About the house plan: - It's a lovely exterior. Just my style! - If family gatherings are a priority for you, I think you'd want a larger dining room. 13x13 won't hold a very large table. - Still on the subject of dining, do you really need a breakfast table AND island seating in two separate places? - U shaped kitchen don't particularly work well with islands in this configuration; they "trap people" in the U. - I would not place a desk in that spot in the kitchen. Imagine someone's sitting at the desk ... his chair will block the path into the kitchen, annoying everyone else in the family -- plus you have an office just around the corner. What I think you might actually want in the kitchen -- I'd want it a bit more out of sight /towards the entry -- is more of a family control center: A designated place for a calendar and kids' sports and school schedules, a place to stick the tickets to next week's Halloween carnival to a bulletin board, a shelf where phones can sit to charge, a place for sunglasses and car keys. And I want NONE of that in my kitchen. - Do you barbeque often? I'd want a more direct door to the backyard. As it is, you'll have to carry platters of meat around the peninsula, past the breakfast room table, and into the great room to reach the porch ... then you'd have to turn right and navigate the porch furniture to get to the steps on the far end. - Covered porches are wonderful (I have one on my current house and plan one for my next house too!), but 8' isn't wide enough for a porch that'll really be used (though 6', even 5', is enough for a show-only porch, as I suspect your front porch will be). My covered porch is 12' wide x 30' long, and it's perfect: We have the grilling area on one end, a table in the middle, and seating on the far end ... and we can walk straight to the steps without furniture being in the way. - I do not like bay windows under covered porches, but that's personal preference. - Speaking of porches, why do you have a set of steps on the far left of the front porch? It's not near the garage /driveway. - The laundry room is far from ALL the bedrooms. Note that to put away clean clothes in your master closet, you'll have to carry those baskets about 60' (half the length of a football field) and through four doors. Most people on this board seem to prefer the laundry near the bedrooms since that's where people change clothes, and keeping the rooms near one another = fewer steps. If you anticipate a large family, I'd consider a second laundry upstairs; it wouldn't be out of sync with a house this size. I would suggest a laundry chute from the upstairs bath, but the clothes would land in the great room! - I'd flip the washer/dryer to the opposite side of the laundry room. This will allow you to keep water in only ONE wall (and with the refrigerator on that wall, you're probably going to want water for an ice maker). - With the kids' bathroom upstairs, the downstairs powder room will see heavy use. This super-narrow set-up is not comfortable -- remember, you're going to use this room for potty training, which means you'll sit in there for long stretches at a time ... and that door is set up in such a way that you'll have to be in the room with the door closed so you can watch the child ... I guess you'll be sitting on the sink. I'd make this area into a large reach-in pantry and carve out a more comfortable powder room using some of the laundry room space OR some of that storage in the garage. - Since you anticipate a large family, I'd add some organizing items in the garage entryway. The size is already plentiful, but a bench where kids can sit while you put their shoes on /coat hooks /places for bookbags, etc. would be useful. In this same area, I'd add a door to close off the kitchen ... in a house of this size /expense, I wouldn't expect to see the garage door from the living area. - At 24x24, the garage is a rather ideal size. That's a large storage area in the garage -- do you need it, or will it just collect junk? Keep in mind that you have significant storage upstairs over the garage too. - The family room is plenty deep, but it's only 15' wide ... and about 3' of that must be used for walkway, so you actually only have 12' of space for furniture. This doesn't seem to be in keeping with the rest of the house. - How do you plan to use the office /homeschooling room? I'd add a second door into this room over near the master bedroom entrance, and I'd use real doors on both. The rest of the house is open; I'd want this room to have both visual and acoustical privacy. - I'd decrease the master bedroom width. 19' is very wide, even with a king bed, yet you don't have the right set-up for a seating area on one end. The windows in the master bedroom are very nice. - The master bath could be so much nicer! It's an odd shape: as you walk in, the around-the-corner part won't be visible, odd. Consider, too, the pathway necessary to reach the toilet: Through two doors and around a corner. The shower looks small; I think I'd make the current toilet-closet into a shower -- a shower gets daily use, and a large one is a nice luxury. The master closet isn't particularly spacious -- I might use some of that excess bedroom space to enlarge this. - Upstairs, the three bedrooms and bathroom look good, and all that linen storage will be great for kids' sleeping bags, etc. ... but why do you need a rec room AND a family room?

ILoveRed - I love that vestibule idea! I'll ask the architect about something like that. mrspete - I think I agree. I do like the front elevation overall, but losing that garage gable might be a lot better. And cheaper too. I'll have to see how the 2nd floor goes, as we might need that area above the garage for a bedroom, so a gable might be necessary. My husband didn't like that indentation between the house and garage (in front of the breezeway) in my sketch either. Rather than add square footage to the house that we really don't need, he suggested making that a storage room accessible from the garage to store bicycles and other misc sporting equipment. I think I like that idea and that would free up the back storage area of the garage for the lawn equipment and tools. Again, would need to see how that works with a nice looking front elevation though. I was playing around again with how the rooms could be placed, specifically what it would look like if I flip flopped the pantry and laundry room. What I think are pros of this idea: - Mudroom and laundry room are combined. One area to drop the dirty stuff as you enter from the garage. - Eliminates corner door in kitchen that breaks up my L shaped counter space....my primary work zone. - Laundry is now right off the kitchen, where I could change out loads of laundry easily with just a few steps. - Carved out 2 extra storage closets. One off the foyer, so could be a large coat closet and/or vacuum cleaner storage. Second one accessible from the Study and would be my Xmas decorations, suitcases, sleeping bags, wrapping paper/gift bags, large extra blankets/pillows, etc type storage. I have a closet like that in my house now and I love it. - With that extra foyer closet, I could recess a regular refrigerator into that space to appear like a counter depth fridge. What I think are the cons of this idea: - Now I have to walk through my kitchen/dining area to get to my laundry room. Basically the furthest point from all bedrooms. - Not sure I love the layout of the pantry. Seems like an excessively large one, but I only have a reach in pantry now, so maybe I just can't fathom needing that much space. I do like that I have room for a hutch/butler's pantry type area in there. What do you all think of this idea? Does it flow? I didn't bother drawing the master bathroom and WIC details. I think I have few options for that space, but I'm liking the size and placement so not too worried about those details at this point. Also, as mentioned above, we could also add a garage storage area in the little indent between the garage and house. Thanks for any feedback!

Lots of thoughts, unconnected and presented in a random fashion: - I'm admittedly not a fan of the courtyard style. Draw in your pool furniture; with only 4' walkway on two sides and 7' walkway on the other sides, you don't really have space for furniture -- and people can't comfortably fit by the furniture. Well, you don't actually have to add anything; just look at the door drawn between the playroom and the pool -- it blocks about 3/4 of the walking space already. On the positive side, with all these walls nearby, you'll have ample room for hanging towels. - Additionally, it reminds me of a miserable stay at a Vegas hotel ... it was 117 degrees and the courtyard pool received not one bit of breeze. We couldn't stand to stay in the courtyard area without actually being IN the water. - An 8x15 pool? I suggest you measure this off, perhaps tape out a space this size on the floor. It's tiny. I mean, I'm sitting on an 8' wide sofa right now ... in a 16' wide room, and I can't imagine a pool this size. We are building one of the smallest fiberglass pool available, and it's bigger than this. - I like the suggestion other people are making about swapping the kids' rooms with the garage. Garages and kitchens should be located close together -- it's not only groceries -- do you really want to carry garbage bags across the living room and down this maze of a hallway? - On the subject of the kids' bedrooms, I agree that I'd downsize them to one shared bath. Two baths are a very large expense, and there's no reason two kids can't share one bathroom. You could easily downsize the kids' bedrooms, and they'd still have plenty of space. Note that it'll be hard to move furniture down the 90 degree hallway to the farthest kid's bedroom. - I agree with the posters who are pointing out the too-open playroom /living room situation -- these two rooms will not have visual or acoustical privacy, so there's no point in having two rooms. Small kids won't use a playroom, but teens will enjoy a place where they can be loud and have friends over. Ideally this future space would move across the house from the main living area, but at the very least you could do a wall /large pocket door between the spaces. - I wouldn't waste prime pool-view space on a workout room; instead, I'd move the master so it would be adjacent to the pool /have a straight-to-outside door. - I hate the master bath and closet. The bath is too long and drawn out -- I have a bowling alley bathroom now, and I hate it. This one'll cost a fortune in tile. I am ambivalent about closets in bathrooms, but this one isn't nicely arranged -- if you're going this route, you want the closet door to be located JUST INSIDE the bathroom door -- you don't want to be forced to walk the length of the whole bathroom to reach the closet. And the size of the closet -- do you really need something this massive? - The bedroom by the garage is the potential MIL room? I don't think it's adequate for someone to live in full-time. In contrast to the master's massive closet, this closet is decidedly tiny. If your MIL moves in with you full-time, she's going to want to keep a bunch of her stuff (needed or not), and she'll have no storage in this space. The bathroom is not well suited to an elderly person's needs at all; take a look at aging-in-place bathrooms online. On the positive side, she could potentially take over the adjacent workout space, using it for a sitting room. - You're building a lot of space that you don't need right now: the playroom and the MIL room. Could you design something that'd accomodate your needs NOW and have room for expansion in the future? It'd save you money now, and when /if you want /need those other spaces, you can add them then. - I'd rethink the powder room. That nose-to-toes layout is always uncomfortable. With so many other bathrooms nearby,

Overall, ratively straightforward, not bad. Either switch the entrance to the dining room to the left end of the wall so you don't walk right through the kitchen to access it, or switch the dining and kitchen as BP suggested. consider the spaces a bit more open to each other Why should the pantry have two entrances when going around it about two steps extra? lose the door to the entrance and gain a bit more storage. pew-type seating at the island doesn't make for great conversation accessing the master closet from the other wall gains a bit more storage grilling porch? It doesn't quite work the office nook would be better beneath the stairs, a bigger, more defined and deliberate seeming location I'd like the entrance with the coat closet relocated, to open up the space. It's not bad as is, it is doable, but I like a larger, more defined area as an entrance. maybe a slightly smaller closet next to the lockers of the mudroom. check with the kitchen forum about the kitchen layout. a coffee station would be better at the 'entrance' of the kitchen, not deep in