[PinkString]

We didn't have anything to do on Saturday, so we checked out some of the model homes going up down the road from us. This is between Decatur and Aliante Parkway.

We thought it was strange that a couple of the lower priced models had a really weird entrance. In one of them, if you are in a hurry and are running in, you will likely kill yourself on the sharp edges of the wall the way it is designed as you slam in through the front door, then immediately slam into the wall.

The other lower priced model had a really weird surreal layout, it veered to the left through a long hall, then to the right, with another long hall. Then if you went to the living area, that looked OK, although it is yet another big open floor plan.

The two story models were pretty nice, with too much room and lots of bedrooms. They had good size yards, whereas the weird small models had tiny back yards. I like small yards, don't need much. But who in the heck designed these homes? Smoking too much of that legal weed perhaps? Or do people want something different, a home with a challenge perhaps? Maybe they should just close off the front door and enter through the back.

[movin1]

I have lived in several homes, had some custom or semi-custom built. The biggest challenge is finding a good floor plan.

With two of my custom homes, I took existing floor plans and modified them to be better. I'm searching for a new home and again see many bad floor plans. Lots of wasted space and plans that do not make sense from a functional standpoint. One of the homes I had built from a floor plan I modified I called "functionally perfect". It had no wasted space, excellent flow patterns, and everything I wanted and needed. I found as I got older, I could get by with a lot less space, so now I'd like to find a smaller house that has no wasted space and only what I need. I don't understand why it's so difficult and there are so many bad floor plans. How hard can it be to design a 3 bedroom, two bathroom single story house?

[orca17]

Whoever designed my kitchen had to be on crack. The wall for the laundry area is directly to the right of the opening for the refrigerator in the kitchen, and it sticks out about three feet beyond the front of the refrigerator. That means that you cannot open the right hand doors of side-by-side or French door refrigerators even 90 degrees (because the handles hit it), and even with a conventional refrigerator you have to move the hinges to the left hand side in order to be able to open the doors more than halfway.