My old house has an insulated steel door (painted) with sidelights with glasswork. People couldn't really see in, but I could get up close and look through one section that was totally clear. The door also had decorative glass on the top portion. For the house I am building now, I'm going to skip the side lights, but the steel door and a nice big peephole sounds about right to me.

Agree with Sue, Staircase should be illuminated at the top or bottom which is more than enough...Like she said if you have money burning a hole in your pocket, you can light it up any which way you can, I have seen illuminated risers, or like the image she provided or enough of recessed lighting to give you a sun tan by the time you reach the last step.

@Ann Marie Thanks for the suggestion! I will look there. I'm a little partial to painted art rather than photography, but I'll see what they have. @lindac92 That sounds like good advice! How would the need for a lamp change what art would go in that space? I have no idea how to think about that at all. But you're right, probably I would want a table lamp there. I know from browsing around that sometimes art just goes behind a lamp, which honestly feels weird to me, but maybe it's fine. But I'm not sure how that changes what I would want to put on the wall there. @threers Thanks for the advice! I can assure you that I will most definitely only get art I love. If I'm going to look at it every day, it had better make me happy! But I would also like it to match the rest of the room if I can possibly arrange it. :) @Patricia Colwell I actually was originally thinking of having two couches (which I think may have the result of another comment of yours in another thread), but the problem is that I can't seem to make it work with our TV placement. I definitely want a couch to face the TV, and then the only real arrangement that works is to have an L-shaped arrangement. And if I'm going to have that, well, I have always liked couches with corners, so that's how I arrived at a sectional. But I'm open to other alternatives - I just don't know of any good ones. :)

@Beverly @WestCoast Hopeful Oh my goodness, I love this porch idea SO much. It takes the porch and yard from two separate spaces to one big, friendly space. Our builder will 100% NOT do this for us, so we'd have to do it afterwards on our dime, but I love this transformative idea! We probably wouldn't lay concrete across the whole back, but maybe a smaller area with a gazebo or something. I stopped by the house this afternoon and walked around at ground level behind the house. (I haven't done this too much because we've had a lot of rain the last few months and it's super muddy.) When I was down there, I learned a few interesting things: First, the area that I thought was most usable -- directly below the porch -- is actually not the most usable. It has more of a slope than I thought. You can see it better here: It's still going to be useful, but the largest level part of the yard is in the corner where I was standing when I took this photo. Conveniently, this is also the area where the level part goes deepest towards the back of the lot, so it gives us the biggest usable level space. This slope right below the porch means that the big wide centered steps that @Beverly suggested would have to go out significantly further to actually reach the ground. It would probably consume most of the usable space below the porch. But that's more acceptable now that I know that the corner is the prime real estate in the yard. Here's another photo that might show the slope better: The other thing I learned is that the left side of the porch is actually not as high as it looked from above. Standing on the ground, the porch is slightly above my eye level, or about 5.5' up. And since the land keeps rising to the left, stairs going along the house would only have to cover about 5' vertically. We looked at the other stairs from our same builder and estimated that they're about 40 degrees from the horizontal. So one trig calculator later, and it looks like the stairs probably won't even come to the guest room window! So I think we'll go with the left stairs for now and then look into a set of fancy wide porch steps down the line. Thanks, everybody, for all your thoughts and suggestions! I'm really happy with the left stairs for now and the awesome stairs later.