Door & windows

Windows and Doors: Perfect Placement

Building a house and making it your home is one of the biggest goals of many families. It is a dream to be the first person to live in the space and to be able to make each decision about the design your own. In designing your home it is easy to overlook things like the placement of light switches or plugs. In the end however it will matter when running the vacuum, plugging in nightlights, running Christmas lights. It is so important to make each element count. That includes the placement of windows and doors.

Windows and doors have to be placed correctly for your home design to flow naturally. It is important to take their placement into consideration in each room. Think about how the furniture will be placed before you establish where the entry door will be. The same thing should be taken into consideration with windows with the size and shape. I always have disliked the windows in our bedroom because they are placed in such a way that our bed has to stay on one wall. If we move the bed anywhere else it would be placed underneath a window and that does not work for our family.

It is also important in thinking about the air flow in your home. Windows and doors let the air circulate through your home. That is one thing I really like about our homes design. We have two door walls, one in the kitchen and one in the living room. We also have French doors directly across from the door wall in the living room. I hardly ever run the air in the summer because the breeze flows through the house. We have a ceiling fan that also helps keep the air moving to create an environment without stale air.

A room was added within the original space of our home before we moved in. This created a very unbalanced room. We use this as a sitting area. The problem is that the windows are now not centered on the wall. The addition wall actually butts directly up to the one of the windows. It is odd for many reasons. The window treatments have to be those in which are put directly in the window casing. It is also weird for air to flow because it comes in that window and meets with a wall. It really has no balance at all. If I were there when they were designing this added room I would have suggested that they further bring the wall into our sitting area and make the room addition larger and include two windows instead of just the one.

It is personal preference when design your dream home. The placement of windows and doors is one in which great thought and common sense should be brought in. Spare no detail. If you spare any detail, small or large, it will end up being the one thing that continues to plague you after you are settling into your new home. My girlfriend did not put too much thought into outlets and now will forever be plagued with a light switch that should be in the mud room before you enter the home but that lives in the kitchen. You need to open the door from the mud room to the kitchen before you can flip a light on to take off your shoes. It happens to all of us.