The second area (and second floor) of our house contains the private spaces. The activities located here are more personal: sleeping, bathing, dressing, and quiet activities such as reading, writing, crafts, etc. There will also be storage and laundry space. The second floor works well for all of these, as it is separated from the public areas of the first floor, and is “deeper” into the house than the first floor — you must cross through the public areas and go up the stairs (a transition) to get to the private spaces. This provides a feeling of privacy and security.
Mirroring the first floor, the second floor must have an entry. Where the stairs enter into the second floor should be a landing or distribution area. Unlike the first floor, where the open public spaces allow flow through each area, the second floor should have direct entry to most of the spaces (e.g., you should not have to cross through the master bedroom to get to one of the children’s bedrooms).
Our bedroom (the master bedroom) will contain two functional areas: sleeping, and dressing. In most bedrooms these areas are combined into one large room; we are considering having them a bit more separate, but we haven’t decided for sure yet. Clothes storage is part of the dressing area, but this does not mean we’ll have a traditional walk-in closet; instead, we may look at built-ins along the wall which would conserve floor space while still providing plenty of storage. One of the areas should accommodate some quiet activities that require light — for example, reading a book, or writing a journal before bed.
Attached to the master bedroom will be the master bath, with most of the normal pieces: shower, sink and toilet. We will probably skip a bathtub, as neither of us use it regularly; instead, we’ll just have a larger shower and still save space. We do want two sinks so we can share the use of the bathroom.
The other main area for upstairs will be bedrooms for children (we want children; but we prefer to have only one major life change at a time, so we’ll wait until the house is done). Planning ahead for children can be a bit tricky, and the needs of children change over time; building in one particular way might not work even if we already had kids. We’re thinking about starting out with a shared room (with private bed alcoves) for when they are young. We would design it in such a way that it could be divided as they get older (especially if they end up being different genders). This could possibly be accomplished with dynamic walls that allow us (or them) to join or separate the rooms as desired.
We think that the convention that adults should have elaborate master suites while children should have simple boxes is backwards. The rooms for the children should accommodate sleeping, dressing, play, homework and many other activities that we, as adults, would use the office or living area for. They will also need a bathroom, which will have a combined shower/tub, since it is much easier to use a tub when kids are young.
The laundry room will be upstairs, near the bedrooms, as that is the most convenient place to use it. We will probably have space for both machine and hand wash (a large sink, for example), and machine and hand dry (racks and lines for drying).
There will be various storage upstairs — for linens, towels, clothes, kids toys, books, etc. Don’t tell the kids, but we also want to design a small “secret” storage place into each child’s room (different in each room, of course).
We will also have some space for pets upstairs. Right now this is a pair of cats, and all their associated litter, water, food, toys, etc. We would like a space that is semi-private for them to feel secure in; and that is easy to clean up messes (hairballs), food spills, litter, hair (i.e., not carpet!).
