Not only do I have to get permission from the local government, but this server does not allow me to see photobucket, so I have not seen the drawing. I will check tonight when at home. Meanwhile, I really like your ideas! I took a stroll yesterday evening and tried to envision panels and cutting back the wild stuff. I have someone coming in today who can help me with the heavy work (for a price, of course). Then I modified my original idea and kept to the budget. Canvas! great idea! Also the end of the lot closest to the picnic table near the gate of the fence, well, I was thinking of putting a pyrimidal trellis and planting clematis, so great minds and all that. Now that the box seems to be crumbling, I have been looking at outdoor plant racks and large box containers for raised gardens and looking at everything from different angles. When all done I can I will post pics. Thanks again!

Kauorika, I am afraid I too am "not lovin it." In addition to the tight hallway you originally asked about, and the lack of enough aisleway space between the shower and sink in Bath 1 (that betaiota mentioned), I see the following issues: 1) The extraoridinarily thick exterior walls are eating up a fairly high percentage of your potential interior space. Are you really planning for the exterior walls to be 18 inches thick? And if so, why are they so thick? Are you building a straw bale house? 2) While your hallways aren't that long, because your house is so small, the hallways, foyer, and staircase take up way too much of your available floorspace. 3) I think you're going to find it hard to fit a full-sized bed and a dresser into the bedroom and still have room to easily move about to reach the closet. I only see two possible walls for the head of the bed to go against. Either it will have to be placed under the (#12) windows - assuming they are high enough - or it'll have to be placed against the wall directly across from those windows. In the first case, getting around the bed to reach the closet is going to require squeezing between the foot of the bed and that bumped in wall that you have because of the little hallway niche you created to provide access to the bathroom. In the second, it's gonna be a long walk around the bed every time you need to get to the closet. And, because the bathroom really needs to be made wider (to give you room to slip past the shower), the bedroom will have to be made smaller making this problem even worse. 4) I suspect you visualize a pretty little seating area in the "window bumpout" in the bedoom. A couple of comfy chairs, maybe a little round table? At 7.5 feet, the bumpout is just barely wide enough for that purpose but, depending on the direction that house faces, the windows on three sides could effectively create a little greenhouse and make the window bumpout area uncomfortably warm all the time. And, if you need to reduce the width of the bedroom to make the bath wider, your bed may crown any furniture you attempt to put in the window bump-out. 5) The dining room is just too small to accomodate anything more than maybe a tiny little four-seat round table. Remember, you need space all the way around your dining table for diners to get in and out of their chairs. And, because the only path from front entry to great room goes right thru the dining room, if the dining room is not wide enough, you'll constantly be having to duck around dining room chairs to get to the great room. 6) The pony wall/bar between kitchen and great room is a problem. The plans show that it is supposed to be 42" inches high as measured from the kitchen floor. Then the great room floor is dropped down from the kitchen floor level. If I'm reading the plans correctly, there are TWO steps down, with a 6" drop for each step. That means the great room floor is 12" lower than the kitchen floor. So, from the great room side, that pony wall is going to be 54" high! Now I'm fairly tall but a 54" high bar would be uncomfortably high even for me. And, it would be at chin height for my best friend. No way that is gonna work. 7) I see no possible way to arrange furniture in the "great room." You have a window seat on one wall. YOu have a kitchen bar and the step down entry on a second wall. YOu have the fireplace and built-in bookcases on the third wall. And you have a wall of windows and an inswinging patio door on the last wall. You have NO reasonably blank walls against which you can place a sofa or a couple of easy chairs. That means everything is going to have to "float" which would be fine EXCEPT that floating furniture arrangements take more space than arrangements where the furniture is pushed up against the walls. Here, your whole room (except for the window seat niche) is only about 12X15. By the time you leave space in front of the window seat niche for an aisleway from kitchen to that patio door, and leave space for barstools at the bar and aisleway space to reach them, and leave space in front of your bookcases so you can get to books shelved there - your available room for arranging furniture has shrunk to something like 9 ft x 12 ft. Possibly even smaller Awfully hard to fit a sofa and a couple of easy chairs into theat small a space. If you want an end table or two, or a coffee table, or an ottoman, you're totally sunk. Do yourself a BIG favor. Make some scaled cutouts to represent every piece of furniture you THINK you want to have in each of your rooms and see if you can make everything fit. And, remember that you need room to walk around and REACH each piece of furniture so be sure to build in aisleway spaces. sorry to be so negative but even without seeing the upstairs or the basement, my inclination would be to scrap this plan and start over fress. There are just too many issues on this one floor that cannot be addressed with via small tweaks (i.e., tweaks that don't require moving the staircase or any exteior walls.)

lynn2006 - I'm not necessarily handy, this is my first time trying this stuff, lol. I just watch a lot of how to videos, and then take my time. The cabinets are from Cliq Studios in Dayton White. I searched a long time, and saw the positive and negative reviews for them, but they were the best option for us. They just arrived yesterday, and I do have problems with a couple of them which will need to be replaced. A couple of the negative reviews dealt with the shipping situation from Cliq, but my experience was fine. They scheduled the delivery for 3-6 PM, but the driver arrived before 2PM. I wasn't home, and he waited for me until I arrived at 2:55. As for color, I had my sample color matched at Sherwin Williams - it's very close to SW Alabaster, which is a slightly creamy white. The walls have one coat of SW Creamy (over the old green color), but I'm not sure I like the two different whites together. I'll wait for the 2nd coat on the walls until the countertops are installed. Speaking of countertops - I was originally planning on Silestone, but changed my mind to get soapstone on the perimeter. Here is my slab (it's not shiny, just the reflection of my camera flash where they sprayed it with water to show the dark color) Closeup with green veining:

That slope looks nice to me. Not sure if they would fix ours but I think I should at least ask. I like that house. We own the property and we are planning to do construction management. The guy who was selling the lots does the management- all of the houses in the neighborhood have been built that way so far. He is able to keep costs down since he has many of the contractors on site since there are a number of houses being built. We were originally thinking we would have the architect bid out the project. We told him our budget before we designed the house. When it was done he got an estimate from a contractor he uses and it was SO beyond our budget (like almost double I think?) we were infuriated. It seems even though we continually stressed that we were on a budget, the architect ignored it. We went to the construction management guy we were originally going to use and he was able to get the cost into our affordable range. From what my husband tells me, the tradeoff is that we are assuming a lot of risk. Which is particularly why I think we need this plan to be as good as we can get it, so things can move quicker once we start. The architect has no relationship with the manager except that we have put them in contact a few times- the manager has been helpful in pressuring him to move along faster. The architect's contract says he will make some site visits and things during building but I don't think I trust him anymore. We are hoping to keep the price down to 550. The manager thinks we can if we stick to the budget. He did price everything out roughly to get an estimate. From what I can tell there is no way to e-mail you directly from this site? I could send you the details then... Since we don't need to bid, I suppose the spec isn't as important. I am just concerned that a contractor might see it and assume it is what we want and move ahead with it rather then asking us. In our current apartment (we are in a brownstone in the NYC area) I see that our windows are not aligned with the door height and it looks fine to me (I never noticed it until this thread, just measured it all to get an idea for the house). We have 8' ceilings, the windows are 6" from the ceiling, 63" or so tall, and the top of the sill is 29" form the ground. That sounds like the same sill height and maybe even windows height that you are describing? I guess that gives me a good reference! So it would basically be exactly what we have here but almost 1' of additional ceiling above the window. Is there a standard or typical sill height?