After finishing up the details regarding the exterior of your custom home, you can focus on designing your home interior, an aspect depending entirely on you. The floor plan determines where everything is located in your house. A well thought-out floor plan can make for a comfortable house whereas a bad floor plan can create problems and inconvenience.
You need to make decisions about style, size, and location depending on some components, such as doorframes and hallway passages. These decisions impact the feel of the house and, ultimately, your enjoyment of it. You can find hundreds of home interior ideas in the multitude of home magazines on the rack at the bookstore or on the Internet.
Elements of Home Interior Design
Despite the fact that you have total control on your home interior design, there are some elements to be included into your thought process while designing your home:
- Lifestyle: To be comfortable and relaxed, your home has to fit your lifestyle. Not every home works for every family. Determine how you want to live and design a plan that fits the lifestyle you enjoy.
- Foot traffic: Try to project how people move through the house on a daily basis. Look for problems in the traffic patterns. Some problems may include issues like tight hallways and people crossing through work areas of the kitchen, formal areas, or TV-viewing areas.
- Noise: Remember that bedrooms are for sleeping, so any noise above, below, or next to a bedroom can make for a restless night. Consider carefully the placement of noise-generating rooms like the garage, home office, laundry room, and bathrooms.
- Storage: Create ample-size closets, pantries, and cabinet areas. And make sure your storage areas are convenient without being obtrusive.
- Door placement: Every room needs a door, but it needs to open in such a way that it doesn’t bang against walls, obstruct other doorways, or block closets or windows.
- Window placement: Window considerations include privacy, not being blocked by doors, or looking out on the garbage area. Put plenty of thought into the size and placement of your windows to the world.
- Accessibility: Make sure you can easily access important rooms without creating unnecessary obstacles.
- Convenience: Make sure the rooms are placed for a maximized convenience.
- Utility: Make sure all areas serve a purpose.
- Future expansion: Think about how you might expand the house if you decide to do so someday.
Think about how much time you spend in the kitchen. Food is a critical part of family culture, and you want your kitchen to reflect it. Think about placement for breakfast eating areas. Although the kitchen is usually the most expensive room in the house, the kitchen also brings the best return on money spent in any home.
After the kitchen, bathrooms are the next most expensive rooms in the house. The labor necessary for all that electrical, plumbing, and tile work adds up quickly. Plus you only have to create one kitchen, whereas you may have multiple bathrooms.
The master bedroom is your reward for paying for this project. A touch of privacy is desirable, so placement of the master bedroom away from other bedrooms and heavy traffic areas helps provide seclusion. Also, plenty of room for closet space is a required necessity for shopaholics. The other bedrooms need to be designed for optimum utility. Take advantage of light and views where you can and make sure each room has adequate storage space. Each wall needs to have at least two electrical sockets to accommodate technology.
Dining rooms and family rooms often center around food and need to have reasonable access to the kitchen. If you want a home theater, understand that it’ll have its own special needs in terms of acoustics and technology. Running water will be an important consideration for entertaining. Any rooms with a wet bar need running water, drainage, and power for a dishwasher and the all-important blender. Additional cabinetry may be necessary as well.
Some people may consider the garage as only a home for their vehicles. However, other people view their garage as a workshop and storage unit. Your garage can serve all these purposes with a little planning. When designing your garage, think about storage access as well as the space. You want to get to everything while avoiding obstacle courses or throwing out your back. Consider dumbwaiters for storage above. If your space includes a workshop, take into account ventilation and noise when designing the home interior.