Kitty, Thank you for asking. As I had posted previously, I was able to work with the powers that be and move most of the easement work off my garden beds. However, this whole situation had spawned a true discussion between my DH and I. He had suggested selling our current urban .25 acres to get something bigger when all of this was happening and even though this crisis was averted, we talked it over and decided we were still going to sell the house and look for more acreage. I was coming close to not having enough garden space and this place would need major changes to make it what we wanted. We both travel for work and thus have hotel rooms paid for us year round. So we are selling this house and then looking to buy some land and build, living in hotels in the mean time. Thus unfortunately I had to cancel/postpone my huge spring orders and have to move a large portion of my garden to my mother-in-laws for the time being while we prepare to sell. I am confident however that it means that I will have much more land to garden within the next year. Keep your fingers crossed for me and once again, thank you for everyones advice and support. You all are the absolute best and I could not describe the happiness this forum brings me. Thank you.

Kauorika, I am afraid I too am "not lovin it." In addition to the tight hallway you originally asked about, and the lack of enough aisleway space between the shower and sink in Bath 1 (that betaiota mentioned), I see the following issues: 1) The extraoridinarily thick exterior walls are eating up a fairly high percentage of your potential interior space. Are you really planning for the exterior walls to be 18 inches thick? And if so, why are they so thick? Are you building a straw bale house? 2) While your hallways aren't that long, because your house is so small, the hallways, foyer, and staircase take up way too much of your available floorspace. 3) I think you're going to find it hard to fit a full-sized bed and a dresser into the bedroom and still have room to easily move about to reach the closet. I only see two possible walls for the head of the bed to go against. Either it will have to be placed under the (#12) windows - assuming they are high enough - or it'll have to be placed against the wall directly across from those windows. In the first case, getting around the bed to reach the closet is going to require squeezing between the foot of the bed and that bumped in wall that you have because of the little hallway niche you created to provide access to the bathroom. In the second, it's gonna be a long walk around the bed every time you need to get to the closet. And, because the bathroom really needs to be made wider (to give you room to slip past the shower), the bedroom will have to be made smaller making this problem even worse. 4) I suspect you visualize a pretty little seating area in the "window bumpout" in the bedoom. A couple of comfy chairs, maybe a little round table? At 7.5 feet, the bumpout is just barely wide enough for that purpose but, depending on the direction that house faces, the windows on three sides could effectively create a little greenhouse and make the window bumpout area uncomfortably warm all the time. And, if you need to reduce the width of the bedroom to make the bath wider, your bed may crown any furniture you attempt to put in the window bump-out. 5) The dining room is just too small to accomodate anything more than maybe a tiny little four-seat round table. Remember, you need space all the way around your dining table for diners to get in and out of their chairs. And, because the only path from front entry to great room goes right thru the dining room, if the dining room is not wide enough, you'll constantly be having to duck around dining room chairs to get to the great room. 6) The pony wall/bar between kitchen and great room is a problem. The plans show that it is supposed to be 42" inches high as measured from the kitchen floor. Then the great room floor is dropped down from the kitchen floor level. If I'm reading the plans correctly, there are TWO steps down, with a 6" drop for each step. That means the great room floor is 12" lower than the kitchen floor. So, from the great room side, that pony wall is going to be 54" high! Now I'm fairly tall but a 54" high bar would be uncomfortably high even for me. And, it would be at chin height for my best friend. No way that is gonna work. 7) I see no possible way to arrange furniture in the "great room." You have a window seat on one wall. YOu have a kitchen bar and the step down entry on a second wall. YOu have the fireplace and built-in bookcases on the third wall. And you have a wall of windows and an inswinging patio door on the last wall. You have NO reasonably blank walls against which you can place a sofa or a couple of easy chairs. That means everything is going to have to "float" which would be fine EXCEPT that floating furniture arrangements take more space than arrangements where the furniture is pushed up against the walls. Here, your whole room (except for the window seat niche) is only about 12X15. By the time you leave space in front of the window seat niche for an aisleway from kitchen to that patio door, and leave space for barstools at the bar and aisleway space to reach them, and leave space in front of your bookcases so you can get to books shelved there - your available room for arranging furniture has shrunk to something like 9 ft x 12 ft. Possibly even smaller Awfully hard to fit a sofa and a couple of easy chairs into theat small a space. If you want an end table or two, or a coffee table, or an ottoman, you're totally sunk. Do yourself a BIG favor. Make some scaled cutouts to represent every piece of furniture you THINK you want to have in each of your rooms and see if you can make everything fit. And, remember that you need room to walk around and REACH each piece of furniture so be sure to build in aisleway spaces. sorry to be so negative but even without seeing the upstairs or the basement, my inclination would be to scrap this plan and start over fress. There are just too many issues on this one floor that cannot be addressed with via small tweaks (i.e., tweaks that don't require moving the staircase or any exteior walls.)

This was posted almost back at the beginning: > If a hot wire was shorted, then it shorted to a safety ground. No > current need pass through that hose. Why did current pass through > the hose? Maybe safety ground does not exist or was disconnected. > Most installers would not know how to test that. A missing > safety ground is a serious human safety threat. Somehow, they connected a dishwasher shorted to the hot wire. When power was applied, a safety ground would have simply tripped the circuit breaker. But that safety ground (that was required even in the 1960s) was missing. So current used a hose as an electrical conductor. (BTW grounding to water pipes is also illegal.) Well, that might have tripped a circuit breaker. But definitely should have tripped a GFCI type circuit breaker. A summary conclusion: A safety ground (that was required since the early 1960s) was missing. Devices that must have been powered by a GFCI type breaker either were not or were powered by a defective GFCI breaker. And installer connected that first dishwasher somehow with AC hot wires shorted to the dishwasher chassis. You have plenty of reasons to be disappointed by everyone (especially installers) who should have known better. This was really simple stuff. No reason for anyone of them to not understand this ... unless trained in some third world nation where safety grounds do not even exist. Wonder why so many jobs go to China.

Thank you, I appreciate your concern. This very house has been built at least 10 times along the Mississippi Gulf Coast with minor tweaks each time. Our builder has built it multiple times. I have actually walked through the house in my first picture and it is lovely. IThe windows and porches are wonderful. It does not have a loft area or a bunk-room. Each time time it is built there are minor changes in order to not have the cookie cutter effect. My particular "tweaks" are in regards to enlarging the loft area and the bunk room that has been created in the dormer section along the front of the house. I had the option of a small cozy bunk room but that is similar to a house nearby. So I asked for a longer one with a small sitting area in the middle and a gabled dormer in addition to the shed dormers. My concern was that I was trying to get too much into a small space. I have spoken to the draftsperson and we added a foot to the gabled dormer to make it deeper. Now that gabled section is 9 feet. The ceiling in that area reached 12 feet. I have been playing around with ideas about creating a built in bench seat beneath the window with an Ikea wardrobe on either side. That adds seating and gives us storage and leaves a whole whopping 7 feet to place a small coffee table and small scale chairs with a tv on the other side of the wall. I also have discovered the Ikea Hemnes shoe cabinet. It is narrow but gives the look of a traditional chest of drawers. I think it will be perfect in this room. Iwill start a new discussion that is limited to just this area and how to stage it. For an update after speaking to the draftsman, she explained that the vanity in bathroom number 1 is due to the door and pocket doors won't work. So I will leave that like it is. The loft will stay the same size and might just have a desk or a small area to sit and read. The bunk room will serve as the area that I hope to send kids to watch tv. (I personally don't want a lot of tv watching at the beach, but I know it is inevitable, so I want there to be a separate area for kids.) I appreciate all of the insights from everyone. I realize that my post had too many questions. In the future I will focus on one thing at a time. I plan to start another post just for the staging of this bunk room. For all of you that have hung on through my rambling, please know that I will try to be more concise. Thank you!