As someone who won't put the crib together until the new baby is born, I'd wait until I needed 3500 sq ft of house.

Best guess is that a house that size could cost you a minimum of $500,000 to build if you do builder basic with carpet instead of wood floors, etc on up to over a million.

That doesn't include land, etc. Most young people who are newly married start with something smaller that they can either add onto or they move when they are more settled financially. Or at least that's what we did when we were planning to have a family. My first house was 1400 square feet on a 40 x 100 plot of land with 2 bdrooms and two baths.

@cpartist - we have been married for 5 years already, so not necessarily newlyweds. We waited until we grossed over 6 figures to start thinking about houses and babies. We gross 6 figures now, so a half-million home is not out of the question for us at this time :) We currently live in an apartment and do not want to raise kids here.

I think you could leave family room upstairs unfinished until you grow into needing that space. I also think $500,000 minimum is pretty steep estimate for a minimum, without knowing where it will be built. The house plan you posted does not look overly complex. with corners or funky rooflines.

My wife and I were in a similar situation as you and your husband, except we already have 2 little ones. We poured over plans online, never finding one that exactly met our needs, or what we thought our needs were. What we ended up doing was taking the floorplans and elevations we liked to a family friend who is an architect. She modified the plans, we posted them here for feedback, reworked them a few times over and are close to locking down our plan. The whole experience has been awesome and we would've never got to where we are without sitting down with a professional and getting numerous suggestions from the good folks on here. cpartist, bpabath, mrspete, chisue and many others all are extremely helpful on the details my wife and I would never even think to consider like light switches, door swings or where a bath towel hangs. The whole experience has been wonderful. She just got us the elevation views and everytime I look at them I just get the feeling of this is what I always had in my head. We are extremely lucky as the architect is charging us $1 sq-ft for construction plans, but a house plan that is tailored to your needs and desires and local building codes/zones is worth paying much more than a $1 a sqft.

I would pump the brakes a bit with thinking you can afford a $500K house unless you both are grossing $100K a piece, kids can be expensive and the interest and taxes on a $500K home is quite the monthly payment.

Good luck on your journey, it is a lot of chicken or the egg, especially trying to figure out how much things cost, brick vs hardi vs vinyl, don't even get me started on windows.

I agree with Melly, and with Fred--get some help with the revisions to the plan. I would try to fit in a full bath in the office area so you can use that room as a nursery while the children are infants. What kind of office space do you need? perhaps you could fit it into the dining room at the beginning, or would you need the extra garage space? Be sure to post the plan in the Kitchen Forum for help planning that space.

Good luck!

Sounds like you two know what you're doing in terms of finances. Sorry if I sounded like I'm lecturing but so many come here without a clue as to what it costs to build. Please accept my apologies.

Fred M, I don't think that's a steep estimate for a minimum cost for the square footage they're looking at. That works out to $142 square foot.

Depending on where you live, and with the economy improving, prices per square foot can range from $140 a square foot to over $300 a square foot.

I agree about the kids being upstairs when babies. Since you are planning on acreage, have you considered doing a one floor home where you have public rooms and private rooms near one another. You can still design it so the bedrooms are not on top of the master but are closer.

Also I think you'd get more use from a family room that is off the kitchen. This way you can also keep an eye on the kids.

I think the best advice would be to see what it is you like about the plan plus any other plans and then work with an architect. It will be money very well spent.

Thank you everyone for the wonderful comments/suggestions.

We are in an excellent place right now with finances, will have the land paid for (in cash, yay!) by the Spring, and then work on finances for the house. In all honesty, it might takes us more than a year to save for the house ... we won't know if we'll finance half or more (saving at least 25% downpayment is our goal for now). We also live 30 minutes south of Seattle, and would like to buy land about 20 minutes east of here, still in the same county.

I really do appreciate everyone's opinions on taking into account the floorplan of the house and our family planning/entertaining goals. I'm a big planner, so this really helps a lot. We would really love to have a one floor home, but not sure of house plans out there that fit our needs. We could pay for an architect, that might fit our bill/budget better. I will have to think about this more.

I like to say that when you buy an stock house plan, you're trying to fit yourselves to the plan vs when you have an architect design a plan with you in mind, you're building a house that fits you.

Think of why you want to build a house. It's to build your vision and to build for how you and your family (now and future family) will live.

Don't forget the costs of developing raw land. It is minimal when a developer bulldozes an entire tract and throws up houses they've built 100's of times, but a custom home on raw land is much more expensive. Clearing, driveway, utilities, septic, etc.

Also, I don't see how you can effectively design a home without having the land. Despite having 7 acres, our land dictated the design and orientation after considering the topography, views, and desired energy efficiency. It's fine to look at plans and get ideas, but I wouldn't go too far into your design until you have selected a piece of property.

Infrastructure in your target area is very costly. Also check into city and county fees in that area. As I remember, there is a VERY high cost to do business there. Lovely area, in high demand and people pay dearly for that privilege.

Another suggestion to get house specifics out of your head and find your land. You may know how many bedrooms and baths you want, or preference for open plan etc, but choosing a house before the land misses a lot of opportunities to have the house work for you AND with the land.

I am assuming you have the finance is not an issue here. Also know that there are plans which are in the 2800-3000 sqft range and still gives you what you need and room to grow. Also, assuming it is custom build, make sure to have at least 10% as overage.

Is your land very flat ? one of the key if selecting a plan is to make sure it will work well with the land. Of course, you can move earth,,,,backfill.....etc. but that costs lot of money.

About this plan, the wrap around porch is very nice, keep in mind it will add to the cost. I would make the back porch wider to fit in a grill and outdoor dining, of course, it depends on your climate.

Biggest concern - it is master down. Will that be an issue when you have little ones ?

I guess you can use the office as nursery, in that case, I would suggest changing the door location and open it close to master bedroom.

formal dining is closed off so putting a big table and have enough space all around, may become tight. I would say open up the wall with kitchen so that you extend the table that way. If you want to or have to keep that wall, then just have a opening instead of French door, and may be a butler's pantry.

I am not sure if the kitchen has enough space for that small island, often times those islands in a u-shaped kitchen acts as a barrier.

great room will be too narrow at 15' I am guessing it includes the hallway to master. Which means, it is really 11'.

Master closet is too small. toilet location seems a bit far off.

I would suggest having plumbing for washer/dryer upstairs. When the kids grow up, they will generate lot of laundry. At least have the setup, its much more cost effective to do it now.

Also, with such a big upstairs, I would want to see another bathroom, or a guest suite with bathroom. If you have boys and girls, the girls (or the girl) would want to have her own bathroom.

Another possibility, is to have a double master - turn the family room upstairs into 2nd master with attached bath. So that you can be closer to the children when they are young.

- I prefer the reverse stair option.

That's all for now. Good luck with your build, this is surely exciting time.

Shows you I was tired last night and missed the fact you don't even have the land yet.

Of course you need the land even before you look at house plans. And then get an architect to help you design a house that works for you and the land you'll be sitting on. They are not mutually exclusive anymore than the interior is not mutually exclusive to the exterior. All have to work as a harmonious whole.

I applaud your saving and planning, but I feel you may be getting far ahead of yourselves.

Right now you do not have a family to house, and you won't have a *large* family for years. Also, because you are not yet parents, you don't have experienced insights about raising *your* individual children. Schools, child care, how spaces in a house work with babies, toddlers, older kids. Observing other families isn't the same thing. Children don't all have the same needs, but they are all *expensive* to raise. You could regret tying up too much in a house or find that the location doesn't work for your family.

Your post reminds me of someone who was on the Buying and Selling a Home Forum a few years ago. She was living with her husband in the beautiful four-bedroom home they'd built for children that never came. They'd built before the RE crash and couldn't afford to sell without bringing a lot of cash to the closing. There was no escape from the failed dream.

Might you slow down on the house plans and speed up on the babies? Move to an existing home until you know how much house you need?

Sounds like you are taking the right steps in planning. Generally speaking, the more research you can do the better. Definitely not too early to start looking at architects and builders. We have friends who just finished having their house built in King County and it was a much more difficult process and took much longer than they had anticipated.

I would echo the suggestions of others not to get too invested in a specific house plan before you get your property. It's great to have a rough idea for a guesstimate and figuring out your needs/wants, which it sounds like you are doing.

(If you are ready for kids, I would not delay having kids to build a house first. Nor would I hurry the design/building of a house just to be done before a child arrives. I would try to be flexible as possible on timing since there's so much that might be beyond your control.)

Good luck!

"Might you slow down on the house plans and speed up on the babies? Move to an existing home until you know how much house you need?"

stickin' my neck out here and saying that these are very wise words.

i like your plan to a degree. My biggest criticism is the direct entry from the great room into the master bedroom. I think an architect could improve this plan with some tweaking. The outside is really pretty. The inside is just not very gracious for a plan of 3500 sq ft and costing close to a million to build (in my area, with a basement).

I'm afraid I'm with those who see red flags all over this plan, and I too urge you not to give up on this dream, but to slow it down. Look objectively at what you're considering: Buying land (after you finish getting funds together -- that's a big red flag), Building a large dream house (which you admit makes you nervous) as your first house ever, Learning to maintaining /paying for a large house before you've ever had a small one, Having children, Leaving your job to run a small business, Adding animals to your family, Hosting all the family gatherings.

Would you really suggest to a friend that she do all of this NOW?

I hear you when you say that your careers are taking off, and
you feel that you've "made it" -- and you're doing very well for a young couple! But truthfully you're looking at a house for a
family who "made it" years ago and has saved aggressively for a decade or more.

This plan will work ONLY IF everything goes right in your life: Your children arrive one at a time and healthy, Your husband's career continues without interruption, Your new business takes off, and more.

Your early career years are the right time to save aggressively -- for your kids' college (yes, I saved before mine were conceived) and for your retirement. Those are the things that NEED years to grow, and your greatest financial asset is TIME. You have years ahead of you for compound interest to work its magic -- if you don't tie up all your financial assets in a house that you don't yet need.

My suggestion for an order of operations:

- Buy a small, existing house and plan to stay in it 7-10 years.

- Save aggressively for your future children's college and for your own retirement. Put aside 40,000 per child for college; this will grow before the children turn 18 and need it, and since you'll probably still be working, this savings + your current earnings will be enough to bankroll a state college.

- Also save for the dream house.

- Start having babies.

- Begin those other projects slowly, one at a time.

- When the kids are all here, and you know how many bedrooms you'll need ... and when they're old enough to actually want that space upstairs (they won't play away from you until they're 7-8 anyway) THEN build the dream house. By that point, after having owned a small house for a while, your opinions on a "just right house" will have changed, and you'll know yourself and your family better.

- Or, at minimum, consider leaving off the master bedroom wing and the upstairs family room for now ... and add them later when you actually need them.

I wish you luck, I really do.

About the house plan:

- It's a lovely exterior. Just my style!

- If family gatherings are a priority for you, I think you'd want a larger dining room. 13x13 won't hold a very large table.

- Still on the subject of dining, do you really need a breakfast table AND island seating in two separate places?

- U shaped kitchen don't particularly work well with islands in this configuration; they "trap people" in the U.

- I would not place a desk in that spot in the kitchen. Imagine someone's sitting at the desk ... his chair will block the path into the kitchen, annoying everyone else in the family -- plus you have an office just around the corner. What I think you might actually want in the kitchen -- I'd want it a bit more out of sight /towards the entry -- is more of a family control center: A designated place for a calendar and kids' sports and school schedules, a place to stick the tickets to next week's Halloween carnival to a bulletin board, a shelf where phones can sit to charge, a place for sunglasses and car keys. And I want NONE of that in my kitchen.

- Do you barbeque often? I'd want a more direct door to the backyard. As it is, you'll have to carry platters of meat around the peninsula, past the breakfast room table, and into the great room to reach the porch ... then you'd have to turn right and navigate the porch furniture to get to the steps on the far end.

- Covered porches are wonderful (I have one on my current house and plan one for my next house too!), but 8' isn't wide enough for a porch that'll really be used (though 6', even 5', is enough for a show-only porch, as I suspect your front porch will be). My covered porch is 12' wide x 30' long, and it's perfect: We have the grilling area on one end, a table in the middle, and seating on the far end ... and we can walk straight to the steps without furniture being in the way.

- I do not like bay windows under covered porches, but that's personal preference.

- Speaking of porches, why do you have a set of steps on the far left of the front porch? It's not near the garage /driveway.

- The laundry room is far from ALL the bedrooms. Note that to put away clean clothes in your master closet, you'll have to carry those baskets about 60' (half the length of a football field) and through four doors. Most people on this board seem to prefer the laundry near the bedrooms since that's where people change clothes, and keeping the rooms near one another = fewer steps. If you anticipate a large family, I'd consider a second laundry upstairs; it wouldn't be out of sync with a house this size. I would suggest a laundry chute from the upstairs bath, but the clothes would land in the great room!

- I'd flip the washer/dryer to the opposite side of the laundry room. This will allow you to keep water in only ONE wall (and with the refrigerator on that wall, you're probably going to want water for an ice maker).

- With the kids' bathroom upstairs, the downstairs powder room will see heavy use. This super-narrow set-up is not comfortable -- remember, you're going to use this room for potty training, which means you'll sit in there for long stretches at a time ... and that door is set up in such a way that you'll have to be in the room with the door closed so you can watch the child ... I guess you'll be sitting on the sink. I'd make this area into a large reach-in pantry and carve out a more comfortable powder room using some of the laundry room space OR some of that storage in the garage.

- Since you anticipate a large family, I'd add some organizing items in the garage entryway. The size is already plentiful, but a bench where kids can sit while you put their shoes on /coat hooks /places for bookbags, etc. would be useful. In this same area, I'd add a door to close off the kitchen ... in a house of this size /expense, I wouldn't expect to see the garage door from the living area.

- At 24x24, the garage is a rather ideal size. That's a large storage area in the garage -- do you need it, or will it just collect junk? Keep in mind that you have significant storage upstairs over the garage too.

- The family room is plenty deep, but it's only 15' wide ... and about 3' of that must be used for walkway, so you actually only have 12' of space for furniture. This doesn't seem to be in keeping with the rest of the house.

- How do you plan to use the office /homeschooling room? I'd add a second door into this room over near the master bedroom entrance, and I'd use real doors on both. The rest of the house is open; I'd want this room to have both visual and acoustical privacy.

- I'd decrease the master bedroom width. 19' is very wide, even with a king bed, yet you don't have the right set-up for a seating area on one end. The windows in the master bedroom are very nice.

- The master bath could be so much nicer! It's an odd shape: as you walk in, the around-the-corner part won't be visible, odd. Consider, too, the pathway necessary to reach the toilet: Through two doors and around a corner. The shower looks small; I think I'd make the current toilet-closet into a shower -- a shower gets daily use, and a large one is a nice luxury. The master closet isn't particularly spacious -- I might use some of that excess bedroom space to enlarge this.

- Upstairs, the three bedrooms and bathroom look good, and all that linen storage will be great for kids' sleeping bags, etc. ... but why do you need a rec room AND a family room?

I have to agree with the others about the house. If I had bought the house I thought I wanted for my first house, I'd have been very unhappy. But thankfully we couldn't afford a huge house to start so we bought a starter home and it taught me what I needed vs what I wanted.

I managed to live in a two bedroom/ two bath home of only 1500 square feet (it actually might have been smaller) with two children until my baby was 1 year old. We had a small eat in kitchen, LR/DR, front entry/porch area, two bedrooms and a walk up attic, which became my studio area. We lived there for 7 years and it was perfect because when I finally saw our 3200 square foot house, I knew it would work perfectly for our family as they grew up.

And I agree, don't put off having those babies. Hopefully you'll be like me where the first time you give up the contraception, you're pregnant. However I've had too many friends who suffered through years of trying before they were able to have children.

Have you done research in how long it would take for forested land to be able to sustain sheep? I know when you doing this for horses it takes awhile to go from forest to pasture.