Very nice. (One reason I like it because it has something actually labled 'Back Hall'!) I'd elongate the main part of the house and eliminate that connecting single-story part between it and the garage. I'd put the 'study' immediately left of the kitchen for a kid's playroom and put the laundry on the outside end of the house, with a back door between the playroom and laundry. What is now walk-in closet could become larger powder room or larger closet. I'm keeping the powder room where your family will use it, thinking young families don't often entertain formally, but you could move it, pushing the DR left and inserting a powder room between DR and Foyer. The 'LR' can become a less formal 'study', or combine the FR and LR into one Great Room. The DR could also be 'study' instead'. I don't think you need THREE public rooms: FR, LR, Study. And you do need a children's playroom -- someplace that can be left 'messy'. Upstairs, a laundry chute may be possible from the MBR area. If you make that one-floor connection part of the house, there would be space for a laundry upstairs. Move the MBR and bath left and insert laundry between MBR and Hall Bath. I'd reverse the master bath. Flank the tub with toilet room and shower. Flank the doorway with the sinks. You don't want to be constantly skirting that protruding tub. (This would require a shorter tub or a wider bathroom.) I agree about the double window over the entry door; one single window is more classic (and cheaper). I like this plan. There's a reason it is a classic: It works.

Without dimensions on the plans, it is difficult to tell exactly how big the Living Room area is but, it LOOKS to me like you should have plenty of room for a reasonable amount of furniture in there without it looking or feeling cramped. I think the way the master bath is designed is very I personally would not want to devote as much square footage to the bath as this design requires but it is different and looks fairly functional. If your shower won't have doors then I suspect you'll get a bit of water splashing onto the floor outside the shower but with tiled floors that probably won't bother you. I don't think you'll be able to switch the laundry and toilet as Yillimuh suggested tho unless you're willing to lose your hall closet. Too bad because it would have been good to have the toilet a bit closet to the bed and nice to have the laundry closer to the closet. Since you mention you're retiring, have you given much thought to the possibility that you or your spouse may one day become wheelchair bound. One problem with "toilet rooms" is that they're usually too small for a wheelchair to get in/out of. So, people wind up having to tear down the walls surrounding their toilets. While your toilet is tucked back out of the way, consider if you had to take the wall with the pocket door out completely to allow wheelchair access, would you still be okay with entering your master bedroom thru the bathroom then? Do look into sound insulating the wall between the game room and powder room. The game room is nicely positioned to be repurposed as either a formal dining room or a formal parlor if you or a future owner should ever decide to do so. If used as a formal dining room, you wouldn't want to be able to hear the sounds from the powderroom during dinner. Finally, do you mind my asking where your garage is? At first I assumed it was next to your kitchen and I was going to comment that your kitchen might be a bit dark since the only natural light would filtering in from the sunroom...but then I noticed the window over the sink - so the garage can't be on that side. Then I thought it might be at the front of the house (in front of the kitchen office) but, again, you have windows there so that can't be it. Is the garage "semi-attached"? (i.e., connected to the house only via the mud room? If so, please be aware that if you're on a slab, the mud-room section of concrete may be highly subject to cracking. That piece of concrete slab like a small bridge between two very large slabs of concrete. It is natural for monolithic slabs to tend to shift around a little bit. As long as the entire slab moves as a whole, you don't get cracking. But with that "bridge," the garage slab and house slab will basically be two independent slabs and will probably move independently of each other. The bridging section probably won't be strong enough to force the garage slab and the house slab to "move together". And, if they move independently, cracks will show up running across your mud room floor. Even if you have cuts in the concrete to direct cracking to a specific spot, it may not work. I know because I have a similar design with a screened porch connecting my garage to my house. The screened porch is 10 ft wide by 14 ft long. (14 ft from house to garage.) We got our first crack across the screen porch slab within two months of the foundation being poured! After almost three years, the cracking and shifting seems to have pretty much settled down - but we have a half-inch wide crack running clear across the screen room floor in one place and a second smaller crack (maybe 1/8 inch wide) running across clear the screen room floor in another spot. The cracks look pretty ugly but at least it is a porch floor and eventually we'll put down composite pavers (made of recycled tires) to cover the cracks. I'd have been sick if the cracks had been in my nicely tiled mud-room floor. Just thought you ought to know.

Respectfully, the problem isn't that you're crazy. Everyone here is working on developing the perfect house plan. Some people begin with a house plan and make adjustments, while others start from scratch. However, I haven't seen two that come out identical in the end; thus, while I understand your quest for "perfect", you're not going to find agreement on this or any other board. You won't even get "perfect" for yourself (much less yourself and your spouse). Building a house is an exercise in compromise. No matter how many wonderful ideas, no matter how many opinions and how many drawings you go through, you will always end up sacraficing something. Here's an example: I want plenty of natural sunlight streaming into my kitchen. However, after much discussion and professional help, the bottom line is that the house is going to face east. That means my kitchen will face west, and it will be hit by the afternoon sun, making my kitchen into an oven. So I can either scrap my whole houseplan (which I do not want to do) or add a covered porch over the back portion of the house. I really don't want to add a porch, but it does solve my kitchen problem, it will serve the pool area well, and it's the best solution. The point: I'm not getting "perfect" in this situation. To keep the house plan I like, I'm making a compromise on one item in the kitchen. You're going to end up making compromises in numerous ways as you build. It's just the nature of the beast. To borrow your analogy from your referenced thread, you may end up with the "ipad of houses"; that is, you may end up with the best product in your category, price point, etc. The real problem, as I see it -- and I mean this in the nicest possible way -- isn't crazy so much as lazy. You've not done your homework. If you want something other than a cookie cutter house, you have to make that happen yourself. You need to do some reading on home building, and you need to start searching plans yourself. No one else knows your opinions, tastes, and preferences, so no one else can do this for you. The builder is going to tell you how he typically builds master bedrooms; he isn't going to reach into your mind and pull out your ideal master bedroom. When he tells you, "No, we don't do it that way", ask WHY he doesn't do it that way. It may be that your concept is unworkable, or it may be that it's just not cost-effective. As you do some reading, you're going to find lots of questions that'll help you refine your ideas and pinpoint what matters to you. More importantly, you'll develop your ideas into terms that you can communicate to other people. Having a picture in your head is great, but if you cannot accurately project that picture to your builder and your architect, you're all going to be frustrated. I also suggest that you start collecting pictures of things you like. You're not all that strong with verbal communications (typical engineer -- I'm married to one, so I know), so photographs might help get your idea across to the builder and architect. Also, you've not given us any idea of what kind of house you plan to build -- these are the basics that you're either ignoring or aren't communicating to us. Is it to be an old South-type house, a house with a European flair, a ranch? What does it need to do for you? Do you have children? Do you need it to function for you and your spouse . . . but then expand once a month for weekend guests? It's impossible to know what kind of advice go give without knowing what you need the house to do. To give an analogy, it's like asking what kind of dishes you should buy -- without telling us whether you need something durable for kids, something lightweight because you can't lift heavy stoneware, or something inexpensive. Once you have a plan (or a couple plans) that you think you like, come back and post them. With a "starting place" to work from, people can give you ideas on how to improve and how to proceed.

I'm with you about eating at islands/peninsulas - it's not for me. I do think you'll be happy about having an island for prep space as most of you current counter space is under upper cabinets which limits you somewhat. I would resist, though, the temptation to put a small sink in as your regular sink is close and you'll want the island space for its work surface. jgopp makes a good point about walking space between the fridge and the proposed island. It looks like the plan has 45" between the two which, if correct, is plenty. Check to be sure that is right though. Backsplash: this is so individual. One possibility might be to put something pretty behind the stove since you have a lovely open space planned and just paint the rest above a 3" backsplash of the same material as the counter - the focal point approach. I'm concerned that your back-painted glass might read more shiny than you really like and you don't want to overwhelm a pale countertop with look-at-me color/material-in-your-eye brain freeze. Actually, I love your tangerine accent with both the light and dark countertops as long as it stays accent. If you live where there are showrooms, especially countertop ones, check them out. The real thing just looks different than photos.