Square footage tells you nothing about where the bed goes. Wall footage does, and almost no plan sheet reports it — you have to pull it off the drawing yourself, segment by segment, while the plan is still changeable. The count takes about ten minutes with a scale ruler, and it catches the two failures … Read more
Most buyers read “two-story great room” as a ceiling height. It is really a subtraction, and the thing being subtracted is the floor above it: on plan 440050PWL, that upper floor ends up carrying five labelled spaces and a rail. Everything a household actually touches on a Tuesday sits on the ground. Master suite, two … Read more
“Bonus room” on a plan listing usually means the leftover: a few hundred kneewalled feet over a garage, reached by a stair nobody wanted to give up floor area for. Plan 744526ABR is not doing that. It draws its bonus as a full unfinished storey over the entire right wing, and that space holds roughly … Read more
The advice on farmhouse plans is always the same: buy the porch, and the deeper the better. This one hands you a front porch 7 feet deep and 21 feet long, which is a canopy rather than a room, then spends 625 square feet of covered floor on the back where the pool is. On … Read more
Four bedrooms, and three of them are at the top of a stair. Plan 32614WP puts the master suite on the ground floor with the kitchen, the laundry and the room everyone ends up in, then stacks the children, a second laundry and an unfinished rec room above the garage. The Southern part of the … Read more
A floor plan is a horizontal slice through the house taken roughly four feet above the finished floor, drawn at a stated scale, and it will answer nearly every question you have about how the building works if you read it in the right order: title block, walls, openings, dimension strings, circulation. Room labels come … Read more
The garage is bigger than the house. Not as a figure of speech: plan 400025FTY draws 2,979 square feet of shop against 2,882 heated, both sitting under one roofline. What that buys is a bay about 50 by 54 feet with nothing standing in the middle of it, three bedrooms split across two floors, and … Read more
Three dormers, red brick and white board-and-batten under gray shingles: the street face of plan 185037PHD is doing formal farmhouse work, and the porch beneath it is six feet deep. Six feet gets you a chair and room to walk past it. Every foot of genuine outdoor living on this plan sits at the back … Read more
Two storeys of elevation, one storey of house, near enough. Plan 880006HLN draws 2,400 heated square feet and leaves only 431 of them at the top of the stair: a fourth bedroom, a bath, a flex room and a desk nook. Everything a household touches on a Tuesday — primary suite, kitchen, laundry, two more … Read more
Attached shop, on most barndominium listings, means a garage with a workbench along one wall. On plan 405070FDC it means 2,600 square feet with three overhead doors and its own bathroom, drawn as the left-hand half of a building a hundred feet long. The rest is a genuinely large house, and the porch is what … Read more
