Planning the Homestead

[crazyms]

We're still a ways off from it but I've been daydreaming and planning for our homestead and I'm looking for some inspiration. We have decided that it may be a better idea to stay here and use the property we have instead of moving like planned so I've been thinking about the property and what I wanted to do with it. We have 10 acres of undeveloped property in a rural area. There are improvements to be made as far as developing the land but I've mostly been thinking about the house. Most of the developments can't really be done until I know where to put them which means I need to have decided on the house. I'm asking to see what some of you have/want in your dream house to help me scope out the design for ours. I've gotten a good idea of what I want but I'm having a hard time visualizing some of it and making it all fit.

So here's what I'm thinking so far:

Ranch style 3 bedroom house

Master on one end at front of house, 2 kids rooms on other end

Living areas in center of house with central woodstove and vaulted ceilings

Loft in vaulted ceiling over kids' rooms on that end of the house for playarea

Laundry/bath/family closet together (back of house behind master bedroom)

Full length porch on front and back of house

The issues I'm having with design:

Layout of the laundry/bath/family closet - would like access into laundry and bath from back porch for coming in

Layout of living areas - separating space without closing off rooms

Layout of back porch - want to include summer kitchen with eating area off of kitchen/dining, want 'conservatory'/gardening work space possibly on back porch with small greenhouse

It would help if I could find a floor plan that resembled what I'm talking about and I'll add a link to one if I can find one or once I can hook up my scanner and maybe scan a rough sketch.

So anyone want to play along with the dream planning? What do you want for a dream country house?

ETA: This is the closest plan I could find to what I'm talking about. Double the living space in the center though to be larger and include a dining room and the door going off the back of the house out of the laundry/bath area not the side.

http://www.dreamgreenhomes.com/plans/craftsman.htm

Edited by crazyms - 1/6/11 at 12:52pm

[Momsteader]

Subscribing :) I just bought a 'homestead' but there is already a house there. I'm going to be doing some mega remodel/updating which I think is more daunting that building, but I love looking at other plans for inspiration!

Ross Chapin has some amazing plans that are well thought out, space saving, and very lovely!  I like that they show many photos of the finished products so you can get an idea of how it actually looks when done and the flow of things.

http://www.rosschapin.com/Plans/plans.html h h as some amain  

[limette]

If you will have a woodstove, you're better off putting the bedrooms above the living area because the heat travels up more than it travels out. I'd also have issues having the kids rooms far from ours, but that's just me.

The taller your ceilings the more heat you need to produce. My friend had a house with vaulted ceilings and her heating bills were insane.

Having said all that, if I was building a passive solar home that didn't need a lot of supplementary heat, I'd do a one story house because I hate stairs and I have a bit of a phobia with having floors above me (or being above a basement).

Do you really need two full porches? It's extra expense and I bet you'll only end up really using one.

We just moved to our little homestead on 4 acres. It's a 2 story 150 year old farmhouse and although I wouldn't have picked it be my dreamhouse, it is now.

[Momsteader]

Love your blog btw limette :)  My kids want a pig JUST like Checkers! LOL

[limette]

LOl dh and I were in her pen snuggling with her the other day. She is getting soooo big. We treat her good and she's easy to deal with but we are still cautious around her. She tends to nibble at our clothes (like a goat) but she has the potential to be dangerous so we don't let the kids in with her. It's definitely a novel experience, having a pig.

[CrunchyJess]

Hi. I'm new here, or old to the forum as a lurker rather but a new poster.

My fiancé and I are putting an offer in on a place this week. He will live there through the summer and my sons and I will move in when we get married in august.
The place we are buying isn't ideal, but we have looked at a lot of properties and given our current situation, we feel this is as close as we will get to our dream for the time being. It's a brand new 1600 square foot house on 2 acres about 10 minutes from a rural city of 20k and about 30 minutes from the states capital. We've looked a lot at properties with older houses on them but when we add up to expense of making the houses energy efficient (old window and insulation), a newer house seemed better. This way we can just live in the house for now and we will be able to get started building a barn/shop and chicken coop this summer hopefully.

I think your plans for a house sound great and are very similar to the house we are hoping to buy. The only drawback in our house(I'm so attached I think of it as ours even though we havent got it yet) is that there is no fireplace. Luckily I have a very handy fiancé and dad and we've figured that it will cost about 1500 to install a woodstove if we do the labor. I've also been looking into solar power and would like to go that route once we have the homested side of things established. One step at a time I suppose.

I love the idea of a loft, that sounds awesome. It's so fun planning this, I feel like I've hardly slept since we first found our place, all I've done is lay up in bed at night and think of big brown chicken eggs and fresh goats milk and watching our kids fill baskets up with just picked blackberries! I feel so fortunate to have a man to spend my life with that has like dreams as me, and I'm happy to become a part of this forum with women who are the same!

[1jooj]

I also live in a century-old farmhouse. Ours is about 3000 sq ft and has a sleeping porch on the south side of the house. It's in every way a typical house from its time.

We renovated, adding a second bath because our first bath was an add-on to the house, which placed it right off the kitchen, far from bedrooms and in the middle of the action. Not very modest.

It is, overall, too big for a family of 4. In winter, we close off the living room entirely and use the dining room as a sitting space. There is one downstairs bedroom, and this we use for exercise/library, and it is also closed/unheated in winter. Even without these 2 rooms, the house feels big for 4 people. (Which is nice, since winter can get cabin-feverish, but still.) So I suppose, for us, 2000 sq ft would likely be plenty.

One thing I would definitely add/change is a hose-down mudroom-type backdoor entrance, with a floor drain and hookups for cooking appliances in summer. We don't use AC, so a well-ventilated summer kitchen space would help immensely with canning and pickling, and the dirt/mud/manure on barn boots is a constant battle. Also, from time to time, sick livestock comes in, and this would be a nice alternative to the bathtub.

[PenelopeJune]

1jooj, your house sounds like my dream house! Perhaps a little too big for me, but sounds great. I love the idea of a sleeping porch.

If anyone likes looking at floorplans of antique and vintage houses, I found this amazing website the other day:

 www.antiquehome.org

My dream house:

- Would be old and large, approx 1200-2000 square feet or so. (Right now our house is 500 sq feet and I'm feeling really smothered!)

- A nice big entryway, with a coat closet.

- Closed, seperate kitchen, with an extra large pantry, and room for a breakfast table.

- Small dining room.

- Bedrooms upstairs, with a large family closet, with washer/dryer, preferably next door to a bathroom.

- Basement or cellar. We live in tornado alley, and I do NOT like not having shelter.

- STORAGE! We have one closet in our entire house right now, and I almost cry every time I have to put towels or clothes or sheets away.

- Old-house charm.

[junebugmidwife]

I'd go more passive-solar if you're building.  Earthships are a little extreme, but I like a lot of the ideas, especially the front greenhouse.  Or I'd go with a concrete dome house: http://www.monolithic.com/ which uses lots less energy, never needs to be re-roofed, etc, with a masonry stove instead of a conventional woodstove--much more efficient. Then you'd be cozy and use much less energy than a traditional rambler.  

Plus, those concrete houses are nigh-on indestructible, good for tornado-prone places.

[Eresh]

My grandfather designed and built a house in the Sierra Nevadas a couple of decades ago that I've always loved.  It had an open living room and large country kitchen/dining room with the wood stove at the side between the living room & kitchen.  A hallway led to one full bath and two bedrooms (one used as a den).  Upstairs had two large bedrooms and a small full bath.  Unless they had guests they always had the upper level closed off to conserve heat.  The bedroom we always stayed in was right over the kitchen/living room and would sleep right next to the chimney pipe to wake up in the morning listening to my grandparents down in the kitchen.  Also with the steep pitch of the roof they built storage under the eaves accessible through small doorways so they made one of them into a little play room for us kids.  

I also have a friend whose parents designed and built their home in coastal WA.  Temps there don't get a whole lot below freezing so that wasn't as big an issue.  What impressed me was their fore-planning.  They built the second floor such that it could be closed off and rented out as a 2 bed/1 bath apartment with external access.  The large room, while it was used as a bedroom before my friend went off to college, had the necessary plumbing and hookups to turn it into a living room & small kitchen.  Meanwhile the two "bedrooms" upstairs became a game room and a storage room.  They also designed a small in-law suite on the end of the house to accommodate one of the grandparents.  So I've always thought, considering my own aging father and DH's parents, that if we did design our own home I would incorporate something like that.

[crazyms]

Sorry I 'thought' I'd responded to some of the posts already but apparently I lost my post. I'll try to catch up here. Heating the house is not really an issue for us since we live in the deep south and have very little winter. We get a few cold days here and there but most of our 'winter' is just a little chilly. Think no heat needed if you were to put on layers in the house. Mostly only need heat to take the chill out at night on the cold days. I can't remember it EVER going below 20 here and even below 30 is rare. It's January and we're still getting 50 and 60* most of the time just a little lower at night. Our big concern is cooling the house. Our summers are long and hot. In the 80s/90s for months and so much humidity it's hard to breathe :). The porches I know seem excessive to some but that's how most houses are built here. Since the house won't be that big the porches aren't going to be that big either. The back porch will be used space though for a large summer kitchen and areas for gardening prep and laundry duty (like washing the grungy stuff outside and line drying - also line drying just outside in winter). I am trying to keep the plan open to allow good air flow since that is our biggest need for cooling. The old houses here are all symmetrical with large windows and doors so you can open the house up and turn on ceiling fans for cooling (before they had ac). That is the design I'm trying to use in a way. I like not 'having' to use the ac all the time. The woodstove in the center of the open design would be sufficient to heat for our little winter since it'll be open and symmetrical to open up the house for the heat to spread. DH is also planning a blower unit and fans to be able to spread the heat through the house. I love those old farmhouses everyone seems to be getting!!! We lived in one for a while and I absolutely loved it. It was really large for us though and really didn't need most of the space. We have spent most of our married life in an old trailer that has been added on to so I'd guess around 1200-1400 sq ft and it's plenty of space for us. I agree with the posts about the mudroom. That's what I'm thinking. The bath/family closet area at the back of the house so that we can clean up before getting into the house when coming in. The summer kitchen I'm planning will have a ton of space so that it can be our 'harvest kitchen' for canning and such.