The real cost of a bad floor plan

Walk into any unhappy home and you'll find the same story. The kitchen island is a metre too wide. The hallway eats six square metres that nobody uses. There's a beautiful sofa nobody can comfortably sit on because the TV ended up on the wrong wall.

These are not finish problems. They're floor-plan problems — decisions baked in long before the first tile was laid. And once the walls go up, fixing them costs ten times what it would have cost to think more carefully on day one.

The most expensive thing in a renovation is not marble. It's a plan you'll resent in two years.

Spend a week living inside your floor plan on paper. Tape it onto the existing floor. Walk the route from bed to coffee. Imagine guests arriving in the rain. The plan that survives a week of imagined living is the plan worth building.