How to determine the most efficient layout for your home

Design efficiency is often overlooked and rarely discussed by buyers and builders. Over years of designing and building homes, I have had to review countless home designs to save the building and achieve a target budget. There are a few simple rules when going through this review that I have outlined below.

Save wasted space

This is the simplest step for someone with a high level of spatial awareness. A quick overview of a floor plan will highlight areas that are larger than necessary or excessive. Examples might be significant hallway lengths, oddly sized areas where rooms do not connect or flow properly, or simply oversized rooms. Last year a client approached me and showed me a floor plan of a house he had designed through a so-called architect that had an 8.5 x 3.0m master bedroom and the client didn’t identify the room as strange until that I pointed it out. If you are familiar with viewing architectural plans, this process is quite simple; however, for most homebuyers it is very difficult to visualize the space simply by looking at a scale drawing. An easier way that I recommend to buyers is to take a blank sheet of paper and cut out the furniture to scale that you have in your current home, then place it on the house layout plans where you think it will go. This will help them assess the proportions of the room sizes in relation to their furniture.

Eliminate excessive engineering costs

When designing and building two-story homes, the main factor in price efficiency is engineering costs. Large stretches of open space on the ground floor could cause the engineer to increase the depth of the suspended slab from 172mm to 257mm, adding significant cost. Keeping enough sub-slab structural walls in key positions will eliminate the need for this cost and can still mean you have fantastic open space.

Minimizing the lengths of suspended slabs is also critical, something that an experienced architect or home designer will do automatically, but is often overlooked by novice designers. This poor design feature will result in a home having a concrete slab where it is underutilized and hidden in roof space, which just means it is a very expensive roof.

Reducing the need for structural columns is also a factor. Since the supply and installation of a structural column can cost between $400 and $500 each, you want to reduce the amount used in the design of a house. Clever use of internal walls can easily save $3,000, again a cost that will never be seen once the house is complete.

This step-by-step analysis was recently conducted on an economical design for a two-story home that highlights changes made to the elevation and style of the home that saved significant construction costs.