A little late getting these up, but I haven't played in a while. First up, took a stab at breaking up the brick fortress look as suggested. I expect this will change at least a bit in the future, but for getting well outside my decorating skill set, I'm happy with this for now:
I've also done some work fixing my floorplan which divided the entertaining and living space between both floors with an upstairs performance/dance hall, and a downstairs bedroom. Combined with the tiny and oddly shaped bathrooms, and I am surprised I kept that layout for as long as I did. The biggest challenge here was that for gameplay reasons, I really wanted two downstairs bathrooms, and I had to keep the study with the secret basement entrance.
To expand the entertaining space and move the dancing downstairs, I opted to knock out the kitchen and expand the living room into that space with a new wall separating it from the dinning room. Next, I moved the Kitchen into the space occupied by the downstairs bedroom and one of the bathrooms. It took some playing around, and the kitchen is substantially smaller, but it was largely wasted space before and this layout seems to work. This also means that the kitchen, living room, and dinning room are now connected as a circle, where before the dinning room was only accessible from outside and the kitchen.
To get my bathroom back, and to get some needed additional space on the main floor, I eliminated the family room entirely and completely redid the layout for that side of the house. The office is now accessible from the hall leading to the backdoor, while the bathrooms now face each other and are accessible from a small hallway leading away from the stairs. This lends the bathroom some privacy as well (how many houses have you been in where there was a bathroom directly off the living room?):
Upstairs, the former dance/performance studio gave me a lot of free space to play with. I had to put in a bedroom and family room to replace the rooms I lost, and I decided to stick in an upstairs bathroom for good measure. After a little bit of playing room tetras, I settled on the current layout that puts the bedroom on the back wall where the good view is, and places the family room and bathroom off to the sides of a narrow hall leading back to the bedroom. I did this because I was able to run one grand(ish) hall down the front of the top floor, which I like, and it avoided any 5 sided rooms from trying to place the 3 rooms so they could all be accessed from the front of the house. Also, I wasn't able to easily fit the laundry facilities into any of the bathrooms, so I decided to make the bit of house past the stairs on the second floor useful again by turning that into the laundry room:
As always, thoughts, suggests, and criticisms welcome!
Oh, and some interior shots and the blueprint shots:
