sueb20: I love the names of paint, that sounds beautiful and, interestingly enough, it was the kind of color that I wanted to find for the siding of our home; we finally went vinyl to my husband's delight. I found the color on BM's virtual fan and I'll be pulling that color when I go to the store next week. It's overwhelming when I go there and to think that I'm going to need to find the right colors for five other rooms; OMG! Thank you for your suggestion.

Well, I've drawn out about a bazillion rearrangements, and out of those my husband and I selected about three of them for me to play around with a bit, to see if one shouts that this is the one to refine. I have to take breaks from this process often or I get too stressed out. Trying to keep it somewhat enjoyable. Graph paper speaks. It can make it obvious when the floorplan closes the house in too much, blocks views, etc,. Sometimes it shows that despite a room looking large, there is no good place to put couches, etc. because of walking paths to other rooms. The style house we are going to build is the old Florida "cracker style" home. It has a fairly steep pitched roof (metal), and a FULL wrap around porch. I don't want to bump out into or take away from the porch in any way. Most of the year we are able to use our porches. I've dreamed of this porch for years. It's more important to me than the sewing room, or anything else. An idea as to how we want the outside of the house to look like is to go onto the crackerstyleloghomes.com site and look at the "Fowler" That's the porch I want. I've come to the conclusion that I really don't want a loft. For one thing one never knows when they might break a leg. The other is I'm not getting any younger. After speaking with a few people that have lofts, many of them generally stop using them after awhile. Maybe it's the isolation thing. My husband and I also do not care for the extremely high vaulted ceilings that results over the unlofted area. The other issue is, lofts adds a huge, huge amount to the building costs. I'm afraid of having a half completed home if we do a loft. I know we have enough money to build a single story. I think. If we are very, very careful, and eat beans and rice. It's much cheaper to increase the base footprint, or build another structure than to build a loft and finish it off in nice wood. Some people will leave the floor joists exposed on the lower level, but I don't care for that look. I would want the ceiling portion done in tongue and groove like the walls. Heating and cooling costs also increase greatly with a lofted home, and they certainly aren't getting any cheaper!. The ceiling is so vaulted that it becomes wasted volume that is climate controlled. I think what I will end up with is a sewing room that is decent sized, but not quite as large as I would like. If I situate it properly, such as french doors that open into the great room, I can just wheel my cutting table into there to cut if I need more space. It doesn't bother my husband or I if I do that, and it can get wheeled back into the sewing room if company is expected. We really don't entertain much anyway, and if someone stops over unexpected to say hi, it doesn't bother me if they see my stuff out. I've been waiting to post a floor plan until we narrow the orientation of the rooms down to one we think will work. Then I truly want all of you to give me your thoughts on how best to refine it. I'll most liklely need help with the boxes that are storage areas and closets. Maybe with some prayer I will get to that point early this week. Moccasinlanding, I LOVE your storage ideas with stairs and such. They are excellent. I do like lofts....a lot. However, when I wrote down the pros and cons, the cons seem to be greater in number. Lofts can make less than "nice" things happen to the house, such as the high vaults. It certainly makes the house much harder to maintain, especially the outside structure being so far up in the air. (Think huge ladders). However, when it comes down to it, my main worry is running out of money mid construction. I refuse to get a mortgage or loan again. It's too nice living debt free now. My husband keeps saying how he can build me a sewing studio near the house (now to match it), for a reasonable amount of money. I've noticed that all the men I've spoken with LOVE detatched work areas. It must be a guy thing. They just don't understand my reluctance about it. The other evening we had a very violent thunderstorm. Bad lightning and rain, and we lost power for three hours. I pointed out that I couldn't see myself in a detatched studio in that kind of weather. In reality though, I wouldn't have stayed out in this imagined studio anyway. I love him dearly, but I swear the male species is from another planet. They probably think the same thing about women:) Maybe we women just feel more secure doing things within our homes, while men are genetically programmed to leave the house in order to hunt dinner for us. Sandy

Even though I tend to be a "mitchy-matchy" person, my CKD said to remember that all metals should be considered neutral. I have SS appliances, sink, faucet. ORB hardware seemed to look better with the tortoise ceramic floor, bronze glaze on the cabinets, and darker wood trim on the cabinets in our rustic kitchen. We were also able to get samples to look at. I think it was good advice to look at overall tones/colors and not just the other metals. I also liked all pulls. Excuse any picture problems. I am just figuring that part out.

decor, I recently bought a small cabinet to hang on the wall, and it had that Federal molding on top ,which I didn't care for. I removed it, spent $5 on new moulding, had a contractor friend cut it because I could not get the angles right myself, painted them and attached it. What a difference! Yours would be even easier because the corners are right angles, so all you have to do is a simple 45-degree chop. If you add bead board to the inside of the upper part, though, I would probably add it to all three sides, in which case you would also have to cut 45-degree angles for the corners, but 45-degrees is an easy cut. You need a mitre saw, though. Those two things are very easy changes which would make a very big difference in the hutch and make it much more amenable to a coastal theme and feel in the room.