Layout of the Duggar house

[FaeT]

Has anyone ever see the layout of the Duggar house?? http://www.kodiaksteelhomes.com/images/DuggarFloorPlan.pdf

 

A few things come to mind:

1) They have a bathroom right off the dinning room so the door opens into the dinning room?! Ew.

2) Prayer room!

3) Do the girls seriously have to go through mom and dad's room to get to their bedroom?!

4) The boys room is significantly bigger and nicer than the girls room.

5) Why do both parents need an office? Michelle doesn't work, remember? They each have an office on opposite floors.

6) I find it convenient that the boys are on one end of the house (above the playroom with a slide going to it nonetheless) while the girls are the other end with mommy and daddy

[pixydust]

The girls don't have to go through the parents room, but they do have to go past it.

The boys room might be bigger (at the time that they built it they had 10 boys and 5 girls, so it might make a little sense if they weren't planning for the future) but the girls room is far nicer. They have coordinating furniture that was bought new when they built the TTH, the boys have older thrift store furniture and little to no decorations.

[Didi]

The bathroom off of the dining room makes TOTAL sense to me and I dont find it weird or gross. :)

If I was the older girls and guys I'd be moving stuff around, so some of that storage space could be for older ones alone space. :)

The girls' bathrooms connect to their room not the parents??

[Witsec7]

There is a thread on this where all the space considerations and layouts were addressed. Search may help you folks rather than reinventing the wheel again.

[Guest Anonymous]

Floorplan talk starts here: viewtopic.php?p=115462#p115462

[terranova]

WTF is a goodbye room?

I think it makes sense to have a toilet off the dining room, especially when you have a zillion kids. I do think that in a house that size, it's odd to have a teeny tiny little guest room squashed into the corner behind the laundry.

[linnea27]

WTF is a goodbye room?

I think it makes sense to have a toilet off the dining room, especially when you have a zillion kids. I do think that in a house that size, it's odd to have a teeny tiny little guest room squashed into the corner behind the laundry.

I don't think it's really a guest room- I think it's Grandma Duggar's room. The placement behind the laundry room keeps her mindful of her place in the family- laundress.

[slickcat79]

I don't think it's really a guest room- I think it's Grandma Duggar's room. The placement behind the laundry room keeps her mindful of her place in the family- laundress.

It is her room, but it wasn't at the time the house was built. JL was still alive at the time, and they had their own house.

I don't think the floorplan is 100% accurate.

[Lillybee]

I just noticed that Ma and Pa Duggar seem to have a fancy bathtub.

[Lemonbalm]

Sorry saw the link to the other thread where the double toilets was discussed. Carry on. :)

[donks]

WTF is a goodbye room?

I think it makes sense to have a toilet off the dining room, especially when you have a zillion kids. I do think that in a house that size, it's odd to have a teeny tiny little guest room squashed into the corner behind the laundry.

I've thought about the bathroom off the dining room off and on since the last conversation we had about it.

I wasn't raised fundy, but it was a patriarchy (sp?)) And if we 'acted up' at the dining table we were dragged off and whipped in the bathroom.

I hope that isn't why it's there... But it does make me think.

[longskirtlotsakids]

I sincerely hope that somewhere they have an S&M dungeon. A St. Catherine's cross with a rack of whips and chains. It would explain why Michelle looks so gosh darn satisfied most of the time.

[Mind UR own uteress]

I think it's practical to have the bathroom there, as people can wash hands before eating or preparing food if the other sinks are busy. Also since they're homeschooling, they have a bathroom right there. So it's kind of like the school bathroom minus all he cool graffiti.

I think the slave quarters oops, i mean girls' room, is smaller because they had half as many slaves, oops, i mean girls when they designed the house. Notice how it is conveniently located over the kitchen while the boys' room is located over the playroom.

[silverspoons]

I'm always bothered when people build a huge house and they don't have a garage. They could not find room for a pantry in the 6000-7000 sq ft of the rest of the house so they had to use the garage?

It also seems like the Commerical kitchen takes up alot of space espcially since the have the pretty kitchen which is bigger then most families have with double appliances. I have always thought if the Duggars were building the house today with the new modern modest tatses they would not have the commerical kitchen, they would have a bigger pretty kitchen.

[CanadianHippie]

The bathroom off of the dining room makes TOTAL sense to me and I dont find it weird or gross. :)

+1.

But then, I grew up in a house with the bathroom right off the dining room and there have been no issues associated with that.

[Deleted07]

There seems to be a lot of small rooms that would be wasted in my opinion, like the sewing room? The Duggars haven't sewn their own stuff for YEARS!

[Childless]

Along with the sewing room, the studio is also wasted space. It was built for Smuggar. He hasn't lived there in years, so I doubt anyone uses it anymore. They should take some of that TLC money and do some renovation. There's no need for a "pretty" kitchen if you have a commercial kitchen. Wall off the "pretty" kitchen and make it a classroom. The kids may be able to concentrate better on school work if they're separated from the rest of the goings on in the house (I can't believe with all that room, JB and Michelle didn't think to put in a class room for their children. :roll: ). The sewing room, the studio, and Michelle's office (because I'm sure it barely gets used) could be bedrooms for some of the older kids so they don't have to bunk with toddlers. All the work those older girls do, it'd be nice if they had a place to get away and relax for a bit by themselves. You could even take part of the girls room and add it to the prayer room to make a fourth single bedroom. That would give the four older girls their own rooms. Plus, that cat walk, while nifty to look at, is such wasted space. They could put in four more bedrooms in that area alone.

[freealljs]

I'm pretty sure Jim Boob "apprenticed" with a Gothardite architect when coming up with the layout for the house. (I'll assume you all read that lame ass excuse of writing about how the J'kids apprentice with professionals. On an aside, does that mean if they want to be doctors that Boob or Mullet will allow them to operate on them after they're done apprenticing?-LOL)

Otherwise, they would have taken into consideration a nice pantry, a proper in-law suite for Grandma, extra guest rooms for those who visit, a, a prayer closet that doesn't look like a dungeon, a garage, and a laundry room that has their community closet attached to it, along with a better storage system.

[Coconut Flan]

If I remember correctly what Jim Bob said at the time, they planned the pantry like that with the overhead door to make it easier to unload the massive grocery trips. Why they didn't plan or build a garage I have no idea.

[She Who Laughs]

If I remember correctly what Jim Bob said at the time, they planned the pantry like that with the overhead door to make it easier to unload the massive grocery trips. Why they didn't plan or build a garage I have no idea.

They'd have to build a huge pole building not a garage anyway. A typical garage couldn't even begin to hold all their vehicles. And really garages aren't exactly a necessity, lots of people live without a garage and maybe they thought a huge pole building to house vehicles would be an eye-sore on the property.

[donks]

I don't think they really care about any of their vehicles except maybe the bus. Afterall, they could just sell any of the vans or SUV's at the car lot to a leghumper... Josh's salespitch 'it's screen-used!' Would appeal to the masses of idiots on the FB fanpage.

They do need at least a canopy for the bus. It's value is being affected by sitting out in the weather.

[slickcat79]

They'd have to build a huge pole building not a garage anyway. A typical garage couldn't even begin to hold all their vehicles. And really garages aren't exactly a necessity, lots of people live without a garage and maybe they thought a huge pole building to house vehicles would be an eye-sore on the property.

Given that they have several huge industrial warehouses on the property, I don't think they really care about the eyesore factor. But I don't think a garage would be so important for them either. Given how many vehicles they have, including vans and small buses, as well as SUVs and other cars, it would have to be a MASSIVE building to hold them all. And they live in rural Arkansas. They've had a couple of winter storms that have caused problems, but they don't have horrible winters like in the northeast. Garages aren't amazingly common in areas where you don't have to protect your cars from weather or criminals. I think having a huge pantry with freezers is a better use of that space for their family. And while the "pretty kitchen" isn't really necessary, I have seen them use both spaces. It probably would have made more sense to just have a single large kitchen instead of a second kitchen full of industrial appliances that they never really use.

The guest room is really wasted space, though, given the fact that it's attached to a laundry room. I would also guess that most of the small rooms upstairs are used for storage more than anything else. They are under the sloping roof of the house, so there's not a lot of headroom to work with. I wonder if they felt like it was hard to make floorplan changes, given that they built the house out of a kit?

[FaeT]

The guest room is really wasted space, though, given the fact that it's attached to a laundry room. I would also guess that most of the small rooms upstairs are used for storage more than anything else. They are under the sloping roof of the house, so there's not a lot of headroom to work with. I wonder if they felt like it was hard to make floorplan changes, given that they built the house out of a kit?

If you watch the episode where they build the house (it's only youtube) JB mentions that they kept changing the floor plan because j'chelle kept changing her mind and since it was a kit, it was easy to do. He also mentioned they bought two kits and put them together, which I suspect makes it easier to change things around.

I've always been curious about this build a house from a kit thing. I'd love to build my own home without the bullshit of a contractor and a cookie cutter floor plan. I need to watch that episode so I can figure out where they got the kit because I would really love to know what came with it and how much it cost.

I'm not sure what the half circle thing is by the parents bedroom, so it seemed like that whole space was theirs and the girls walked through their space, which wouldn't entirely surprise me since you can never trust a woman :roll: And my "ew" at the bathroom door opening into the dinning area is mainly about smell and visual. I wouldn't want everyone eating and seeing me enter/exit the bathroom. And I wouldn't want that smell right in my face while I'm eating either. But I do think the floor plan is slightly different. In the graduation pictures, there appear to be two doors in the wall at the end of the table.

[tropaka]

Didn't they get sent a kit that was "backwards" and then received ANOTHER set, and so the house doubled?

[slickcat79]

I think they actually ended up with three kits. One of the originals came with the holes drilled backwards, so they got sent a replacement but were allowed to keep the originals as well. That may have been what allowed them to have such a big open living area. I would imagine, since the kits are metal beams that have to be screwed together instead of wood, at some point you just wouldn't be able to change the layout anymore...especially when random builders are helping you finish it. I have a friend whose family hired a contractor to build them a custom house. They wanted to change the location of the bathrooms on his plans, but they forgot to take out the old ones when they added new one. By the time they realized what had happened, the bathrooms had already been plumbed, so they ended up with 7-8 bathrooms in a 5 bedroom house. Oops. Even with professionals involved, sometimes things don't come out quite like you planned.

The half circle thing outside JB&M's room is a spiral staircase.