I knew a lady who had a 'Formal Room'. Her house was known, locally, as "The Castle", and was a Tudor dating from 1925. Anyway, the 'Formal Room' was a large walk-in closet next to the kitchen, where, when the maids weren't doing anything else, they could go and get a 'Formal' (party dress/evening gown), and "iron-on-it" for awhile. The lady's daddy had owned a beer joint, but she'd been Miss-something-or-other, and had snagged the richest boy around. It was real smart of her to have 'The Formals' where the maids could grab one, when the Lady of the House, or her Daughter, called from upstairs, or from the Country Club, and said, "Vinah! Git me thaaayit blue Dior ready. Wuhrrr goin' ta thuh University Club tanite!", or "Git me up some formals, Queen Esther! Tha inlaws are flyin' us up ta thuh KENtucky Derby." That 'Formal Room', now that you've jogged my memory, was probably the house's original Pantry, and is roughly the size of YOUR pantry. In fact, your house is roughly the same size as 'The Castle'. And its facade seems about as complex and expensive-to-build as 1920s Tudor architecture. Yours is a HUGE, luxurious house, by most people's standards. So, I'm baffled as to why the dining table is relegated to a 13'x13' 'Dining Area' off the Kitchen. I'm guessing you're in someplace like Northern Michigan, where people are very unpretentious. But still, there seem to be a lot of people in your life, and jamming them all into that little space, when food seems rather important in the scheme of things (the well-developed kitchen... the large pantry....) would seem to potentially make for tense and unpleasant meals, when the whole family is together. We recently moved back South, when it turned out we'd taken over another corporation (honestly, I didn't mean to...), and someone was offering us too much money on our almost-complete house outside Portland, and somebody else took our lowball offer on a silly, overgrown "Old-South-Style-Dream-Home" (on considerable acreage, with millions in landscaping and embassy-style electric fencing that we were getting basically for-free). As much as I hate Mississippi, all those tempting numbers made the move back home impossible to resist. So, here we sit. This house had the typical tiny, prissy little Dining Room, just big enough to hold the previous Owner's "Mamaw's (Grandma's) Mahogany Dining Set from Montgomery Ward" (C. 1957). The space was too small. It became my husband's Library. Stretching across the back of "The Gracious Mansion" was some bizarre free-flowing conglomeration of space, that was a den/great room... something... I had that space gutted before I even let my Decorator in the door. Didn't want to give him a cerebral hemorrhage... and it's cheaper to let your design team know the raw dimensions from the get-go. They're going to come in and take measurements, and photograph every stub-up and framing anomaly... So I had studs, sub-floor - tutto - sprayed in white primer, before they arrived. Well, I had sold our Portland house before I was able to use my custom table built for 30. But that table (and a kitchen designed for caterers) turned out to have made the house irresistible to my Best Friend's Daughter, who ONLY entertains formally, and otherwise has meals across the meadow at her Parents' house. I have a history of selling my houses to pairs of surgeons. These particular surgeons, despite their youth, paid cash. Seems they'd each been letting their trust incomes pile-up while they were in residency. Good kids. So, here, in my newly-acquired bargain manse, I wanted the same thing: long table, with three big chandeliers overhead... lots of sconces, mulberry silk shades for really soft lighting... but with a big, long buffet, because this IS the South, and we ALL dine buffet-style. In Portland, caterers and rent-a-butlers are fun people. In Mississippi, they're failed actors and musicians, and are bitter, spiteful little bundles of passive aggression. And anyway, everybody at our table here, even when there are 30, are 'family' in some way, and the Caterers really don't need to overhear whatever schemes we're hatching, or whatever dirt we're dishing. Although we use fancy plates and fancy goblets and Whiting's 'Lily' flatware from 1902, we DON'T DINE FORMALLY. Everybody's too busy, and it's basically an open-house-in-the-Dining-Room: arrive at some approximate hour, grab a plate, leave whenever... But the table seats an easy 30 (three feet for each person), with blazing chandeliers overhead, and my favorite ancestor, a banker from Riga, glowering over everybody, from the center of the longest wall. It's a practical room: brick herringbone floors that can be mopped with strong soaps; fractionally non-parallel walls for better accoustics; embossed velvet 'papering' the walls, for even better accoustics; a tented ceiling where it once 'cathedraled', for soaking-up our family's cacophony; sturdy chairs, and a sturdy table... And "immediate family", for us, can easily fill the room. We totally fill up the room with people, at least once a week. I'm thinking that you're happy 'Yoopers' (or some sort of Central European/Alpine types, in a snowy part of America) with none of our Southern pretensions or obsessions. But still: wouldn't you be able to use an old-style English 'Long Room', with a long, rugged refectory/trestle table (a long, narrow, rustic table), in a more expansive space? A refectory table can be used for reading, computing, etc., when not used for dining. What I see on those plans just seems like the 'kitchenette' in a 1950s tract house... a tract house that just grew and grew. Your house is the size of a MANSION, but the dining area is like a breakfast nook in Levittown.

I don't know that you can get a real looking Shaker hollow door because the flat recessed panel area would have to be very thin in cross section. In my experience the raised panel portion of a hollow door is much thicker than the raised panel on a solid wood door, almost as thick as the stiles and rails themselves in cross section. Stylistically I don't think a 6 raised panel will work well on closets with the Shaker on the room doors. In a hierarchical sense, the Room door is the Primary door and should be fancier or more detailed than closet doors if they are not all going to match. I see nothing wrong, if you are not matching doors, with using a Shaker door on the room door and using plain slab doors in a paint grade with a good paint job on them for the closets, so that the closets take a stylistic back seat to the room doors. As for hollow vs. solid. I am strongly biased toward solid even for pocket doors. It is the hanging hardware and the workmanship of the hang that dictates their proper function, not the weight of the doors. The houses in my neighborhood have pocket doors that are 10 feet tall and four feet wide that are Very heavy. But you have to get good hardware, have a good carpenter do the install, and *make *sure * the *finish *carpenters *don't *nail *the *baseboards* and *door *casings *through the *drywall *and *into *the *pocket *doors *themselves*. It Happens. A Lot.

Yikes. The electrical is messy and I didn't realize how fuzzy the pic uploaded compared to the original. I don't have one without electrical that is jpeg. I'll ask my builder. For now is there a way I can upload the current one less fuzzy? MrsPete- I agree about the garage! I wish it didn't poke out. We needed the mudroom bathroom to be the one accessible from the backyard. Couldn't figure out a way to move the garage, keep the bathroom accessible on both ends, and stay under 104' width which is really at the widest we can be. Any ideas are appreciated.

Well- I wouldn't totally give up just yet. How about stuff like swiss chard/ green beans/ cuke/Kale/lettuce/radishes/summer squash maybe a winter squash. IMO strawberries are a pain. The blueberry might be a good idea but do you have another area where you could put a highbush one- it seems kind of a waste of space for that area where you could grow a lot more stuff- but how deep is that bed and how much sun does it get? If the soil is good and you can plant fairly close together there probably won't be that much weeding. Maybe do half of it in the actual soil and the rest in containers. Amend the soil where you want the tomatoes when you dig the hole and make sure they have sun- I see a tree or something on the left (East side) does that shade that spot? Is the building in the pic the one on the South? The West side looks pretty clear so if the ? tree doesn't block the East your getting at least Morning and later day sun. Look at it on a sunny day and put the tomatoes in the sunniest spot for the majority of the day. If you have it pretty much weeded so far you could cover the area you are not actually inground planting with cardboard or something to keep the weeds down. Look for cheap containers- you can drill holes in storage containers/ buckets etc. Look for the raised bed kits when they go on sale. I used to have a fairly good sized inground garden but but since I've gotten older have gone to more raised and container set-up. I've found that even a one- to two foot tall can grow quite a bit in close quarters. I have found also that the even lower raised beds have a lot less weeding and they come out easier because they are never walked on. That cement block thing looks interesting except I doubt I could lift the blocks. I hear you on the expense thing but when you see the price they want for a stupid zucchini when I know how easy and prolific they are I do it again every year.