Before & After – Previous Home Floor Plans

Here’s a follow up of my THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN BUILDING A HOUSE post. Let’s talk floor plans. As we finalize our floor plan for the new house, I realized I never shared this process with you all with our previous house.

Blaine and I loved our first home in Urbandale (12 years ago), and it was a split level. We decided to do something similar when we were building our previous home. We’re going to call this floor plan a modern split level. 😉

Here’s the sketch that I sent our draftsman, Kurt.

This is what Kurt had drawn up:

We definitely had revisions to the original drawings to bring cost down. Reality is that we had to stay on budget so that means we couldn’t have it all. We got rid of the mudroom and put the lockers in the garage. We also decided to remove the private deck from the master bedroom. We removed Blaine’s office and decided to put his desk in the master bedroom. We also removed the powder room, and visitors can use the bathroom between the kids’ bedrooms. Instead of a screened in porch, we decided to do a covered porch and was going to screen it in later. As much as we wanted an extra garage in the basement, we removed that as well. We decided not to put transom windows since that would be an additional cost because we would have needed a steel beam. Another thing we did was simplify the roof line. As far as the floor plan, we originally had about 2400 sq. ft. on the main level and revised it to about 1850 sq. ft. on the main level to bring cost down. 

Instead of builtins leading up to the master bedroom, we decided to take that out and do a drop down tv mount near the stairs above the railing to the basement.

With all the revisions, we still loved how our home turned out!

We are almost done finalizing the floor plans for the new house. Once we have that done, I will share with you all! Stay tuned!! 🙂