tikilyn, in response to you question about what is "inefficient" about the kitchen... The main problem is that you've stuck in what is sometimes referred to on the Gardenweb kitchens forum as a "barrier island." Basically that means, you can't walk between sink and fridge, or between fridge and stovetop , or between sink and wall oven, without having to walk AROUND the island. It is a barrier to straight line travel between those points that you most often have to reach. Those who actually cook full meals in their kitchens (as opposed to just heating something up in the microwave 95% of the time) find barrier islands to be INTENSELY inefficient and annoying. It seems like everyone wants a kitchen island because they just look so "cool" and "modern." All of the kitchen design magazines feature them prominently on the front covers till it seems like, if your kitchen doesn't have an island, well you just might as well face it, you're a total loser. LOL! In reality, properly planned so that the island is to one side of what used to be called the "work triangle," a kitchen island can be a joy. But, poorly planned so that it IMPEDES your work, a kitchen island can turn out to be the bane of a cook's existence! I deliberately chose NOT to have a kitchen island and I couldn't be happier. I have a large L shaped peninsula that serves the same purpose as far as giving company a place to gather and giving a fabulous "bar" for serving purposes and for casual meals. But my work triangle is totally "barrier" free. Before you finalize you plans, do spend some time reading on the kitchen forum and post your kitchen plans there for feedback. There are some folks there with a huge amount of experience with kitchen design and they are very willing to offer advice. They can help you achieve not only a beautiful looking kitchen but also on that works beautifully! Next, beyond the whole kitchen thing, while I realize that your current plan is just a rough sketch, there are a couple of other things that I think you should take into account before getting too attached to it. (I won't bug you about the front-facing garage b/c we've already gone over that before on another thread and you've said your DH WANTS a front facing garage - so that's settled. ) 1) That powder room near the front foyer you have in your new plan is simply not deep enough to have the toilet and sink face-to face-like that. Men need a certain amount of room in front of a toilet to stand and aim. In your currently designed powder room, a guy would either have to stand to one side of the toilet (heaven help your walls!) or press his backside up against your vanity sink. NOT good! A 5 x 5 powderroom will fit a toilet and sink side-by-side with an entry door on an adjacent wall. For a face-to-face sink and toilet with a door on the wall between them, the room can be a narrow as 3 feet but it needs to be at least 6.5 foot long - and even then the door will need to open outward or it'll be nearly impossible to get into/out of the room. 2)And regarding the placement of that powder room... I suspect that many of your guests are going to feel very very uncomfortable using a powder-room that basically opens up directly into the Living Room. When a toilet is too close to a living area or another room where guests actually gather and linger, there is a concern (sometimes unconscious) that any noises made in the bathroom might be heard by other guests. Even worse, no one wants to worry that, if they make a bit of a stinky, someone in the adjoining room will smell it when they open the powder room door. Many people don't even like using a powder room where the flushing toilet can be heard from the public rooms. Having powder-rooms open off of a hallway where no one lingers helps to avoid these concerns. Guests may never say anything to you about how your powderroom makes them uncomfortable. Instead, they'll just shorten their visits so that they can head home (or to the nearest corner gas station) before they really NEED to use your PR. Strongly suggest that you find a less conspicuous location for the powder room. 3) If the bathroom for bedroom 1 is not going to be shared with the kid's TV room area as it was in the original plan you built yours off of, why not swap the bathroom with the closet space. That way you can put a window in the bathroom for natural light AND, if the closet is also going to serve as "safe room" space (as suggested on the plan you built yours from), it would be better if it were NOT on an outside wall anyway. 4) Wouldn't it be nicer to swap the master bathroom and that big closet so that the bathroom was along the outer walls and you could have more windows in the bathroom? 5) With no door between the living room and the kid's TV room, noise from the kid's area will bleed into the living room and vice-versa. 6) No way you're going to fit two L-shaped sectional sofas into a 12X12 TV room as you've shown. I've looked at a bunch of L-shaped sofas and the dimensions for each leg runs about 85" long. Two stuck end to end to form a solid U would require a space 85" x 170" not even counting space to walk around them or between the two unit. 170" is over 14 feet. If you're going to insert "furniture" into your drawings, be sure it is drawn reasonably closely to scale or you will confuse yourself about what will and will not fit in your planned spaces. The sofas you show in the Living room are close to scale. The ones in the theatre room are about half the size they should be! Lots of non-architects do design their own homes. But I think you'll find that everyone who has ever done so and been truly happy with the final result will tell you that they went through literally dozens of totally different basic layouts before they finally settled on one. And then, when they finally had a basic layout they were generally happy with, they tweaked it hundreds of times before they finally had a really great plan that they were truly satisfied with. If you're not planning to begin building for at least a year, you have lot of time to tweak and re-tweak you ideas. But, unless you really really love sketching house plans, unless you happily spend entire weekends revising your drawings for the umpteenth time, unless you find yourself sketching brand new possibilities on paper napkins while having dinner and on the backs of envelopes while standing in line at the post office, unless you fuzz out in the middle of movies because the camera happened to give you a momentary glimpse of a perfect hallway and it set you to thinking about how you could incorporate that into YOUR home, unless you wake up in the middle of the night and sneak out of bed to go tweak your plans yet again b/c you've just realized that if you move that wall 4 inches to the left, you can solve a problem that has been bugging you for weeks about just where the refrigerator ought to go... well, you might you really might be better off just turning the whole job over to a professional architect. LOL!

Thanks, mboston -- I looked at that book at googlebooks. Somehow I get the feeling the person who did this is just not quite as precise as Virginia L. Burton was. Not to talk down my own piece...maybe I'm wrong... I did see something really cool, though, and loved learning about her life with George Demetrios (didn't know that!) Here is a link that might be useful: This is her son!

I loved reading these comments! It is fun to hear other people’s stories about growing up. My husband and I just built our first house a little over a year ago. We are 27 and 28 (no kids yet) and plan for this to be our house for at least the next 10-15 years. Ideally we would love for it to be our forever home if possible. Our lender wanted to approve us for a $300,000 loan (at 26 years old, yeah right) which around here would buy a VERY nice house. We opted instead for a 1240 sqft house at $167,000. We wanted a small loan with plenty of money to travel, buy a pool, travel trialer, nice vehicles, and do anything else we choose over the next decade plus. I’m also considering being a stay at home mom when we have kids one day so we wanted a small enough loan we could easily afford on one income. We built our house on a nice corner lot with a large, fenced in backyard. We have the backyard planned out to include a large above ground pool (to be installed this summer), a fire pit (also to be installed this summer), a shed to house pool and yard equipment, planter boxes for a garden, and plenty of room for a future swingset and room to run. We also have a large driveway with a basketball goal. We plan to have 2-4 kids that will be raised in this house AT LEAST into their early teens. (Would prefer longer). When we built the house we did so planning to utilize the outside as much as possible. We love being outdoors and plan to raise our children to love them too. I would much rather spend my days outside than sitting in a large house, this was true for my husband and I as children and as adults, so spending money on tons of indoor space was not appealing. Utlizing the outdoors (backyard tent camping as a slumber party, roasting marshmellows around the campfire, swimming all summer) is, in my opinion, an amazing childhood compared to sitting in your room. We were picky about where our lot was, we choose a housing addition that is close to the elemnetary school and middle school and park (about 5-10 minutes on bike), one minute drive from the major highway, and about an 8 minute drive into the big subburd. The housing addition has a country feel around it, but is close to everything which is something that was important to us. I could walk the kids to school on nice days with a country vibe around me and still be to the bowling alley or skating rink for birthday parties in less than 10 minutes. We wanted a big backyard but didn’t want to pay for acreage or land, so a large corner lot made the most sense. We have room for the things we want but do not have to pay a premium price. The house is 3 bedrooms and 2 baths with a large living room and good sized kitchen for the size. The table in our dining room fits 6 and we could probably upsize to one that fits 8 if we wanted to, but it would be tight. We have an attached 2 car garage with a 3 foot bumpout for extra storage. Right now we leave one car in the driveway and only park our Jeep in the garage so we have room for our ping pong table which gives us another hangout place when we entertain. We have easily entertained 6 other adults (8 people total) in our living room so I am confident 2 to 4 kids will fit nicely in there with room to spare. If we have 3 children then two of them will have to share a bedroom and all of them will share rooms if we have four (2 per room). However, the rooms are a good size for bunkbeds or 2 loft beds with desks underneath which is what I plan on doing. I also plan to one day turn our patio into a sunroom with a TV, video games and table for board games as an extra place for the kids and their friends to hang out. I firmly believe people live in way too big of houses today. I spent half of my childhood in a 1200 sqft house and half in a 2400 sqft house. I loved both houses, but the 1200 sqft house always felt more like home. The 2400 always felt empty and when I lived in it I envied friends who had smaller ”homier” houses. With proper planning, I think people can easily raise 1-4 children in a 1200 square foot house. If you have more children than that I think you should upgrade to a 4 bedroom house which would probably mean more around 1500-1600 sqft. I think the problem is a lot of people do not have the foresight to plan ahead. People like the OP buy 1200 sqft houses with plans to raise and homeschool over half a dozen children there. If you know you’re someone who wants to have lots of children then plan accordingly. I know sometimes life happens, but most cases of too-small-houses seem like they could have been avoided with better planning. I know our house will fit our needs at least until our oldest children are early teens. If, at that point, we feel too cramped we will move and rent out our house which will give us a nice source of income each month. If (hopefully) we do not feel too cramped we will stay and this will be our forever home that will be paid off by the time we’re 56! Woohoo! Either way it’s a win and our kids will spend, at a minimum, their elementary years in a fun house with a fun backyard and we will have plenty of expendable income for sports, trips, and anything else we desire! Small houses are the best in my opinion. They just require future planning which is something I do not think alot of people do these days! They either buy too small for the number of kids they want (OP) or they buy the largest house they can afford and then are unhappy becuse they have such little expendable income. Big houses don’t just mean higher mortgages, they mean buying more junk to fill them with, higher utilities, higher taxes, more expensive repair and upkeep costs… this all eats into expendable income quickly. I say GO SMALL whenever possible!! But, the right size of small for your family. 1200 sqft for 3 kids? Great! 1200 sqft for 7 kids… not so great.

Yes, totally forget...movies too. I never understood people who could recite passages from books or movies they watched years ago. There are some that stick out in my mind, though. The other day I was reading a book about animals that start killing all the humans they come into contact with, including peoples' pet dogs. I got up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and there is my dog, Chewie, who sleeps up against my door. He gave me a weird look and it kind of creeped me out. lol. Went to the bathroom, got back in bed and started reading again, but apparently when I put my shoes up that night I didn't close the door to my closet all the way. I remembered a Stephen King story called "The Boogyman", it starts with a closet that's cracked open just a little. Well, I had to get up again and close that dang door. I read that story when I was a teenager and it still creeps me out. I'm 53 now and cannot sleep with a closet open. I don't remember most of the story but I do remember it wasn't good for the characters in it. I may have to reread it just for the fun of it. It was from "Nightshift"...a bunch of short stories and I used to own it. I'm now reading one of his son's book of short stories, "20th Century Ghosts". Not sure I like him as much as his father.