Our Floor Plan

For a while now I have been dreaming of building a house. As an interior designer and someone who drafts house plans I see a lot of houses and floor plans. Over the past year or so I had been putting together a list in my mind of the things I would include in my house if we were ever to build one. I knew I wanted a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom ranch style home with an unfinished basement, and I wanted to stay around 1600 square feet. Some of the more specific things I wanted was I didn't want the master bedroom on the opposite side of the house as the kid's bedrooms. Someday, when my kids are older, that might be nice, but with my babies I don't want to have to walk across the house 3 times a night. Another specific thing I wanted was a nice master bathroom with a separate shower, tub, and a separate toilet. I think living in a house for 5 years with one tiny bathroom made me a little greedy for a nice master bathroom. :) So with all those things in mind I started looking online at floor plans. My favorite floor plan was from Eplans. It was this almost 1600 sq.ft beauty.

 

 

So I took that floor plan and started drafting it up. I changed a few things though. I took out the formal dining area and added stairs to the basement and a pocket office off of the family room. I also changed the kitchen and laundry room layout a little.

 

After that the plan sort of just sat for a while until we sold our house and knew we were ready to build! Then, we started to make more changes. My husband changed jobs so we needed an actual office for him to work from. So we moved some more stuff around and ended up with this.

Not much of a change, just the office and stairs moved a little. After we had that we thought about it for a while and decided we didn't like how much the garage stuck out in front of the house so much, so we moved it to the side of the house. We also decided for resale value we wanted a third car garage. So I rearranged a few things again and after a month of changes we ended up with the final product!!

This is the front elevation.

The back elevation. We have a walk-out basement.

SO, I guess my point of all this is sometimes finding the perfect floor plan involves a long process. Our builder, Guardian Homes in Idaho Falls, builds custom homes. They can start with any floor plan you find, and their in-house draftsman can make any and all the changes you want. It's really a great way to go!
And here is where our house is being built.

I can't wait!

A New Look

You might have noticed, but I'm slowly updating the look of my blog. Now that I am going to get back into blogging, I thought a change would be nice. I have A LOT to learn about blog design though, but I really enjoy doing it. Just like my interior design, I feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when I learn something new and actually make it work! Such as my new social media icons. I am super proud of myself for figuring those out! I thought I would give some credit to some of the help I have found in creating my new look. I found this blog post from Hey Love Designs and it has tons of info.

Michelle has combined 50 different links to posts about blogging. There is everything from blog design to promoting your blog.

To make my own social media icons I used Kira's post from A New Leaf. She also has a whole section called Primp My Blog with lots of information on blog design.

 

 

To learn how to create my own icons I used this post from IFabbo. Also very helpful.

 

I still have a few things on my blog that I need to update and change, but like I said before it will probably happen slowly. So please be patient with me as I educate myself in the blog design world.

I'm Back!

Wow! So it has been almost a year since I last posted. I guess I took a sort of unintentional break. Some pretty big things have happened in 2013. In March we welcomed this handsome boy into our lives...

 

 

who now looks like this, and is 7 months old and crawling all over the place!

 

 

Being a mother of two kids is definitely harder than one, that being one of my reasons for not keeping up with this blog. :)

This crazy girl can't get enough of her little brother and will be 3 years old next month!

 

 

Another big thing that happened so far in 2013 was this:

Yep, we sold our house! We put it up for sale by owner at the beginning of June, and had two offers before we accepted the third offer at the end of July. A month later we were all moved out.

 

I cried... a lot. That house was like my first child and we put a lot of love into it, but after having our son we were feeling very cramped. When we bought the house we knew we wouldn't be there forever. It was a great starter house for us and we sure enjoyed every minute of the 5 years we spent there. We are moving onto more exciting things though. We are currently in a temporary living situation while we build our next home! Guardian Homes is building our next dream home and we couldn't be more excited! We spent a month perfecting the floor plan and deciding where to build, and we finally started the process and the foundation was poured last week! So, I hope to start blogging again about our building experience. There are so many decisions to make when building, and I have already made some pretty big ones, but as an interior designer I am loving being able to design my own house!