This plan puts a three-bedroom farmhouse and a workshop just as big side by side, joined by a covered porch that wraps all four sides of the house. All 2,050 square feet of living space sit on one floor. The plan is listed as two stories because of an attic over the bedrooms and a loft in the shop.
I’ll walk you through it the way you’d see it in person, starting at the front porch. We’ll tour the house, cross the breezeway to the shop and its loft, and end on the back porch.
Specifications:
- 2,050 Heated S.F.
- 3 Beds
- 2 Baths
- 2 Stories
- 3 Cars
The Floor Plans:
The Front Porch and the Front Doors
The front steps lead up under a gable trimmed with heavy timbers, and the porch ceiling beneath it rises to a peak like the roof. That shape is called a cathedral ceiling, and it makes the front of the porch feel more like an outdoor room than a walkway. Stone bases and low stone walls line the edge, with a bench on each side of the steps.
The porch then runs all the way around the house, deep enough on every side for a row of rocking chairs with a clear path behind them. On the shop side, it doubles as a breezeway, a covered walkway to the shop. That’s the way we’ll cross over later in the tour.
Add up all four sides and there’s more floor under the porch roof than inside the house. Architectural Designs counts 2,282 square feet of porch, and it’s the part of the house you’d use on every mild evening.
The double front doors open with no foyer behind them, so your first step inside puts you in the main room of the house. The tall ceiling from the porch carries on indoors, and that’s where the tour goes next.
The Main Level Floor Plan
The Great Room, Under the Cathedral Ceiling
Inside, the kitchen, the dining area and the great room share one long space under a cathedral ceiling. The walls are 11 feet tall before the ceiling even starts to climb, so the room feels open the moment you walk in, and nobody cooking or sitting down is shut away in a separate room.
The kitchen takes the shop side of the front doors, and the great room takes the far side. It’s about 16 by 25 feet, long enough for a sofa facing the fire and a reading chair by one of the windows. The fireplace sits in the middle of the long outside wall with a window on each side, and the chair closest to the fire gets good reading light.
For a look at how a great room like this can be finished inside, a similar farmhouse with interior renderings shows one with exposed beams and a stone fireplace.
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Now let’s cross the open room to the kitchen, on the other side of the front doors.
The Kitchen and Its Island
The kitchen is about 16 by 12 feet, and the island is the center of it. The island measures 5 by 8 feet, a little longer than a queen bed, and it holds the double sink and the dishwasher. So whoever is washing up faces the great room and the fireplace instead of a wall.
The refrigerator and the cooktop line the wall on the shop side, and a double oven stands in the corner by the front wall. With the sink on the island and the stove on the wall, one person can rinse and chop while another cooks, and neither one is standing in the other’s spot.
The island’s position also keeps traffic out of the kitchen. The path from the front doors to the bedroom hall runs up the middle of the house, between the island and the great room, so people passing through walk by the end of the kitchen instead of through the cook’s work space.
Behind the kitchen, still under the tall ceiling, is the dining area.
The Dining Area, Coffee Bar and Pantry
There’s room here for a long farmhouse table, in a space about 16 by 10 feet, close enough to the island that nobody has to raise their voice to talk with the cook.
The coffee bar runs along the dining area’s inside wall, and there’s a small sink in its counter. You can fill the coffee pot and rinse mugs there without going to the island, so anyone can make a cup while dinner is cooking.
Beside the coffee bar, tucked into the corner on the shop side, is a walk-in pantry lined with shelves. It’s big enough to take the toaster, the stand mixer and the paper towels off the counters, which matters in a kitchen where the island is the main work surface.
At the end of the coffee bar, in the middle of the house, a hall heads back toward the bedrooms, and the first two doors on the shop side are the hall bath and the laundry room.
The Hall Bath and the Laundry Room
The bath has a tub, a toilet and a sink, and it serves the two spare bedrooms and anyone visiting. It’s also the only bathtub in the house, because the owners’ bath has a walk-in shower instead. That makes it the tub for bath time with a small child, or for washing the dog.
Right past it, halfway down the hall, is the laundry room, a long, narrow room about 15 by 6 and a half feet. It holds a washer, a dryer, a long counter for folding and a utility sink, and it’s a short walk from every bedroom in the house.
The laundry room also has a door to the outside. It opens onto the breezeway, with the shop’s side door directly across, about 10 feet away. Someone coming in from working on a truck can wash up at the utility sink and drop the dirty clothes straight into the washer, and the kitchen never sees the grease.
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Across the hall from the laundry are the two spare bedrooms.
The Two Spare Bedrooms
Bedrooms 2 and 3 sit side by side on the far side of the house, just behind the great room. They’re nearly twins, each about 14 by 11 feet with walls a little over 9 feet tall, a double-door closet and a window that looks out onto the side porch.
The two closets sit between the rooms, back to back. That puts a wall of hanging clothes between the two beds, which helps keep a late phone call or a television in one room from carrying into the other.
The porch roof shades both bedroom windows, so these rooms stay cooler and shadier than a bedroom with bare glass. Either one fits a queen bed and a dresser with the closet doors still clear. They work for children, for visitors who stay a week, or for an office and a sewing room later on. The owners’ bedroom is at the end of the hall, in the back corner.
The Owners’ Bedroom
The owners’ bedroom takes the back corner of the house on the shop side. It’s about 19 by 15 feet, nearly as much floor as the two spare bedrooms put together, with space for a king bed, a pair of chairs and a dresser without anything crowding the doorways.
Its window faces the back porch. Because the room sits at the back, it’s about as far from the front doors, the kitchen and the television as a room can get in this house, so it stays quiet when everyone else is still up.
The walk-in closet opens off one side of the bedroom, toward the laundry, and the bath opens off the other, along the back wall. The spare rooms are just down the hall, which is handy with young children or a guest who may need a hand at night. For a layout that puts them at the far end of the house instead, a 2,107-square-foot farmhouse with split bedrooms is close to this plan in size.
The Owners’ Bath and Walk-In Closet
Inside the bath are two sinks, so two people can get ready at once, plus a toilet, a tall cabinet for towels, and a tiled walk-in shower with a built-in seat. That cabinet keeps towels and spare toilet paper in the room where they’re used, instead of down the hall.
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A walk-in shower is easier to step into than a tub, and the seat means you can sit down while you wash. It’s handy for shaving, or for sitting under the hot water for a minute at the end of a long day.
The walk-in closet is about 11 by 6 and a half feet, lined on three sides for clothes and shoes. The laundry room is on the other side of its wall, so it’s a short trip from the dryer to the closet, and folded shirts never have to travel the length of the house.
The last part of the house is overhead, in the attic.
The Attic Storage Above the Bedrooms
The second-floor drawing shows an attic storage room above the bedroom end of the house. It’s about 16 by 34 feet, roughly the floor of a two-car garage, with a ceiling a little over 8 feet high, so you can stand up and walk around in it.
Holiday decorations, luggage and the boxes you only open once a year can all go up there instead of filling the bedroom closets. No staircase leads up to it, though. The only stairs in the whole plan are out in the shop.
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That makes the way up your choice when you order the plans, and a pull-down attic ladder is the usual answer. A typical one costs $400 to $1,000 installed, by HomeAdvisor’s figures, and framing the opening while the house is going up saves cutting through a finished ceiling later.
Back on the main floor, the tour heads next door, out the laundry door we passed earlier and straight across the breezeway.
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The Shop and the Drive-Through RV Bay
The shop is a separate building of 2,125 square feet, just a bit bigger than the house beside it. Architectural Designs calls the plan barndominium-style because of that big shop built alongside the home. Because it stands on its own, its noise and dust stay out of the house. Inside, the walls are 16 feet tall.
It has two bays. The bigger one has a door 12 feet wide and 14 feet tall in the front wall, and a matching door straight across from it in the back wall. You pull a motorhome or a boat trailer in the front and drive out the back, and with both doors rolled up you can see straight through the building to the yard behind it.
ProBuilt Steel, a company that sells steel RV garages, gives 12 by 14 feet as the smallest door for a Class A motorhome, the big kind that looks like a bus. So this bay is built for the biggest class of RV, not just a camper.
For anyone who rents indoor space for an RV now, StowHelp’s state-by-state guide puts that at $150 to $450 a month. If an RV will live here, the bay will want its own outlet, and that’s the first item in the last section.
The Two-Car Bay and the Shop Stairs
The other bay has a regular two-car door, 18 feet wide and 8 feet tall, for the everyday cars. Together with the big bay, that’s room for three vehicles in all, which is where the plan’s three-car rating comes from.
The tall walls help on this side as well. They leave room for the big doors to roll up out of the way, and they’re tall enough for a car lift if someone in the family likes to work on cars.
The loft stairs climb along the wall closest to the house, with a closet beside them. A walk-in door on the back wall opens close by, which makes them easy to reach straight from the backyard. The closet is a handy spot for the shop vacuum, the extension cords and the things that shouldn’t sit out in the dust.
Barndominiums come much bigger than this, too. The 7,781-square-foot barndominium with an apartment joins its shop right onto the main living area.
The Loft Above the Shop
At the top of the stairs is a loft of about 300 square feet, close to the size of the owners’ bedroom, over the back corner of the shop. Its walls are about 7 and a half feet tall, a little lower than the rooms in the house, and the rest of the shop stays open all the way up to the roof.
The plan calls it an office or storage space. As an office, it’s out of the house entirely, with the breezeway between your desk and the rest of the household. It sits over the back corner, away from the big front doors, and two windows in the shop’s back wall bring in daylight.
As storage, it keeps the camping gear, the lawn chairs and the RV’s spare hoses right next to the bay where they get used. Back downstairs, the breezeway leads straight onto the back porch.
The Second Level Floor Plan
Balanced Farmhouse Plan with 3-Car Garage – 2481 Sq Ft (Floor Plan)
The Back Porch
The back porch runs behind the owners’ bedroom and bath, and it’s a natural spot for meals outdoors. It faces away from the road, which makes it the most private stretch of the porch, the place for morning coffee before anyone else is up. This run alone is about 54 feet long, with room for a dining table, a bench, a pair of lounge chairs and a grill without anyone squeezing past.
The rendering sets the grill at the shop end, near the breezeway, and the lounge chairs at the other end, where the porch turns the corner. Beyond the chairs, the side porch leads around past the bedroom windows and the great room’s stone chimney to the front.
When it rains, you can sit out here, listen to the rain on the metal roof and stay dry, because a porch 10 feet deep keeps the chair cushions out of all but a sideways storm.
BONUS: What to Plan Before the Shop Is Built
A shop this size is easiest to set up while its walls are still open, and two choices are worth making before the electrician’s first visit.
If an RV will live in the big bay, ask for a 50-amp RV outlet beside it. That’s the heavy-duty plug big motorhomes use, and the same outlet can charge most electric cars. The Garage Guide prices a simple install at $300 to $800 when the wire doesn’t have to run far, which is easy to plan while the shop is being built.
If the loft will be an office, plan its heating and cooling now. A ductless mini-split, one small wall unit that heats and cools the room, is a common choice for a space like this, at about $2,000 to $5,000 installed for a one-room system in Fixr’s cost guide. Running its lines during construction means nobody opens a finished wall later.
And if you’d want a real finished room up there instead of a loft, a farmhouse with a garage bonus room has one above its three-car garage and shop.
It’s a modest three-bedroom house and a serious shop, with a porch holding them together. Would you use the loft as an office, or keep it for storage? Tell me in the comments.