Thank-you people! We now have a fairly long dry creek which needs to handle a high volume of water. It has two levels - water comes in from the top and is "visual" and then directly under this is a hidden french drain - they all drain into a dry pond which will be filled with moisture loving native plants to clean the ground water - then it all goes back into a pipe and down the way. There are also funky tributaries to our dry creek to handle all the water coming down the bank, a few more areas need to be incorporated. It was made by the contractors and we just used rip rap but I will also add in my concrete "chunks" and the few nice found rocks the contractors dug up while grading. Eduarda, thanks for that article! It's perfect. Essentially I want mine to look like a cross between Cameron's beautiful dry creek and the Fine Gardening dry creek. Cameron, I will need to get some ideas from you about the native grasses you planted in here. Luckily I will have the ability, if necessary to "reverse" the flow of water from stored water back into the dry creek to keep everything moist. A pump and an underground water line that runs back up to the "front" of the stream will do the trick. So far our "project" is shaping up very well. A few more things need to happen before the patios go in - more retaining walls and drainage. I've got a LOT of planting to do these next few years. I have a feeling winter sowing will be my best friend!

Yes, I have one. It was installed late November. I have the custom panel LFA073. Very quiet, cleans well. It does have the European baskets with tines that are very close together - so it may not work well with fatter dishes like stoneware, but I have Corelle so I can fit a lot of dishes! We have had no problems except that the detergent dispenser did not open correctly a few times and I figured out that I had loaded dishes so that something had been blocking it. Now that I know that and am more careful about how I load things, no more problem. The settings require you to "know" what code = what setting, but then I always use regular wash so its no big deal to me, but a stranger would be totally confused if they did not have the manual handy. I bought mine from AJ Madison, and it was not a stock item so it took them about a week to get it before they shipped it to me. I'm sure they also charged me less than the website listed ($999) - I called and ordered all my appliances from them. The only other comment I have is that AJ Madison lists it as having heated dry, but it does not. It has "perfect dry" which means it somehow releases the steam slowly (no obvious vent). You can read about it on the Fagor website. That was no big deal to me, but some people insist on heated dry. I think they have another model that has heated dry. Here is a link that might be useful: Fagor Dishwasher Pics

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.

my wife got me the best Christmas present ever last year, a Logitec Harmony remote. you program it thru your PC. enter your model number of each device in the program, it retrieves the codes and dumps them to your remote. you even tell it what devices to turn on for what activity. it is truly the only remote i have ever seen that does all functions of the originals. i included a link below. mine took the place of 12 remotes. i even have read of people using them to control lighting and gas fireplaces, though i don't. the only drawback is that you must be connected to the internet to program it, and i only have dial up at home so it can sometimes take a while. Here is a link that might be useful: pricey but worth it!