Garage Wrap

This is one of my favorite floor plans. I don't know about you, but one of the things I really appreciate about a home design is a quiet bedroom. Grampa Tom is an early morning person and I am a night owl. For years and years our bedroom shared a wall with the main family area of the house. In our current house, the TV room is a bedroom at one side of the house and my bedroom is on the other side. I am a much happier camper as a result!

How do you get 3 quiet bedrooms in a 1903 square foot home? You wrap it around a garage! 

Remember, if you want to see a bigger version of the plan, all you have to do is hold down your Ctrl button and push the + button!

The master suite of this home is tucked away on the west side of a generous two car garage.The master bath has a large garden size tub, a double sink and the toilet is tucked back in the corner so that the walk-in master bedroom closet muffles those midnight flushes  :) 

Just off the master bedroom is a large mud room with a walk-in closet, large walk-in shower and a private toilet nook. It opens out to the sun room which is heated by a rocket stove mass heater with a hot tub providing the mass. It also has easy access to the garage and family room. 

The garage is 28' x 28', leave it as is or if you want a basement, put the stairs in there. I put the door the door to the basement in the garage, but you could easily put it in the family room too. 

The family room is separated from the large country kitchen by a half wall. 

The kitchen features a professional range, built in refrigerator and freezer units, a wall oven  and a large pantry that could be re-enforced to make a storm room if you didn't want a basement. It also has double doors out to the sun room (which also has double doors) making moving furniture in and out easier. 36 inch doors though out the home and a wide hallway also facilitate this. This home is also very handicap friendly.

The east wing of this home has 2 bedrooms that are buffered from the hustle and bustle of family life by the space of a living room and generous closets. A 3/4 bath with a shower serves both the bedrooms and guests.  The living room is open to the kitchen, making for awesome parties where the cook is never exiled!

Hope you've had fun dreaming with me!

What do you like about this plan?

What would you change?

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

The Farmer/Gentleman

Grampa Tom has absolutely no aspirations to be a gentleman, but there's a lot of classy college educated farmer's out there. This home is for them. This guy can come in from the fields covered with mud on one side of the house and emerge in a smoking jacket for an evening of intellectual pursuit in the study on the other side of this 2000ish square foot home.

Remember, if you want to see a bigger version of the plan, all you have to do is hold down your Ctrl button and push the + button!

The spacious mud room connects with the master bath, master bedroom, the kitchen and the study. It also has a large walk in-shower and a walk-in closet.

The master bedroom has a huge closet and  connects to the mudroom, the study and the master bath. The master bath has a jaccuzi style tub and a double sink for the gentleman and his lady. The study could also be used as a sitting room for the gentleman and his lady or as a nursery for a growing family.

The study has double pocket doors on the living room wall making it a versatile space that can be private or used as an extended living room space when entertaining. 

This arrangement also makes this home quite suitable for inter-generational living that can give both the homeowners a sense of privacy with a buffer "public" space between them and the two bedrooms on the other side of the house that could easily serve as a Granny house. 

If no basement is desired the area for the stairwell could be enclosed and made into three big walk-in closets, one for the living room, one for the bedroom and one which could be used as a bigger pantry than the small pantry that is just off the dining room. One or more of these could also be fortified to become storm rooms. 

The compact kitchen has lots of cabinets and counter space and is open to the living room and dining room.

The dining room has double doors which open into the sun room, which also has double doors to the outside, making it easy to move furniture in and out of this home. Face this side of the home towards the south and the sun room also becomes an important source of passive solar heat. It could be extended along the entire side of the home to maximize this potential. 

This home is designed so that it can be manufactured at a modular home factory and transported in two 16 foot sections. It also has 36 inch doors through out the home for ease of moving furniture and wheel chair access. 

Hope you are having fun in my play land and getting lots of good ideas! 

What do you like about this plan? 

What would you change?

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

Homeschooling

Posted this then realized I posted it to the wrong blog! It should be on Grama Sue's Rainbow Farm DUHHHH!!! But I think I'll leave it here just for those who might stumble upon it. DUHHH!

Off on another tangent! It's boring here on the farm right now, what can I say? About 25 years ago I started on the adventure of my life. I started homeschooling my 2 oldest children. After several years, I found myself homeschooling other area kids. I wound up with an effective system of homeschooling that uses little to no curriculum and actually can cost less than the cost of paying the book and other fees involved with sending children to a public school.

Over the years, I've posted almost all of these ideas and suggestions in one place or another on the internet and I've kept a file of them on my personal computer. This winter, one of my goals was to gather all that info into a book for anyone who is interested in homeschooling or who is interested in ideas to cut the cost of teaching their own. It won't be a terribly big book, I suspect less than 50 pages. But, in spite of what the education establishment would have you to think, teaching your own isn't as complicated as you think. I'm on page 12 now. Hopefully, I'll have it all together and ready to sell at the markets and on the internet this summer.

I'm toying with a couple of titles, which do you like better? Grama Sue's Tried and True Homeschool or Almost Unschooling Grama Let me know!


God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

Gambrel Barn Home 24 x32

Last week, as I was finishing up my post, I started thinking about how to shrink my barn home even more. Here's what I've come up with!  

Remember, if you want to see a bigger version of the plan, all you have to do is hold down your Ctrl button and push the + button!

This home has a laundry room with a large closet and a walk-in locker style shower. Just across the hall is a bedroom with a walk-in closet and a beautiful window seat. The full bath has a large tub for soaking in and is reasonably close to the bedroom :) A large pantry is right next to the galley style kitchen in the great room. And the great room is open to the loft above the back rooms. The loft is accessed by the grain bin stair well. (My program doesn't do round so you will have to use your imagination a bit here.) If you didn't want to do the grain bin and were willing to sacrifice the pantry and the walk-in closet, you could put a staircase to the loft there.

There is also a large front porch and a patio. The porch could easily swing all the way around to the grain bin, but I've been a tax assessor to long. Patios will cost less than porches in taxes, especially if you don't use mortar. I really had to reach to put as large of a porch on it as I did. Most people who want a home this small are looking to save money.

I left the loft open here, but it could easily accommodate a small bedroom or two or a master suite.  You could also open part of it to make a second story porch like I did in one of  the second story options in my last post.  Which, by the way, would cost less in tax $ than having a fully enclosed second floor. This picture of it isn't the same scale as the picture of the first floor, but it's the best I can do. I'm including the picture so you can get an idea of what it might look like.

This plan is set up so that it could be built by a modular home builder and be brought in in two 12 x 32 foot sections. The grain bin would probably be something you'd have to come up with yourself. Fortunately, they aren't to hard to come by. 

So, what do you think? 

Anything you would change?

I'm not sure I'm up to a tiny house. 

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

Grain Bin Homes

Check out this beautiful home made from grain bins! Oh, if only my program did round walls!

http://www.motherearthnews.com/multimedia/image-gallery.aspx?id=2147489490&seq=0#axzz2KAZnLdXm

Smaller Gambrel Barn Home With Silo

One of the first plans that I posted was a gambrel roofed styled barn with a silo. Recently, I received a message about it, saying they loved it, but would like to see something smaller. I've been working on it. I've now got several floor plans of varying sizes. Hopefully, I'll post all of them soon.

This is the second smallest plan with 1596 square feet of living space on the first floor. Please excuse my square silo. My rinky-dink floor plan program doesn't do round walls. I'm really not sure if the 8 ft. diameter is big enough. I'd need the pro-version to figure that one out. It's just a guess. 

Remember, if you want to see a bigger version of the plan, all you have to do is hold down your Ctrl button and push the + button!

The main entry of this plan opens into a spacious great room consisting of a living room space, a nice size kitchen and an over-sized pantry. This pantry could easily double as a storm room if it were reinforced. There is also an office that could be used as a bedroom if needed and a full bath on the opposite side of the hall. 

The mud room has a huge closet, lots of cabinet space, a double laundry sink and even access to the master bathroom walk-in locker style shower. That's Grampa Tom's idea. It's in a lot of my plans. He want's to come into the house, put his dirty clothes right into the washer and step into the shower. Then he can just go into the bedroom and put something clean on.

In addition to a walk-in locker style shower, the master bath has a Jacuzzi style tub and sinks on different walls that can be at different heights for him and her. It also has a large master bedroom with a huge closet that can be organized to eliminate the need for dressers.

I have several ideas for the second floor. Decided to limit it to 4 different versions for this post. There's at least 3 or 4 more I could come up with, but you might get bored!

The first is a simple loft over part of the first floor. With this option, the gambrel style roof would end at the master bedroom. A loafing shed style roof would cover the rest of the first floor. The first floor is open over the kitchen and living room with a blank of windows on the second floor level to flood the place with light. If situated with the main entry facing south, this could serve as a solarium providing passive solar heat during the cold months. 

This second floor option is also only over part of the first floor. It has 2 bedrooms, a full bath a large storage room and a loft area that is open to the kitchen and living room.

The third has a gambrel style roof over the entire second floor with a private porch area at the back of the house. 

The fourth option has 3 large bedrooms, a full bath in which the sink area is walled off from the toilet-bath area so lots of people can use it at the same time and a loft area on the second floor. If you have a really large family, you could go ahead and put a floor over the portion of the second floor that is open to the first floor and add  at least 2 or 3 more bedrooms. 

Like I said, lots of possibilities with this one :)

What do you like about this plan?

What would you change?

While I was posting this, I started thinking about an idea to create a barn style house that's even smaller. Maybe I'll even try to come up with a tiny house!

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue