Your house isn't too small. It's arranged in a way that fights you.
I'm Heather, a Colorado licensed architect. I help families figure out what's actually wrong with the house they already own, and what it would take to fix it.
Heather Hanson Homes
Under two minutes. Eight questions. An honest answer.
It's 7:27 in the morning and everyone needs the same three feet of floor
You're at the counter. Somebody needs shoes. Somebody else is in the exact spot you need to be in. The backpacks are on the island because the island is the only surface that exists, and you have already walked back to the bedroom twice for keys that were never going to be on the path to the garage door.
You've decided this is a space problem. Everyone tells you it's a space problem. But your house is 1,600 square feet and your parents raised three kids in something smaller, so maybe it's a you problem…
It's neither. It's the layout.
After designing houses for a living and renovating five of my own, here's what I keep finding. Most families who feel cramped are not short on square footage. They're living in rooms that are arranged in a way that makes every ordinary day harder than it needs to be, and nobody has ever taught them how to name it. You cannot organize your way out of that. My own entry had baskets, and the baskets worked. What failed was two adults needing the same doorway at the same second.
It's the layout, not your discipline.
Three problems hide in almost every house that feels harder than it should
01
The Pinched Entry with no drop zone.
The door your family actually uses (garage, side, back, whichever one is real) drops you somewhere with nowhere to set anything down. So everything you're carrying travels further into the house and lands on the kitchen island. The island isn't cluttered. It's doing a job the entry refused to do.
02
Mixed Public and Private Zones.
The path a guest takes, or the route to the bathroom, runs straight through the parts of your life you'd rather nobody saw. It's why hosting makes you panic-clean and why you close doors before anyone comes over. That's a floor plan, not a personality trait.
03
The Missing Spine.
There's no clear path through your house, so you pinball. Dodge a chair, hipcheck the counter, wait for somebody to move, go around the island the long way. Every trip costs a few seconds and four small adjustments, and you make that trip forty times a day. It's why a 950 square foot house can live like 600.
read more about the three flow problems
Start by finding out which problem you have
The first real question is not what to renovate. It's whether your house has the rooms your family needs, arranged badly, or genuinely does not have them at all. Those two situations look identical from the inside and they lead to completely different projects.
The quiz sorts it out in about ninety seconds.
Four Ways to Work with Me
depending on how far you want to go
01
The Home Flow Lab | $47
A forty minute recorded workshop that teaches you to see the three problems in your own house, plus the Friction Audit worksheet.
02
The Home Flow Method | $497
My full design process, self paced. You finish with a flow plan for your specific house that you can hand to a contractor.
03
The Flow Plan Review | $297
You send me the plan you made after doing The Home Flow Method. I record a video telling you what works, what doesn't, and what to change.
04
The Home Flow Consult | $1,997
I do it for you. Two virtual sessions, a flow plan drawn by a licensed architect, one round of revisions.
compare all four
Colorado licensed architect, mom of two, and somebody who has renovated five houses and lived in every one of them while the work was happening. I ran my own residential practice for five years designing renovations, additions and custom homes for people who could afford full architectural services.
Then I started doing layout fixes for my friends, for free, because they couldn't afford full architectural services. That turned out to be the work I actually wanted to do.
I live in southwest Colorado. I work with families all over the country, virtually.
More about me & why this business exists
Find out what's
Two minutes, eight questions, and an architect who will tell you if the answer is move.