Help Me Design My House!

[J Scott]

I've had conflicting thoughts about starting this topic, but figured that my real estate life is pretty much an open book anyway, so here goes...

My wife and I are in the process of designing our new house that we'll be building in Maryland, and we're looking for feedback on the design! We may not listen to all of it, but with all the smart people here on BP, we'd very much love to get some thoughts and ideas.

As background, we've already purchased the lot and are fairly constrained on what we can build, both from a setback standpoint and due to a rule in Maryland where if you disturb more than 5000 square feet of land, you have to go through a long and expensive process for approvals. So, we're essentially limited to a main living space (including garage) of 36' deep and a width of about 65'. This keeps us within the setbacks and mostly overlapping the structure we're tearing down (limiting the disturbance).

A few more thoughts on this whole thread:

- My wife put together all these drawings -- she's not an architect, engineer or drafts-person, so there may be issues with the design that aren't obvious to us...that's the type of feedback we're looking for!

- We're not looking for anyone to completely rework this. We know what's important to us in terms of basic floorplan (open, big kitchen, large master suite, flexible configuration in terms of rooms, etc). So, while I'm sure many will suggest our design is horrible, keep in mind that it's based on what we like.

- We're looking to keep the entire above-grade living area at about 2600-2700 square feet (with at least a small basement). That will give us the room we need, hopefully without exceeding our budget of about $300K.

- Resale is important to us, but secondary to having a house we love.

Other than that, we're open to any thoughts/suggestions/ideas, etc...

To download the PDF of the drawings (which can be enlarged for detail), click here:

PDF of Initial House Design

And here are images of the PDF for those who don't want to download it: