I guess I ought to move this, so it doesn't stay at the top!

If I'm right in the middle of my stressful situation, that phrase just ticks me off. (I want to talk about ME for a minute! LOL!) But once I'm just on the other side off the crisis, it gets me past it faster. It reminds me it's time to look past my own nose. (That was the phrase my mother always used. "Would you look past your own nose for a minute!?") I find more peace from the wisdom "This, too, shall pass." Even if I lost a foot and it will never grow back, the grief and helplessness will pass and better days will come. I find more comfort from the people who tell me I will get through it, one day at a time. I don't like to talk to my mother when I'm having a pity party. She does not sympathize with me. She never just says "I understand." She tells me something to the effect of "Be grateful you have so many dishes to wash, it means you had food to eat, which is more than some people." It might not be about dirty dishes, but you see my point. She tries to tell me my problems are blessings in disguise. "Jeez, the baby was up four nights in a row, I haven't slept, I'm so tired I'm running into walls!" She tells me "Oh, but aren't you glad you were able to have him." I KNOW all that, I do. But a person just needs to vent and be heard sometimes. It clears out all the negativity and lets my own inner voice start talking sense. But that's true for everyone. I do know people who revel in the pity party. The more you sympathize, the longer it goes on. The less you sypmathize, the bigger the pity party gets, to get your attention. For those people it's not a temporary coping mechanism, it's drama for the sake of drama.

I am not trying to say that Paul Evans in particular is an example of what is considered the taste, or good taste at the very top of the market. Just that it is something that's currently collected at the top of a market and a good example of something that will not trickle down into the middle. And, it not only won't trickle down now that the studio pieces are rare semi-antiques, it never trickled down much when he was custom making it for people 40 years ago because it was too taste-specific even then. I know Lane made some knock off brutalist style pieces, but I don't know that was ever particularly popular. To me, like cheap Spanish-Mediterranean, this smacks of porn movies shot in the San Fernando Valley in the late 70s and early 80s: yuck. Evans I think, has a particular appeal to those with an affection for une jolie laide, so to speak, or the beautifully ugly. But the knockoffs fail to capture whatever it is that is compelling about the ugliness of the original. But I think there is another high end that is not particularly driven by anything other than quality, and there is a high end that is also driven by discretion so we won't ever see what their houses look like to emulate in any fashion, anyway. I went to grad school with a woman who had two pieces of Nakashima furniture in her apartment, one of which was a long-arm chaise. The value of these is currently in the stratosphere, back then it wasn't. She also had a number of other pieces of good antique furniture (mostly Biedermeier). The Nakashima had been bought new by her parents at a time when it was comparable to any other hand made or studio made furniture (maybe like Thos. Moser today)--not the stuff of museums. The reason she had it at the time was that her parents were doing a major renovation and these pieces were safer in her apartment than they were either in the house being renovated or in storage somewhere. But anyway, I can remember people commenting at the time about her weird and ugly furniture. They had no idea what it was, they had no interest in what it was either. It was never going to have an effect on the middle. Now, there is a fair amount of furniture that is heavily influenced by Nakashima, for example and while you may see some influences in the organic modernism of stuff at WestElm which is "low" in terms of budget and maybe a little higher in terms of design-intellect, and you see a more direct influences of both Nakashima and Evans at the "high" budget end from firms like BDDW--we aren't ever going to see this in the middle.

"...so to put a tighter turnaround just in front of the barn doesn't help. Not sure if I understand how that option would allow more space? I'll attempt to answer your question. What matters of the turnaround is its most confining dimension. The fact that you add bucketloads of straightaway in the rectangular configuration doesn't help add spaciousness to the tightest portion of the turnaround. This is represented by the green arrows for each configuration. It's probably about 10% - 15% greater diameter within the area not confined by the porch. I'm showing the maximum possible turning radius for each config. (The clearance you would leave from building and fence would be the same degree of clearance for each configuration.) Another consideration would be material cost. If a given area is served by essentially 2 driveways covering the same length, obviously it's going to require considerably more material than a single drive in order to construct it. Also, once the project is drawn to accurate scale, you may discover that with two driveways, built at a proper width, the grass in the middle may appear more like a stripe. The only way to know is to draw it to scale, using proper dimensions. "Would our next step be to have our local gravel yard 'guy' come out and quote it?" Say you're kidding! A person can't quote a vague idea. You must work all the details out in a scale drawing that clearly specifies where everything will go. Even if you're doing the construction work yourself, don't you wish to know if everything will be as you envision it ... or have something on which material calculations can be based? You need a drawing that's done at scale. You must convert the "casual" advice you get here to usable advice in order for it to be meaningful. Rather than first producing a finished drawing that can be "quoted," it might be better if you looked at design as a process. Draw a pretty decent sketch of the ideas that you think are the most workable. Then transfer that drawing to the yard by using dayglow colored marking paint, available from Walmart, H.D. or Lowe's. It'll cost a few bucks but is exponentially cheaper than excavation and gravel actually placed in the yard and discovering it needs to be moved. (I'd recommend buying a long handled "marking wand" as stooping over to spray that large area -- even though you're just outlining -- would be torture and a much more difficult job of marking it out.) EDIT: The purpose of outlining the driveway with marking paint is so that you can explore how well it actually works, and to help you envision how the finished product will appear. (Note on using marking paint and wand: first mark critical points that determine measurements. Walk along connecting these points and creating overall outline with dashed lines. Appraise and make adjustments and refinements with additional dashed lines. Once the layout is correct, repaint over all with solid line. The paint goes quickly so you might get about 5 cans.) My opinion of symmetry is that while it is sometimes nice to have, it is hardly essential and under no circumstances able to outweigh resolving function. In its absence balance and proportion work fine.