves incapacitated and unable to sleep upstairs. I'm still not 100% certain on the placement of the doorway between the study and reading room though.


Here's the second floor:



The dressing room is much bigger - it's now a proper room rather than a large walk in closet. It's also had the positive side effect of making the bathroom bigger too. :-)

In case you're wondering why only one bathroom and not ensuites... This was a deliberate choice. Should we ever have to sell, the configuration is such it would be easy to add/convert to ensuites. But, for us we didn't see the point in sacrificing space to multiple bathrooms that we'd never use.

The other major change is the addition of the front upstairs terrace that Pete suggested, accessible by climbing out the window. I want to make the windows with big sills so you can prop a cushion on them and sit half in the room, half out.

And of course, the upstairs storey of the reading room.


Finally, here's the various profile views:

North: looking down the hill towards the dam and orchard:



West: this is the view you'll see as you get to the end of the driveway, thus arguably this could be considered the "front". I love the way the profile looks now with the tower in.



South: this is the view from standing midway in the 'secret garden'. It's not complete because it doesn't have the tower shown, but you can imagine the shape. I love how the bath will be in the upstairs bay overlooking this.



East: there are two versions of this, first what you'd see from the outside:



and second, a kind of cross section view of it: