Another book to check out is The American Woodland Garden by Rick Darke. I live on a rather large acerage that was logged prior to our purchase of it, and I constantly do selective removal and planting, so I'll share a bit of my experience with this approach. I have 3 varieties of native viburnum and two of native dogwoods (including my favorite, Cornus alternifolia) that I leave and thin back the competition from, as well as some natives like rhodies, blueberries, Kalmia, and lots of ferns and wildflowers. I have added additional woodies like other rhodies and kousa dogwood, as well as natives that weren't already here like clethra, redbud, vernal witch hazel, and fringe tree. I also do removal of invasives like barberry, buckthorn, honeysuckle and autumn olive with a combination of pulling with a pair of oversized pliers for the smallest plants in the loosest soil or cutting small saplings with a saw blade on an industrial strength weed whacker-type implement or a chainsaw, depending on the size. The ones I cut often get some Roundup directly on the resprouts, avoiding nearby desirable plants. We have drilled large holes in the top of a few of the larger stumps and added a bit of fertilizer as the damp and extra nitrogen encourages the growth of bacteria to rot the stumps. A brushhog (large tractor-mounted mower) has been helpful in keeping back growth of undesirables until some of our preferred plants have gotten large enough to fend for themselves. (Often my plants are small in order afford more of them.) I also do use Roundup on the poison ivy in areas where I or the animals will be as I'm really sensitive to it, but again, I shield or avoid nearby desireable plants. I have acid, fast-draining silty soil with little organic matter, so I do mulch, but with quite light layers of shavings from my husband's woodshop that nestle down below the foliage of the native ground covers and spring ephermerals. It works rather like an addition to the natural fall of leaves and pine needles, and holds in moisture where it may help struggling native plants that need a bit more even moisture than my soil provides, and has worked quite well to prevent or reduce the sprouting of undesirable seeds of plants like blackberries. Although I have lots left to do, it gives me joy to see the number of flowering plants in my partially to deeply shaded woodlands throughout the spring and early summer. It sounds like much of what you've planned will thrive in your setting as long as you research preferred light levels for each individual variety and perhaps be ready to do a bit of moving around to make some plants happier. For instance I've found that Ilex verticillata really prefers a fair amount of light (close to full sun) to bloom/berry well and grow thickly. My Northern Hi-lights azalea is planted next to a Nova Zembla rhodie, which is supposed to take a fair amount of shade. The N. Hilight blooms prolifically every year, but the Nova Zembla is getting moved to at least 1/2 day sun, as it doesn't currently bloom. Just one other thought - if you leave some of your small hemlocks, the dark green, fine-textured foliage makes a lovely contrast/backdrop to blossoming trees and shrubs and variegated folage.

will work for roses - The gables in the front will cost more than not having any gables in the front, but any house over 2000 sq.ft. and on two levels will "need" a few gables and "juts/cuts" in the roof line or it will look very awkward in my personal opinion. I will tell you that of some of the more complex plans, the O'Neal is a fairly medium to medium-high complexity for the roof and foundation layout compared to other homes with similar curb appeal in my opinion. Many builders would tell you that it will be too expensive to build, but that's a relative term. There are 18 corners in the foundation which isn't all that many for a house this size when you compare it to say the "Harmony Mountain Cottage" plan by Garrell & Associates which has over 30 foundation cuts in a 2300 sq.ft. design (see it here: http://houseplans.designsdirect.com/disp_pic.asp?sf=GAR%2Frenderings%2F06110FrntRndrng1.jpg&planid=5995&planName=Harmony+Mountain+Cottage&viewName=First+Floor+Plan&filename=GAR/floorplans/06110FrstFlrPln1_f.gif). You can easily have more than 20 in a 1500 sq.ft. house if you start picking out plans that have tremendous curb appeal. Another higher cost in this plan will likely be the hipped roof design versus a traditional gabled end design, but that debate is one that should be saved for another day b/c a gabled roof and a hipped roof have two very distinctly different looks and it all depends on what "look" you want overall for the house. I personally would like the O'Neal and Luxembourg much much less if it were a traditional gabled end roof design. Anyways, I'll move on from that. I would say look into roof trusses and see if the truss company your builder uses (if they even use them at all) can truss the roof you want as it will save you money and time versus traditional framing and you can use attic room trusses in a lot of instances and what can't be trussed can then be stick framed on site by your framing crew. As for the potential savings, I look at it this way: your garage gables are going to be the same on almost all plans (some may only have one large gable, but adding the 2' bumpout doesn't add that much to the cost of building, at least not enough to not do it on a house like this as the added appeal is well worth it in my opinon.) So far so good! You'll also likely have another small gable like the one over the bathroom window on the O'Neal somewhere on the plan, so still no real additional costs. The gable over the front second level bedroom is going to be there on almost all two story plans that have a bedroom over the dining room or else they look very funny. Even if no bedroom on the front of the house in the second level you'll likely still have a couple of dormers or one large oversized gable highlighting the two story foyer. Still not going above and beyond in my opinion. The large columns and the additional gable/pitch over the entry is the "knock-out-punch" on the O'Neal and Luxembourg plans and if you lose those you change the entire appeal of the house. Yes, it will cost you more than not doing it, but to tell you how much it costs would be nearly impossible. Your builder will be the one to ask based on your finishing materials. It would really still be a "it depends" answer. B/c it depends on if you do the columns in stone and the exact way the plan calls for like in the Luxembourg_southmountain.." photo in the link I posted above, or if you buy pre-assembled columns made from pvc or other similar material like the ones in the picture of my friends house that is labeled "December_17...". The front entry my friend built will likely cost a good deal less than the other, but he spent a good bit on the real stone for the front, which is awesome and so he hasn't really sacrificed the look by doing the pre-made columns. I just think it's important to keep overall scale in mind when choosing the columns b/c you can make a big house look very awkward very fast by changing the scale of important features like these bold front entry columns. You could always lose the arched window over the front door that illuminates the grand foyer and reduce the height of the arched gable over the front door to save money, but without drawing that out I wouldn't be able to tell you that would look okay, although I'm sure it would still look nice. If I were building this house, I'd keep the big archway above the door just like it is, not just for exterior looks, but for the massive impact it has from the inside as well. The back of the O'Neal house will always need to have the gable where the bedroom is on the second level because there is no other way to get the bedroom in without adding the additional roof clearance in the gable. The additional bump-out for the great room could be squared off to match the rear wall in the master bedroom and breakfast nook, etc. if you wanted to take out that gable to save some money. You would also take out some of the grand windows in the rear of the great room, which also makes this plan so great, but if you don't have people gazing at the rear of your house all day, every day then you may not care. As I mentioned, he lives on the tee box of a nice golf course and so more people see the rear of his house than the front so that wasn't really an option. One way you could essentially reduce some of the cost to build this and up/meet your sq.ft. requirements would be to square off the back of the house by adding another couple of feet to the master bedroom and breakfast nook, additional main level bath and back bedroom/garage if you needed more width in garage, etc. and that would remove 2 corners in your foundation (save a little $$$) and also remove the additional gable and siding that goes on it, painting the siding or the cost of stone if you were to stone it like my friend did, etc. which would also save $$$. It wouldn't be enough to justify building this plan if you were $25k off, but each little bit you can make a little easier will help you get your costs in line. One more thing I noticed in his plan is that he has additional unfinished and un-floored attic space over his master bedroom and master closet area because he did a tray ceiling like the plan calls for in the master bedroom. If you were to nix the tray ceiling or start with the 9' ceiling in the center and build the tray down to 8' on the sides versus the traditional way its done of starting with 9' on the outsides and building up to 10' in the middle you could have additional sq.ft. above the master that otherwise would be wasted. You already have the roof, foundation, primary wiring ran, ductwork to master, etc that you could easily tie into and add cheaper sq.ft. to get you to your goal. You would have more carpeting and sheetrock and lighting, painting, wiring, and may need a little more "uumph" in you HVAC unit for the added space which would add, but those are the cheaper things in the total cost of adding square footage. Just something to keep in mind. It wouldn't be an enormous room because of the hipped roof line, but it would add more that is otherwise unused or some might say wasted. I'm also linking to another great Gardner plan called the Newcastle that has an awesome "overall look & appeal" in my opinion and I would consider it a milder roof and foundation design with only 12 corners in the foundation (I didn't count the window boxes either since you can cantilever the bumpout/window-boxes if you chose to instead of building the foundation around them). The Newcastle looks great inside as well and has pictures on the site you can look at. It takes advantage of the additional attic space under the gabled roof versus the hipped roof on the O'Neal upstairs and has bedrooms on opposite sides of the upper landing versus all on one side like the O'Neal which is also why you don't need the additional gables on the front & rear of the house like in the O'Neal, but like I said earlier, you still have the two dormers on the front, but not as much as that larger gable dormer & entrance archway. Again, saving $$$!! I hope this isn't info overload, but hey, you asked!!! Here is a link that might be useful: View Newcastle Plan

Hi all, Just wanted to circle back for the benefit of anyone in the future who looks at this question. We went back and compared the carpet we chose to the "true friezes" and "true saxonies" they had. This Essential Living is something Karastan calls a "textured saxony." Fiber is much, much thicker, and considerable looser than a real saxony. Unlike the saxony, you can't make lasting footprints (or draw smiley faces as my son did), in the Essential Living carpet. About the same texture as the friezes, just a teeny bit longer and a little bit looser, and a bit softer. It's not as long as I remember it, and carpet vendor says they've had lots of experience putting it on stairs with no wear or safety issues. With his guidance we did scale the padding on the stairs back to a dense, thinner, pretty unyielding felt that should reduce concerns about too much padding/curve on stair treads. Thanks so much for all your help!

Hi Swampee. Whether or not you can recast a 1950s ranch into an Arts & Crafts mode despends mostly on the aesthetic quality of the house itself. An informal, semi-rustic 1950s ranch, with spacious rooms & wide openings between them; with tall gables over tall, vertically divided windows; with a dark-toned hipped or gabled roof with deeply cantilevered eaves; with broad accent walls & heavy piers of rubble stone rock or tapestry brick; and with rough-sawn wooden siding might make a perfect background for Craftsman-style pieces, just as it is, and for a simple reason: both the earlier furniture & the later house spring from similar aesthetic impulses & both therefore have a similar respect for the subtle beauty of natural colors & materials. The Gamble House in Pasadena, despite its early date, is nothing so much as a well-executed 195Os ranch blown up to giant size. If, on the other hand, your house is the kind of 195Os house my friends all had when I was growing up--with small rooms, narrow hallways & hollow-core doors; with short double-hung windows surrounded by skimpy trim, with pink-&-black plastic tile in the baths; with turquoise counters & appliances in the kitchen; with gigantic plate-glass picture windows flanked by teensy wooden shutters; with a pale gray asphalt tile roof & only a band of one or two courses of gray cinderblocks to separate the expanse of wide-lap pastel siding from a wide swatch of crewcut crabgrass--then trying to create the expansive aura of an earlier period will be a harder--but not impossible--task, and here's a paragraph from Edith Wharton's The Decoration of Houses, that--despite the fact that it was written in 1897, and that it's talking about rooms, and that it's talking about a completely different style than the one we're discussing here, besides--explains why: "[T]he esence of a style lies not in its use of ornament but in its handling of proportion. Structure conditions ornament, not ornament structure. In other words, decoration is always subservient to proportion, and a room, whatever its decoration may be, must represent the style to which its proportions belong. The less cannot include the greater. Unfortunately, it is usually by ornamental details, rather than by proportion, that people distinguish one style from another. To many persons, garlands, bow-knots, quivers & a great deal of gilding represent the Louis XVI style. [A]n architect familiar with the subject knows that a Louis XVI room may may exist without any of these, and he often deprecates these as representing the cheaper & more trivial effects of the period, and those that have most helped vulgarize it. In fact, in nine cases out of ten, his use of them is a concession to the client, who having asked for Louis XVI room, would would not know he had got it were these details left out." In other words, you can't just stick leaded glass doors, copper lanterns & Craftsman-style wooden brackets onto a typical 195Os tract house, Mr. Potato Head-style, and expect to get a good-looking result. It doesn't work that way. But that doesn't mean you're stuck with aqua siding & white wrought-iron porch railings, either. It's just a matter of using the right colors & finishes & planting materials, materials that are compatible with both the actual period of the house itself and the also with the feel of the earlier period, rather than trying to gussy-up your house with inauthentic details that are incompatible with the structure--the proportions--of your house and that have a sstuck-on look. How about posting some photos so we can see what you have to work with? Regards, MAGNAVERDE