The Plans

One of my favorite things of this whole process so far has been putting together plans. It's a lot of fun trying to imagine what your perfect house will look like and then trying to get that picture in your head onto paper has been an exciting challenge. I've spent a lot of time trying to think of every detail and determining what the be floor plan is for our new home. Fortunately for us, we have a floor layout in our current home that we really like a lot. So basically I've taken our current plan as a template and just expanded it to provide for future growth. In all reality the house we live in how is just the right size for us, but we want to be ready when do start needing the extra room. For that reason a lot of our next home will be unfinished when we first move in with the capability to grow as we need it. Here you can see one of the first drafts I came up with when putting the plans together.

There is one quick lesson I can provide for anyone thinking about putting together their own plans. It is one that I've learned the hard way: make sure you accurately read the size of the your lot before you begin. I made the mistake of misreading my plot map. And worse than that, I didn't realize my mistake until I had gotten together a set of plans that both Becca and I were very excited about. As a result of my mistake ,along with some funny rules Nixa has when it comes to offsets, my house plans were wider than the lot itself. I ended up having to move a bunch of things around to make the house "skinnier" but I think I've just about got things back to where we like it. Once we get our final draft complete I'll post again with the end result. Next week we meet with our builder to start the work of getting the plans finalized and within a price range we can live with. I hope it all goes well.