kitch4me: The rug is fun, but I was worried it was too dark. The ceiling tiles will have to stay for now, but we will be replacing the fan with a new light fixture as soon as I can find one that doesn't hang too low. sis2two: Thanks for the color suggestions, I'll take a look at those. LOL olychick. I told my husband people would laugh at his sock, flipflop combination...he just laughed. His socks look like blue in the pic, but they are actually grey. tinan: My husband is out of work, but there is some budget for this. We have no mortgage or debt, and have some savings, so we're okay, just don't want to go crazy (I'm not much of a spender anyway) I should have said, the room is cluttered right now, and has things in it that shouldn't be there. The table in front of the TV is actually a stool we've been standing on for doing the sheetrock, so won't be staying. The bench in front of the window is actually the over the fridge cabinet from the kitchen! It won't be staying either. I actually don't like a lot of clutter, although I have to admit, I'm not an overly tidy person either :) I have ordered some white curtains from Ikea, they should be here next week. The angled bookcase was originally in our dining room. When we moved the bookcase to the living room we just threw some binders on. I have the books all piled up in the sunroom ready to go on after painting the room. My dh is pretty adamant that bookshelves have books, not decorative items on them! I agree mostly, though I do like a little variation. My wonderful dh actually finds the shelf full of binders very relaxing! We are both avid readers, don't have many visitors, and our home is where we spend most of our time. We have been thinking about putting in a window seat on the north window. We have to redo that entire wall as it is covered in ugly diagonal paneling! Thanks for all the suggestions so far. The only things that need to stay are: the couch (it's a small 2 seater),the arm chair, the rocking chair, the bookcases (by the window),the tv stand, and some sort of coffee or end table.

Maybe the problem is that you're insisting that the wall color be carried on into the other rooms instead of considering other options. There are other ways to approach it, you just need to think outside of the box a bit to do it. For example, our main floor basically forms an L shape with the kitchen and living room at opposite ends of each other and dining room in the middle. We have one continuous wall that goes from the kitchen, to the small breakfast area and into the living room. I don't particularly like the way it looks and plan on installing some 18 inch walls on each side of the entrance from the living room to the dining room to help make it a more defined space. For the time being though, I have a line where the paints change color from yellow to Cream and IMHO it still doesn't look bad. There are many things you could do that are less expensive and would allow you to use different colors in each space. For example, you could install a floor to ceiling wall unit or use a tied back drape. A clever and economically affordable idea my daughter found for their transition is invisible bookshelves. They're going to install them from floor to ceiling and house their vast collection of cook books on it. If you post pictures with views of how the transitions from one room to another look in your space, I bet you'll get several doable solutions to consider and then the options of color for your kitchen will expand greatly. Here is a link that might be useful: Sample of Invisible book shelves.

Sorry for not responding sooner to y'all's great inputs. Saturday evening, I got a virus on my computer & didn't get it all cleaned up until yesterday evening so I was too tired to get on the net, last night. Thank you for the complements on the front elevation. Its taken us a while to get there, but we think we will be happy with the results. We're trying to give it a "new old house" vibe. The shakes will be Nichiha Sierra Premium in Caramel, so they will be in horizontal lines rather than the staggered texture the architect used. I do like the look of the 30" French doors which gives me 1 foot extra on each side of the quad to work with. The panels will usually be open, but we might want to close them in on a winter evening when the trees won't be in leaf and we might be able to see the neighbor's house. We will be going to SC in a week, so we can get a better idea of what the situation actually is. OK, if we do 30" doors, that would make the quad 10' wide giving 4' on each side of the unit. The fireplace comes out 2', but I think we want the bookcase to be recessed from the fireplace, so lets say that is ~18". That leaves 30" between the quad and the bookcase. I know that stackback for pinch pleats is 1/6 the total width on each side. Does it work the same wall for panels with rings on a rod? I'm pathetically out of touch with drapery fashion. (I do know that I am going to take down the traverse rods w/ pinch pleats & install rods w/ inexpensive panels when we go to sell our current house.) Anyhow, if I follow the stackback formula, there would be a 20" stackback on each side. With 30" to work with, I should be fine, right? Does anyone have suggestions for layering so that the panels on each side don't have to be operable? I know that bamboo shades are very popular. Do they fit with a slightly more formal great room as opposed to a family room? I had a house with French doors across the back that had those 80's pleated shades on them; they were not attractive. And, in that case, the shades were rarely open, so I have a bit of an aversion to shades on French doors. Gosh, I don't have good ideas, yet, about furniture placement. I have home design SW, so I'll put something together and throw it out there. I think we've been working so hard on the floorplan, elevations & then choosing a builder for so long that we've finally come up for air to realize that how we want to decorate can have an influence on the plan details. We want as much figured out now, before we break ground, so we can minimize the change orders. Thanks, again for all of the help & sorry for the slow response - Jo Ann

Any particular reason you put the sink across from the range? There was a pretty exhaustive discussion of why not to do that in Small Kitchen & Dining Room thread, and also in the thread about what ranges are safest for kids (link below) (the title of that thread was sarcastic--the point was that kitchen design, not range choice, is what influences whether you have accidents/burns happening). The basic problem is that if the range and sink are across from each other, you are designing a kitchen in which accidents are waiting to happen because you force yourself to walk across the kitchen with hot water and hot and/or dirty pans. It's especially dangerous if you have pets or small kids or if pets/kids are ever guests in your house, but the danger is only reduced, not eliminated, if pets/kids are not an issue. A galley or modified galley like you're proposing is fine, but it is MUCH SAFER to put the sink and range on the same side, and the fridge/freezer on the opposite side. There is no safety advantage to putting the fridge on the same run as another fixture (i.e. sink or range), but there is a major advantage to putting the sink and range on the same run: you can empty your boiling pasta water, take pans to the sink after you use them, etc., without ever walking across the open floor. So there is no opportunity for kids or pets to get underfoot or in the way, or for you to slip, and drop hot things on kids/pets/the floor. Given your constraints, I would suggest putting the sink on the same run as the range and the wall oven on the fridge run. Putting a wall oven there is way less dangerous than putting the range there, first off because using a wall oven never involves pots of boiling water, and second because usually when people take things out of the oven the first thing they do is set them on the counter to cool--so stuff would come out of the wall oven and be set down beside it to cool; stuff would not be carried, hot, across the kitchen. But I think what would actually make the most sense here, since you have a longer run on the bottom, is to put DW, sink and range along the bottom, and move the fridge and freezer up to the top. They should probably go on the end where the wall oven is shown, so put either a pullout or a couple of feet of counter between them--from right to left it would go freezer, fridge, counter or pullout, wall oven, more counter. Here is a link that might be useful: Thread on burn-safe kitchen design