Okay, so I’m done messing around with the second floor footprint on that houseplan I posted earlier today.
Here’s the original second floor:
And here was the first change I did on it, extending the master bedroom to completely cover over the 2-story great room to make the great room single story:
And lastly, here’s the one I did tonight that incorporates Denis’ idea of having a catwalk on the upper level of the great room and leaving it somewhat open. The master bedroom still goes over the great room a bit, but keeps a portion open which actually is a good shape for creating a “funnel” type of situation when it comes to air flow. This change also changed the back wall of the master bedroom and made it more square, which means the first floor footprint would have to change slightly to make that fit. But I don’t think that would be too hard to do.
And I just realized that if we WERE to do a catwalk in the 2-story greatroom for bookshelves, it’s possible that we can remove some of the shelving from the study area and make that more like a play area – maybe set up the Wii there and have that be an open “hangout” place for the kids instead of a study area.
Thoughts so far?
I love the catwalk. That would be a very cool unique feature and would still leave plenty of space for the master bedroom.
Mikes last blog post..Starting A Little Business
Mike, I agree! As much as I hate 2-story great rooms, I think it’s a great idea and even if we don’t use this floorplan, I think we’ve pretty much decided that whatever plan we do end up with will include a catwalk if the great room is two stories. Since one of my dreams is to have a library for all my books, this is a great dramatic way to do that and not have tnem hidden away in a room somewhere.
That part that says “Open To Below” just outside of the study, you should connect that to the walkway that way people could get to the walkway without actually walking through your room.
We converted the family room (the one at the front of the house with the fancy furniture that nobody ever uses) into a library with a bunch of built in bookcases and love it.
Mikes last blog post..Starting A Little Business
I agree on the connect from the study rather than the bedroom. Denis and I realized that once I printed it out and we looked at it more carefully. We’d take out the access from our room altogether.
And we hardly ever use our living room either (only once a year, really, for a big Christmas party we throw), and I considered turning it into a library. And for a while when discussing building a house we considered doing the same thing, but this catwalk idea is INFINITELY more fun and dramatic!