A woodland house

I have had a staircase going from a living room and I would not repeat it.  Noise / smells etc.  An en-suite upstairs may be good.  I can't see fridge / freezer / oven / microwave / dishwasher in the kitchen and there is not much storage there.

 

Woodburners can quickly overheat a well insulated space.

Definitely separate the stairs from the living room. It will only shrink the living room actual space by a tiny amount anyway.

 

Then you can do a we have done, make the wall each side of the stairs a supporting wall.  Joists then span end to end with intermediate support from the two stairwell walls.  The supporting walls can then continue up to the ridge and you can support a ridge beam end to end and create a vaulted warm roof as we have. That means your loft space is warm and you can choose to have high ceilings or a conventional loft space. or even one bedroom having a mezanine floor above the adjacent room as we have done.

 

In fact with those alterations that layout is not a million miles from what we have.  If you are ever passing up this way (near Alness) feel free to drop in and see out part built house.

@Mr Punter yep the woodburner needs consideration, it will most likely allow a very low kw input into the room and a much higher kw into water.  Today's job is to look at whether everything will fit in.  Utility room and larder will also be used for white goods.  The overall space is way bigger than our current, very spacious flat and so I'm not overly concerned at the moment.  As for en-suite's, I'd imagine it might make it more attractive from a resale point of view but personally I think they're a bit of a waste of space.

 

@ProDave  - thanks for the tip regarding the stairs.  It would be grand to have a bit more flexibility with what happens in the loft space so we'll think about that.  Thanks also for the offer of having a nosey, we may well take you up on that.

Is the door/porch the main entrance for visitors? Seems a bit odd to me to send them through the utility room to get to the living room? The utility room also has a lot of doors opening into it taking up space?

 

Hope it's ok but I played around with your drawing a bit to see what it would look like with...

 

Larder and porch about a meter to the left. This reduces the kitchen work surface a bit but allows a door from the Porch to open into the Kitchen rather than utility room.

Made WC made slightly wider to allow door to open into WC instead of utility room. 

 

That will fail Scottish building regs on accessability, you can't have the door swinging over the activity space in front of the pan.

 

You could do what we are doing, the utility room and WC are all one room. Not to everyones taste to have Washing machine, tumble dryer, sink unit then WC in a line, but building control are fine with it.

 

Don't also forget you have to demonstrate you have space to fit a downstairs shower. You can probably do that by saying you will sacrifice the wardrobe in the downstairs bedroom.

15 minutes ago, ProDave said:

That will fail Scottish building regs on accessability, you can't have the door swinging over the activity space in front of the pan.

 

You could do what we are doing, the utility room and WC are all one room. 

 

Would they allow a halfway house? So leave the WC door off @Temp‘s design making it a single room but with the WC separated by a bit of wall. Then once signed off you could stick a door on afterwards if wanted? 

 

 

1 minute ago, newhome said:

 

Would they allow a halfway house? So leave the WC door off @Temp‘s design making it a single room but with the WC separated by a bit of wall. Then once signed off you could stick a door on afterwards if wanted? 

 

 

I am sure that would be okay. We all have an "after sign off" list

 I forgot you need to allow for a wheelchair in there as well. I suppose a sliding pocket door might be an option but personally I'm not a fan of those even though we have one in our house.

Thanks all - this is still the bit we're thinking/changing about.  Currently thinking of moving the W.C. into the lean to, accessed from the utility room to allow a bit more light into the utility room.  As for the entry into the utility room, I'm wondering about leaving it for now, but making sure there's space for a wee stud wall in the future to separate the entry from utility . The cupboard in the study is the downstairs shower, although it will only have the plumbing for one, rather than being an actual shower.

 

@Temp No bother with playing around with the drawing - for me one of the benefits of this site is getting a second, third,fourth... opinion.  I had thought of a sliding door, but I have little experience of them internally.  Any particular reason for not liking it?

Two main issues with sliding doors..

 

Sliding doors are slow. They take longer and more effort to open and shut behind you without banging.

 

They can reduce the width of the opening.. They have a "stop" which prevents the door going too far into the pocket and prevents you jamming your  hand between the door handle and the frame as it opens. So you have to factor this in when working out how wide a door you need to give the regulation opening width.

 

IMO the bedroom door is hinges on the wrong edge ... you lose an extra 1m of space on the top wall to walk through it.

Edited April 30, 2018 by Ferdinand

nice plan  would be a nice project to use panelized walls

On 30 April 2018 at 14:07, Temp said:

Two main issues with sliding doors..

 

Sliding doors are slow. They take longer and more effort to open and shut behind you without banging.

 

They can reduce the width of the opening.. They have a "stop" which prevents the door going too far into the pocket and prevents you jamming your  hand between the door handle and the frame as it opens. So you have to factor this in when working out how wide a door you need to give the regulation opening width.

 

I have seen sliding pocket doors with recessed flush handles that slide right into the pocket, then a little fold out finger pull on the edge to retreive the fully hidden pocket door.

Just make sure your finger isn't in the recessed handle as the door goes into the pocket.