Indoors

The inside of a house that is 1064 Sq Ft. is quite hard to do anything special with. The amount of decisions that you can actually make with respect to layout are quite small.

The questions you have to answer go something like this:

1) Do you want an open or closed concept?

2) Do you want two bedrooms or three?

3) Do you want an en suite bathroom off of the master bedroom?

I'll show you my rationale one question at a time.

Question #1: To me, this is the big one and probably the fundamental thing that will make my house a little more modern than your traditional split entry home. I wanted an open concept between my kitchen and my living room. The main reason is that I'm most likely going to be living alone. If you're living alone and you spend $2K on a TV, you might as well be able to watch it while you're cooking Chef Boyardee. Secondly, if you're trying to sell a home to a family with a couple of kids, they'll probably want to be able to keep an eye on them while they're preparing more sensible meals, like various casseroles and roasts.

Question #2: I still fight with this one to this day. In a 1064 Sq. Ft. home, three bedrooms on the main is definitely a squeeze. With two bedrooms you can give more room to the master and even have an en suite. The second bedroom is much more marketable and livable. With three bedrooms the en suite is pretty much ruled out and the remaining two bedrooms are much less fun to live in. However, generally 23 year old men don't buy homes likes this. Small families starting out do. Any family with a couple of kids will want them on the main floor, not in basement with the dog. Secondly, I own a huge desk and I think I am certainly in need of an office environment for my potential upcoming academic endeavors and work on occasional time off when required. Hard to sell a room to a roommate when you're in there four hours a day. Solution, three bedrooms.

Question #3: With three bedrooms, the en suite is not even an option. Too bad, it would have been nice to have my own...facilities.

So all in all, the revised layout shaped up like this:

Sorry for the crappy resolution as my normal image capturing tools from PDF seems to be acting up.

As you can see, the counter for the kitchen now comes out to separate the living room and the kitchen. There is an elevated breakfast bar included in this to pull up stools to.

This seems like an excellent feature of a home where I'm certain a fair amount of beer / pizza will be consumed. I'll probably hang some lighting above there as well. Adjacent to the bar, you can see a wall has been brought out to close in the kitchen. It was my thought that this would prevent someone coming in on a cold winters night and freezing out anyone eating at the dining room table. It also just offers a little bit of privacy for the dining area to counteract the open concept of the kitchen.

If anyone has any thoughts, small mods can still be made! Feel free to call my bullshit at anytime.