The outdoor kitchen is what this plan gets sold on, and it is the smallest part of what happens behind the house. The drawing gives you one covered room 44 feet long and about 18 feet deep under an 11-foot ceiling, a masonry grill wall at one end and a fireplace at the other, with … Read more
On a house under 2,000 square feet, the garage is the design problem. This one is 600 square feet, close to a third of the heated area, and on most plans at this size it takes the best stretch of the front elevation and fills it with two doors. Plan 51772HZ turns the door ninety … Read more
The entry side of this house is forty-six feet of white board-and-batten with two windows and a door in it. The deck side is four glazed bays under a ceiling that has climbed to 14 feet 6 inches. Plan 337013JUN spends its whole elevation budget on one wall and asks the other one to disappear, … Read more
The gabled dormer centred over the front doors is decorative. The designer says so on the listing: it is there for the look, and on a single-storey house there is nothing behind it to light. Once you notice that, the rest of the front reads the same way. Symmetry this exact costs something, and plan … Read more
Ceiling height is cheaper than floor area, and this plan is built on that one fact. Plan 421043HFC holds the heated block to 820 square feet, then runs an 11-foot vault unbroken over the living room, the dining nook and the kitchen while both bedrooms stay flat at nine. Outside, a 12-in-12 gable in dark … Read more
“Vaulted great room” gets read as a ceiling height. On a single-storey plan it is really a roof decision: you frame a two-storey-tall roof over a one-storey house, then choose how much of that volume to open up and how much to leave as attic. Plan 820014WSF opens exactly one room, to 21 feet, and … Read more
Almost every guide to Craftsman houses starts at the elevation: the tapered columns on masonry piers, the exposed rafter tails, the knee braces under a wide eave. That is backwards. Those details were the cheap part, applied to a plan that had already made its real decisions, and you can bolt every one of them … Read more
The second storey on plan 93236EL is mostly for the street. It covers the front half of the building only — two bedrooms and an unfinished bonus room over the garage — while the kitchen, the living room and the primary suite all sit on the ground floor behind it, under a roof drawn at … Read more
There is a door between the master closet and the laundry room. That single opening is what plan 810002RBT is built around: 2,880 heated square feet with the master suite, the kitchen, a second bedroom and the washer all on the ground floor, and the garage, mudroom, laundry, closet and bath strung up the west … Read more
The front porch on this plan is a little over six feet deep. On a modern farmhouse that is a canopy rather than a room, and it tells you where plan 818128JSS decided to spend its money: not on covered outdoor floor, but on roof. Twelve in twelve across the main gables, fourteen in twelve … Read more
