My wife and I took almost 6 months to find the right house plan for us. During that time, we weren’t looking 24/7, but we would look in the house plans they put in the Sunday paper, go to open houses and spend time each week looking at websites that list house plans. Some of the websites are quite informative, and you can get some good ideas of what you want and don’t want by looking at them and going to open houses on the weekends.

After about three months of looking, we decided that we needed around 3000 square feet, the kids needed real bedrooms, not the 11′x12′ crap they put in houses nowadays, and we wanted a bonus room by the kid’s room so we wouldn’t have to listen to them yelling and screaming all the time. I’ll tell you right now, there aren’t any houses that have bedrooms bigger than 12′x13′, that aren’t master suites, and that sucks.

What we ended up having to do was find a design we liked that was about 2200′, then make the areas we wanted bigger, bigger. The house plan that we settled on had a separate office and formal dining room, with the great room, breakfast nook and kitchen all in the same area. The kid’s bedrooms were 11′x12′ with a jack and jill bathroom between them, the laundry room was tiny and the master was OK sized.

What we ended up with after messing with the plans for about a month was that we left the separate office as the office, turned the formal dinning room into a library and raised all the main floor ceilings to 12′, including the great room/kitchen/breakfast nook area. The kid’s rooms were added on to to make them 11′x16′ with the jack and jill bathroom. We put a 25′x12′ bonus room in over the garage, and added a 12′x12′ room at the back of the garage for all the mechanicals. In the master bedroom, we took out the master tub and put in a 4′x6′ tile shower with a seat and added a couple of showerheads. We then took out one of the two walk in closets, and with the room saved by getting rid of the stupid garden tub, we ended up with a master bedroom that is 16′x19′ with an additional 7′x8′ sitting room off of it…. Can you say cool?

We then took all of our scribbled on papers down to Earl, who has an office above Land Title in Walla Walla, and he turned them into 8 sets of plans for around $700.00. While the whole thing was a huge pain in the ass, I’m pretty sure that this house is going to be a kick in the pants to live in, and is just what we need for the way we live.

I’ll be posting more really fast over the next few days, because I have almost a month’s worth of posts sitting here waiting to be uploaded.

Building My Own House…. Yahoo!

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