Our house is bricked to grade... so our walkout's French doors are surrounded by brick.

Agree with above, however I'll throw out that when I built my last home I put my woodworking space completely separate from the rest of the home (exterior doors, no shared ductwork, and exterior garage door for entry along with interior door entry that was a sealed "exterior" door). Kept dust out of the rest of the home and could spray paint etc without issues. try to keep stairwells if possible from the middle of the space. If building a shop, consider dust collection in the floor before pouring the slab.

OK now i'm learning, haha. I had never noticed or heard of the daylight with walk up door basement before. I'm mostly familiar with the full above ground walkout. That is an interesting option. Also I had assumed they could move the dirt around to make both levels walk out on grade, but now i see that would be an awful lot of dirt/expense. Or dig deeper so the back door is at grade, then put retaining walls on either side of the lower walk out door? That sounds a bit exessive too. I don't mind a few steps down in the back of the upper level, maybe I can minimize this by going more rectangle shaped. Say 34' deep into the hill by 22' wide gets me up to a 5' drop front to back. Thanks again for taking time to show me the grade sketches. I had an old F150 3 on the tree... loved that truck!

I designed ours with the walkout on the front, since part of the house was about 12' feet higher than a pond a short distance away to the southeast. I can't give you a drawing, but will try to explain it, and maybe you or someone can draw it out if that helps. It's partly similar to what Chipsa mentioned above. You approach the house from the 200' driveway that goes up the north side of the lot. The driveway is level with the side-facing garage on the north part of the house. The front of the 1-acre lot faces east, but the front of the house was turned southeast to face the pond (which is partly on the neighbor's lot). The lot is narrower than it is wide and forms a dogleg half way back to the northwest and narrows somewhat down to a river, which is the other best view out the back in that direction. The lot slopes both to the southwest and southeast and has large oak and hickory trees between the house and the street, so the walkout on the front is not noticeable unless you're looking for it. There's a porch in the middle third of the front of the house (not counting the side of the garage), which shields the view of the walkout, so it doesn't look strange. The original elevation of the lot started dropping from the front of the garage, so there's a lot of fill to level the lot to the side-facing steps to the front porch. The porch is 20'x 10' and has wood storage and well rooms under it accessed from the 10' southwest-facing side and also inside. There are 3 garden terraces down the front of the 20' wide porch with a series of large irregular limestone steps just past the 3 terraces down to the lower level walkout patio which I think is about 25'x25'. One side of the patio has the wall of the lower level walkout family room, which forms an L with the 10' side of the front porch on another side of the patio. Anne