sea2mist, your original question was whether it would be better to design a one-story or a two-story home with elevator. The best answer to that question is really "which one do you like better?" A two story home without elevator would probably cost a little bit less to build than a one story home with the same useable square footage. Add on the cost of an elevator and they would probably run fairly close to the same amount. I built a two-story with an elevator simply because I LIKE two story-homes with big wrap-around porches and had always dreamed of owning one and also knew I wanted to be able to live in my dream home till the day I died. We have nearly 4 acres so I could just as easily have built the entire house all on one level. But I knew I would never be satisfied with a one-story house. I WANTED two stories. All our bedrooms are on the second floor and the entire house - including the attic - is wheelchair accessible. At current prices, a home elevator will run you about $20,000 to $40,000 depending on the model. Not cheap certainly but in comparison to the overall cost of a typical custom home (especially one in the size you're contemplating) it is not outrageously expensive either. It is quite likely that your land will run you more than the cost of an elevator IF you decide you really want a two-story home that you can live in forever. Until you get a better idea of where you want to live tho, doing too much in the way of "designing" your dream home is really an exercise in futility. Remember that the location of a house really can and should dictate many aspects of the house. Mountainous terrain may make a walk-out basement highly desirable. On the other hand, decide to settle in the Houston area and it would be the height of foolishness to have a basement. A house that would be perfect on an Oregon mountainside would not function well on a the Florida coast. A house that would be wonderful in the dry mountain air of Santa Fe would be miserable in New Orlean's hot muggy climate. And, it would be sad if you spent hours and hours designing a home with big windows to take advantage of the southern sun, only to then buy a piece of land with a perfectly charming view toward the northeast but a big ugly office building on the south. While it is great to dream and fine to start making sketches and playing with design software if it helps you visualize things, don't get "married" to a design until you have at least decided what part of the country you want to live in. And, even better, wait till you've actually found your own little slice of heaven and then let the house be designed to take fullest advantage of your land. BTW, I do agree with a previous poster that the room sizes you are contemplating are quite a bit larger than they really need to be. Do keep in mind that rooms that are too large can feel less "homey" than more modestly-sized spaces.

I've only found two small things so far that MS Office can do that OOo can't, and they are fairly specialized little tricks that most people would never miss. One is that the mail merge in Writer doesn't have a simple way to create a "catalog" listing, and the other is that the spreadsheet in Calc doesn't have the option to label the cells using the "R1C1" convention, which allows certain types of calculations to be formatted more quickly. Most people have no idea what I'm talking about, so most likely it wouldn't be missed. OOo will open and allow you to work with documents created in MS Office. You just have to remember to "save as" one of the Word, Excel or PowerPoint formats if you are going to use them under those programs again. Open Office has a different native format, but gives the option to save in several other formats that are compatible to other programs. I would strongly recommend downloading Open Office and giving it a try. The worst thing that can happen is that you end up buying MS Office down the road, but very likely you'll end up finding it to be just as useful.

That's great you have some help. I was thinking about your office today because I am working on mine and we have a few similarities as far as size and furniture - except I don't have all the great closet space you have! I think once you have the additional furniture in there you can play with where the desk should be. The good thing is you can shuffle it around as much as you need to until you find a look that feels right. If you don't already have some, you should pick up some of those sliders that you place under furniture to help move it around - they make it really easy for one person to move things around to try various configurations. I have several sets and they have been invaluable! In some rooms, we lived with those darn sliders under our furniture for weeks as we tried, lived with, and then changed up where certain pieces of furniture went.

I'd like an office that changes usage over time. In My life, I had a large U shaped desk that took care of my ranch, my personal stuff and my work stuff. I've left my work for others self behind as I got older and ditched one side of the U into a large L shape desk. I also took down about 6' of upper cabinets. So, now I'm into gaming online, various projects including my 'cottage in the woods', my personal stuff as well as the ranch. With the cottage, I'm building my own 'office' again utilities about 8' of wall space in the living area. I need to function for personal stuff, gaming and gardening. I have two 27" monitors as well as a ton of equipment including printer, landline phone, router, wireless as well as hardwire technology, UPS, backup unit, to house and a place for office supplies and file cabinet. I'm also thinking about adding in a shredder. Where do I begin without turning this into a monolith?