Part 2 – 3015 sqft 3 Bedroom House, Georgia

John,
Congratulations on the Rising Star award (Paul C posted this news yesterday). It’s amazing you actually find the time to keep this website going on top of your other work!

As for this Atlanta house, we’ve all concurred with your observations, although Leo says that it’s not all bad because it’s open and situated well for light. He proposed alternate uses for some rooms, ie. media room where formal dining room is. However, given this much floor area, there must be several ways to make so much space more efficient while maintaining the orientation. Perhaps we might tackle it as a design project some day–how to make the non-slow three-car-garage home more slow?

My first thoughts on seeing this weeks wwwth (my first chance to visit Slow Home in a while) was that this plan is not the worst, and is salvageable.
I see most of my ideas were suggested yesterday, but, turn the 1 car garage into a 3rd childs bedroom (and landscape the driveway, rather than asphalting the whole thing), reclaim some of the master closet to give the kids a usable bathroom, remove the breakfast nook (and remodel the kitchen) to open up to an alfresco eating area, re-label the formal dinning room to a seating/media area, re-label the ‘teenage room’ (huh?!?) to the office that it really is… And you have a plan that is relatively nice. Especially that large living dinning area along the south side of the house. Of course there will still the fundamental issue of too much space, too much consumption, but still, not the worst. There are McMansions 100 times more offensive than this.

Heres some creative ideas for re-appropriating McMansions i hope everyone gets a kick out of:
http://www.re-burbia.com/2009/08/05/the-frogs-dream-suburban-eco-water-management/
http://www.re-burbia.com/2009/07/31/entrepreneurbia/