Guide on How not to design your home?

For a recent post on the RMCAD Rudnick Design Collaborative site, I have been conducting research in which I explore how not to design a home. Rather than dwelling on all of the wonderful things instructors at RMCAD have taught me over the years, I’d like to show you how NOT to plan your space by creating a very stupid floor plan based off of an existing one.

In this example, we will continue to look at that same-is ranch style house seen here:

First Floor Plan: As Built (Dumb)

Though this image is admittedly confusing and ugly, there are some interesting features. The laundry room seems well placed adjacent to the garage and the stairs down into the basement. The kitchen, dining and living room share a relatively large space with an open corner fireplace. There is also a separate office and what looks like a guest room across from the master bedroom.

Second Floor Plan: As Built (Stupid)

This image shows how to make bad design decisions while planning your home. Note that all of these rooms are within reach of every other one here. This means there will be constant noise and distractions which could severely hamper—or prevent—the quiet work required by each area’s function; this house would be annoying at best and torturous at worst for someone who works from home or needs to maintain focus on focused tasks such as writing, coding, creating music/art, or studying.

Also note how the master bedroom is separate from its attached bathroom, meaning anyone who wants to shower after waking up will have to walk out into the hallway where everyone else is staying. This design would also require someone living in this house to take two separate stairs down into the basement every time they needed to do laundry. While that’s good for your calves, it isn’t so great if you’re going grocery shopping or bringing home 40 bags of dirty rags and towels from a DIY detailing session at a car wash.

First Floor Plan: Dumber (Really Stupid)

Okay, okay… it gets even worse! This floor plan shows a terrible use of space, which could potentially leave us with no storage room whatsoever.

The dumbest design decision in this floor plan is the fact that the laundry room, kitchen laundry appliances (a.k.a. trash cans) and pantry are all one continuous space without doors or partitions to separate them. These areas would be prone to spills, cross-contamination of smells and general chaos not unlike that occurring in a place where you might find clowns living together… if they did dirty work like laundry for other clowns instead of just covering kids with chicken pox at birthday parties.

Second Floor Plan: Dumber (Super Stupid)

Sigh!  Not only have we removed a bathroom from this floor plan by eliminating a bedroom altogether, but we neglected to move the stairs up into the hallway where they should be. Though one could argue that this layout would allow for more privacy in the master bedroom—by not requiring anyone to walk through it when entering or exiting—one could equally claim that this makes bedrooms and bathrooms (two key areas in a house) far too isolated from one another.

If we were to add a bathroom back into this floor plan somewhere, we’d need to find space for it in either the laundry room, kitchen or hallway; if we also wanted to keep the two upstairs bedrooms and maintain the current floor plan’s dimensions, we’d have no choice but to place an even larger washer/dryer combo unit within said bathroom. The only other option would be to expand outward by adding on an addition which would take away from room on the other side of the house—the garage.

Garage Plan: Dumber (Seriously, Who Does This?!)

Okay, this is just dumb… unless you have a car that’s larger than most New York City apartments! Look at all that wasted space in here! And what about exhaust fumes? Or batteries exploding? Or gas cans spontaneously combusting out of sheer stupidity?

If we want to keeps this garage looking normal, it would seem reasonable to assume that our next option should be to build an addition onto it. But doing so will require adding on several feet of width around the entire rear half of the houses, which will make the whole shebang, look totally out-of-place.

Conclusion:

And now, for the dumbest floor plan yet! The garage/expansion addition is shown here without any door between it and the kitchen, which will allow smells to waft into dining areas during meal times—if anyone ever cooks anything in there, that is. If they do, their food would also be positioned directly beneath an exhaust fan vent situated at the top of a stairway leading down from the bedrooms.