I need to find a new home for 2 large (5 foot) grapefruit and avocado trees that are in large pots ASAP. They want some TLC and a sunny location inside for the winter. PLEASE email me right away if you can give them a home. I can bring them to the swap or to your house if it is nearby. HAVES For swap (let me know what to dig for you!): white snakeroot 'Chocolate' seedlings threadleaf coreopsis blue fescue pussytoes green and gold pink swamp milkweed seeds sundrops assorted groundcovers (phlox, sedum, mazus) golden ragwort comfrey herb robert geranium wild ginger asters Canada anemone strawberries (originally from Vlad)

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.

Thanks, Casey--that makes sense, actually. I can't figure out how to post more than one photo per post, so here is another photo. This one is of the interior--it's the main redone attic room. There is also another, smaller room up there with original details including the floor, door and the original windows (the rest were replaced). It's possible that part of it could have been maid's quarters, although the house seems sorta small for that. Who knows. There is also a full bath up there. The seller of the house won an award a few years ago for saving the house from destruction. Apparently it was in really rough shape. He was unable to save a lot of the period details due to the extensive damage, but he saved as much as he could, including some of the original hardwood, the original mantels and a few other things. On the one hand, I'm sad that more original features are not there, but on the other hand, he did a very nice job with his choices and he did bring back most of the original high ceilings and take it back from apartments to a single family home. His real estate agent lived on the street during the time this was done, and she said it was in really rough shape. Apparently the preservation society thought this was one that was beyond saving--and look at it now!

Fori, yes, it is exposed aggregate. It's vintage (1970's) from a prior owner except for a back section (the strip along the long straight side of the pool) when we bought the house. There is a 2 foot drop at our fence line and that concrete had tilted. We had a concrete block retaining wall added to stop the subsidence and replaced that part of the concrete. They were suppose to match what we had and to my eye at the time they did okay but I've gotten pickier - the stone colors are the same but the new section has a lot more white stone. The original decking has more of the blue-black and reddish brown with just a bit of white. The sales guy for the pool refinish proposed redoing the pool deck but I didn't feel it needed it. It has some cracks but it's otherwise in good shape. The same exposed aggregate is in decking all along the back of the house, our driveway, and front entry area including the koi pond. With aggregate, the installation skill is critical. In a prior house, we had some where two much was washed away in parts so there were a lot of pop-outs and not enough in others so little or no stone was exposed.