Overall, I like the plan. I'd move the frig towards the pantry. Leaving it at the penninsula end creates a pinch point. Imagine walking out to the grill with a tray of meat while someone is getting a drink, or coming in to wash your hands after gardening while someone is deciding on yogurt or a cheesestick for a snack. Maybe noone in your family stands in front of the frig, but even if it's just a short moment, it'll still cause disruption of traffic flow.

Sorry to rain on your parade but you've got one big problem right off the bat that is going to force some major changes in your design. Your staircase run is simply not long enough. You show it 10ft long (120 inches.)

Assuming your ceilings are 8 ft tall and you have 12 inches between floors, your floor to floor height will be 9 ft or 108 inches. A typical riser is between 7 inches and 7.5 inches high. The taller the riser, the steeper the staircase. Some codes won't let you have risers any higher than 7.75 inches.

But, let's go with 7.5 inches as a starting point. Dividing your floor to floor height by 7.5 yields 14.4. You can't have 4/10ths of a riser so we round that to 15 risers which means each step will actually be 7.2 inches high.

Then, since you need 15 risers, you'll have 14 treads. Each tread needs to be about 10 inches long. One general rule of thumb for comfortable stairs is that the riser height plus the tread depth should be between about 17.5 inches. If you have treads that are 10 inches long, your total stair case will take up 140 inches or almost 12 ft.

You need to either add a couple more steps at the top of your stairs - which means there isn't room for that linen closet... and, if you plan to have steps going down to a basement, they too will need to start just about the middle of where you show the cased opening from kitchen to dining room.

Alternatively, you could add the steps at the front end of the house. That will force the door into your living room smack dab up against the front wall of the entry way.

When you're designing a 2 story house it is imperative to get the stair case right at the beginning of the process. Fixing it later is just too difficult.

supermom -- it looks like you have a lot of experience with people lingering in front of the frig! I tried to design my kitchen like my sister's kitchen, which I always liked, so I'll have to ask her if the frig by the pennisula causes a bottleneck problem.

bevangel -- thanks for alerting us to the issue with the stairs! We started with a plan from a modular company (which we are not using for our house) and changed a lot of things about it, but we didn't change the stairs. I looked on their website and found that the house as they planned it is supposed to have 9' ceilings, so they must be putting in some really steep stairs. We're planning on having 8 ft ceilings, so we'll have to figure out where to put the extra two feet of stairs.

I have lots of thoughts, but would like to say that, like pp's, overall it is nice.

I think you might be able to add the extra stairs to the first floor end and just move the LR door down the hall.

I would reconfigure the powder room to get the toilet water service off the outside wall and give yourself a bigger vanity. Simply back the toilet up to the laundry wall room in the back corner of the PR and run the vanity along the same wall before the toilet as you come in the door. That gives the toilet a little niche beside the vanity, people tend to feel a little more secure with that arrangement :). You will also get your pipes off the outside wall, have water service for both laundry and PR on the same wall (less expensive for plumbing), have room for a 48" vanity (nice to have extra storage) and still allow a whopping 36" of space in which to center the toilet. Or you could have an 18" tower cab, 36" vanity, standard 30" wide space for toilet. Those measurements would adjust by 4" depending on which side you're putting your interior wall width.

You need to swap the washer and dryer to put the dryer on the outside wall for venting and the washer further away from the outside wall.

If it were me and I had both a LR (quiet place to read?) and a FR (TV, games, etc.), I think I'd take a few more feet off the LR and give it to the DR so that you can accommodate a crowd when needed and get better use out of the room for crafting and/or have room for piano or another secondary use.

I'd put pocket doors in that cased opening between the DR and the FR. That way they can be open when needed and closed when desired (you'd be surprised how often in family life that need arises; especially if you do use it for sewing or put a piano, music practice area, or art corner in there! Or even if it just becomes a quiet place to use your laptop).

I would also try to make the kitchen a little more accessible to the family room. Anyone with kids won't be able to see or check on them easily. Kitchen to family room is the highest traffic flow and talk-across in our family. I wouldn't want to have go through the mudroom (breakfast nook?) or go around through the dining room taking several turns to get to it. Pedestrian flow would be great, but even an old fashioned pass through over the base cabinets on that wall would help. The kitchen also seems a little widespread with over 10 feet between the cabinet run and the sink. It's not enough space for an eat-in table or island, but a little too much to me to just be open, kwim?

If that extra space is your eat-in area and not mudroom, you could try schussing the whole kitchen to the back wall, swapping the peninsula with the range counter so that the range can vent to an outside wall. That shortens the distance walking in with groceries to counters and cabinets. Also, then your eat-in nook area could be open to or have a direct door to the FR and be closer to the formal dining room, too, for overflow family events (think kids' table or "befores" buffet, removed but not too far away from grown ups). As for collapsing or making the space between the outside wall and the pantry cabinet run more useful, I'm not sure, but I think it could be done by playing around with the arrangement a bit.

And, yes, I'd definitely put the fridge elsewhere to make that doorway more open.

Upstairs, how about making the two itty-bitty hinged-door closets between the office and BR one long two-sided closet with sliding doors instead? The office/extra BR probably won't need much closet space most of the time and that would give the BR more.

Bath access for front left BR is awkward, but I'm not sure how to get around that with the center stairwell. You might trying playing with the idea of changing to a left-front entry instead of center, but that would be a lot reworking that might not work...

Finally, what orientation is and what is the view out the left side (LR, DR, FR side) of the house? I see a lot of windows, but this seems to be a narrow lot plan. There is only one window on the other long side. I am wondering what you get to see from different places in the house and how the light works during the day.

hadley - Thanks for all your thoughts - you've given me a lot to consider. The space behind the kitchen is the eat-in area -- guess I should have drawn in a table and chair so it would be obvious. The view from the left side is of the neighbor's house. Not much of a view, but we want lots of windows for natural light even though it will be filtered (with curtains). The best view is from the back - there is no house directly behind us.