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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2934 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 29, 2025

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Homeowners of The Motte -- what would you differently if you could do it all over again?

I plan on building a house in the next 12 months on a lot about an hour away from the Gulf of Mexico America. It's going to be a two-story 5BR house with porches on the front and the back, built in a traditional Southern style.

I'm a bit overwhelmed as I don't even know what I don't know about building, and I want to avoid making costly mistakes that I'll have to pay to renovate later (or worse, be unable to fix at all). Happy to hear both from people who built and people who bought.

Specific random things, because most things are going to be covered by smarter guys than me:

  1. Plan one entrance to the house with no steps. Almost nobody does it, because it's difficult to handle the architecture/landscaping to make a ramp look good, but you totally can if you plan it from the start. Elderly people fall on steps all the time, and often hurt themselves. Also convenient for heavy stuff in general. If you plan for it now, you'll have it forever; if you have to rerig it later it will look bad, especially if it's at a time when you yourself are older/less capable.

  2. Anywhere water comes into your house will eventually leak. Plan for that now.

  3. That's a big house, think about how you're going to use the rooms. A lot of people end up with a big house with four rooms that are all variations on "couch and we watch TV in here;" or they all started as bedrooms and got adapted.

  4. Think of the repair guy. Don't put anything in a place where it will be difficult to extract when (not if, when) it needs to be serviced or replaced. Make it easy to reach the air handler, the water heater, the septic system, etc.

  5. Take pictures of the inside of all the walls before you close them up. Write notes and measurements. Store them in multiple places, hard copies, in the home, for the future.

Re. 2, how do you recommend planning for it? Do you have an example?

Re. 3, we have four kids and may have more. Our thinking is:

  • 1 master bedroom
  • 1 home office (wife and I are WFH)
  • 1 older boys' room
  • 1 older girls' room
  • 1 younger kids' room
  • Guest bedroom somewhere, maybe? The design we're looking at is 3,300 sqft. Do you think it would be possible to get away with less house? I'd actually prefer not to have to clean, cool, and maintain a huge house.

The design we're looking at is 3,300 ft2. Do you think it would be possible to get away with less house?

I can fit your stated requirements into 1301 ft2. Use your imagination!

lol, well, we could all technically live, Gilded Age style, in a single room, but I don't want that, so I suppose I have more requirements than just minimizing enclosed space. I'd want a garage, a living room, a space for a dinner table, and ideally a porch. I'm also trying to do a 2 floor build because I want to minimize the footprint on my lot.

But point taken. After this thread I think I need to hire an architect.

We could all technically live, Gilded Age–style, in a single room, but I don't want that. I'd want a living room and a space for a dinner table.

Clarification: That big central room is a combination living/dining room, as permitted under IPMC § 404.5.2. (I was just too lazy to label it.) A width of 7 feet may seem small, but under IRC § R312.2 it is permissible, and Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction fig. 2.24 indicates that it is sufficient for a dining table to fit, as long as everybody sits on the same side. (If I'd had the book in front of me when I made the drawing, I would have made the living/dining room 8 feet wide, so that people could face each other across the dining table. With that mild augmentation, the area rises to 1347 ft2 + 94.5 in2.)

I'm also trying to do a 2-floor build.

Note that the IRC's prescriptive design assumes that the second floor will contain only bedrooms and implicitly bathrooms. (Compare table R403.1(1) note b with table R301.5.) If you ignore that assumption, you may have to pay extra for an engineer's services, since the architect will not be able to just copy-and-paste from the IRC's tables.

Here's a design that meets your new criteria. (I'm assuming a detached garage, and not bothering to draw it.) (Whoops—swap the office and the kitchen.)

After this thread I think I need to hire an architect.

Come up with your own original design first, before letting an architect mess stuff up. Doodling random floor plans is fun!

Also, I think you should go straight to a homebuilder (which will have an in-house architect), not to an architect. I tried hiring several architects, and did manage to get one to help me pick a lot, but they generally didn't seem very interested in me. Presumably they have bigger fish to fry, such as designing larger commercial, industrial, and apartment buildings.

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