Ground Floor House Design Tags

Social Kitchen, There's room for three people to sit at the built-in table in plan 48-685, a great space-saving feature that means you don't have to devote more space to a dining room. A fireplace adds a cozy focal point in the living room, which steps out to the patio...

But now merchant builders are using shiplap siding in family rooms, stucco to frame showers in Mediterranean designs, and concrete block to form the interior walls of contemporary homes. Plan 888-3 uses board and batten siding on the walls of the second living room to reinforce an indoor-outdoor feeling. In...

When touring a model home – take away the upgrades in your mind: If you’re shopping around for homes one of the best ways to experience the floor plan of a home before you buy it is to walk through the developer’s model homes before hand. One of the easiest...

Inevitably you'll spend time re-doing /changing certain aspects of the home to meet state standards. Or you might need to make changes to suit the site all of which is more incentive to reduce the time required to develop a final plan. Dean concludes: "Making small changes to an already-designed...

Planning for your home can be very exciting. You could be buying new furniture but you might want to consider the color of the carpets or the floors when you are choosing your pieces. A blue couch on a brown carpet does not exactly match. When planning for your home...

Floor Plans for the Next Chapters. The Boomers are retiring. With over 80 million members, the Baby Boom generation will be looking for a different kind of house that suits their retirement. These houses will likely be in warmer locales, will be less square footage and in communities geared for...

Americans believed that technological advances helped win the Second World War and launch was was to become known as the Space Age. Innovative designs such as the all electric home were supposed to make housework a thing of the past. Realizing the dream of space travel was on the horizon...

Imagine your entertaining spaces fully occupied when deciding on a floor plan: For most homeowners dreaming of their ideal floor plan, they consider how nice it will be to have a few people over for drinks on the patio. The thought of entertaining the in-laws for a month each summer,...

Circulation is something else to think about. As Dan Gregory points out in a post called Watch That Layout! the best house plans provide two ways in and out of the living room, dining room, and kitchen -- as illustrated here with Plan 929-1 by Donald Gardner. See how you...

Don’t assume the sizes of rooms on a floor plan are adequate: How many times have you read the dimensions of a room on a floor plan and then realized your existing furniture doesn’t fit like you thought into the finished room? Measure your existing furniture before deciding on final...