I have a 17 yr old Cuisinart at home that is still going strong. I purchased a half dozen KitchenAid food processors for work 5 yrs ago and then again 4 yrs ago and was very happy with them. I don't know if all of these were pre Hobart design switch or not. After seeing the same Cooks Illustrated test results that chickadeead posted about, I recommended the KitchenAid to a friend about a year ago and she's very happy with it. Consumer Reports in 2006 also favored the KitchenAid 750. It's gotten so tricky these days to figure these things out. IMO If you're not a heavy user and aren't doing dough's, the KitchenAid would work well for you. If you do need a heavier duty unit, Look at the Cuisinart and the Magimix. Was excited to learn about the Magimix from jkom51. I'm always interested in this sort of thing and did look at some of the reviews for the Magimix. It gets really great reviews, but the following cons were mentioned: 1. A little bulky and heavy 2. Parts aren't all dishwasher safe (must read fine print in manual) and it is a little hard to clean. Best of luck with your decision!

So if we were to do a 1.5 story with the master on the main level, where would you put that, behind the garage then? My thought process would be to first determine priority of room placement in the most ideal location for the use of the room and then if conflicts between room placement develop then rank by how much time is spent and how time is used for each room as well as the importance of that use compared to the importance of the uses for the other rooms. If watching the sunrise from your bed pays off with more enjoyment than having the sunrise and morning sun striking your kitchen, then plan accordingly. For instance, do you plan on using your master suite as a parental get-away from the kids, using it during the day or will your non-sleeping uses be restricted to evenings only, meaning that any views from the rooms would be lost to the darkness of the night? If the views are not important, I'd bury the master suite near the garage in the above sketch. If however, views and day time use are important, then I'd move the master to the east/south/west walls, perhaps right off the entry or in the back off of the kitchen. I'm not necessarily saying to put the master off the entry or off the kitchen, though you could, I'm just using these as examples that reference the above sketch. The way I'm designing my own home is to use a very self-reflective process which tries to understand how I actually live my life rather than trying to contort my lifestyle into architectural trends which presuppose how people SHOULD live their lives. So, to continue on the questioning, why exactly do you appreciate a main-floor master? Is it so that you can avoid stairs? Is it so that you can hear the comings and goings of the kids at night as they try to leave the house, is it because you don't want the kids too near your bedroom, is it because you don't want noise transmission from the master to be easily heard by the kids, and so on? Once you can articulate to yourself why you want something then you can find the best solution for your plan, rather than adopting a cookie-cutter approach. For instance, what I found amusing in some plans was a main floor master with a child's bedroom directly over it on the 2nd. Now, to me, if the goal was to reduce noise transmission from either the child's room to the parent's room or vice versa, the separation by floor, while having intuitive appeal, would fail to achieve the mission. The example I used in an earlier comment was to have a master suite separated by a stairway corridor AND a children's hallway which together create a 7'-8' dead zone, possibly with some walls other than the master and child's bedroom walls also added in between. There are no common walls shared, there is a huge dead zone in between and the goal of reducing noise transmission is, I believe, better served than a downstairs master with an upstairs child's bedroom directly over top, sharing common ceiling/floor as well as sound transmission paths down the walls. Of course, if sound transmission has nothing to do with the appeal of a downstairs master suite, then what I've sketched out is a solution to a problem which doesn't exist, or doesn't matter. I was thinking the master/office space on one side and then the kitchen, dining, great room on the other. That makes sense to me. Would you move the great room from the center of the house below to the front where the dining study is and move the study to where the great room is? Lots of configurations can make sense, but they must make sense in relation to how you envision yourself using the space and the particulars of your lifestyle and preferences. I'd say grab some graph paper, or even blank paper, and just block out the rooms and see how they interplay with each other, note how you foresee traffic patterns within and throughout the space, imagine daily routines taking place within the space. Once you have an idea of how you live, or how you want to live in the new space, then get the graph paper and try to get a better handle on size and furniture placement, and traffic patterns and by the end of this process you should have a very good understanding of how you want the space to be configured. I did the same for my house and this has resulted in me doing away with a formal living room from the now traditional LR/FR combo pack and reallocating the space elsewhere in the home, such as combining the entry with the LR space in order to create a larger sense of space/volume, has led me to create a larger kitchen than would be warranted in relation to the size of the informal living room, has led me to other design changes that likely violate what trained architects use as benchmarks for how homes should be designed. Thank you for the garage tip also - I thought 24x24 was rather large? We will be getting an oversize door for sure. I'd say measure your cars, block out a 24 x 24 space on your lawn, use cardboard boxes or something else to fill the space of your cars, then throw in the other junk you're likely to store alongside the walls of the garage, and see how much space you actually need. Try to get out of your car and see if the door bangs the wall or the other car. A 24 x 24 garage is actually pretty good considering that many designed give a 20 x 23 or something similarly ridiculous.

I feel for you so much! I bet you know all I'm about to say, but I'll say it so you can see it. If you're doing an elimination diet, you're much better off doing it right the first time. That is, truly eliminate with no cheats all the suspect foods. It's a dead bore, crazy making and screws up your normal life, but if you felt fine it wouldn't be an issue. You CAN do this. Maybe you need to have a tapering down time. Of course don't go radical until you hear what the doctor has to say. Just remember, the doctors hear so many "I can'ts" that they may give in when they really want to shout at you that you need to do this to feel better. The trick is, cut out everything potentially bad. Give your body time to heal on the highly restrictive diet, however unfun and uncomfortable that may be. For other things, it can be as short as 6 weeks, but your doctor should have a number in mind. Then, once you're pretty well as healed from the "bad" foods as you're going to get, add in one eliminated food and see if it's okay. Then set it aside, wait awhile and try the next, repeating until all have had their chances. Then add back two at a time to see if they pair up to be "bad". It's a total bore, but it works. If you're not going to do the whole thing, there's little point in doing part. I had a friend who did that, and she was perpetually deprived because she wasn't really eliminating the baddies from her diet, just giving it a lot of lip service and a half-hearted wave. In your case, before clearing more out of the kitchen, I'd look for a few things that you can for sure have and see what you can make out of them to replace the eggs that you eat when you can't think of what else. Make sure there's some nutrition similarity, and that what you invent tastes good. Then start tapering off actual eggs. Without soy and nuts, I don't know how you're going to find a good dairy substitute. Avocadoes might be a good sub for cream cheese on toast, and might be satisfying, but they're not cheese. Pâté , maybe?

WalnutCreek: as you requested, here's the recipe for my Cranberry-Orange Coffee Cake. This is the only pic I could find of it, sorry! LYNN'S CRANBERRY-ORANGE COFFEE CAKE INGREDIENTS: 1 cup almond flour 1/4 cup regular all-purpose flour 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon 1/8 teaspoon salt 3 eggs, beaten 4 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled a bit (I use Smart Balance, though) 2 tablespoons honey or blue agave syrup 1 teaspoon almond extract 1/2 cup of my cranberry-orange compote, at room temp DIRECTIONS: Preheat oven to 375-degrees. Butter or grease a glass pie plate. In a mixing bowl, mix together all of the dry ingredients. In a smallish bowl, beat the eggs and then stir in the melted butter, the honey and the almond extract. Stir well. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and gently stir to combine. Spoon batter into your prepared pie plate. Using a teaspoon, gently drop spoonfuls of the cranberry-orange compote all over the coffee cake batter. The batter will be too soft to allow you to spread the compote out, so take your time to keep it fairly even. Bake in your preheated 375-degree oven for approximately 30 minutes. The cake will be golden and it's edges should be browning and pulling away from the edge a tiny bit. Serve warm or at room temp. Store leftovers, covered, in the fridge. ** Please note that baking times may vary a bit, as I'm at an altitude here of 6,000 feet.