Congrats on the new baby! Where is your kitchen now? Where will Baby sleep, until he/she is old enough to sleep alone in an upstairs bedroom? What is happening to the existing entry? Will guests enter from the end of the covered porch, into the dining room? That seems a little awkward to me. If you're turning the existing entry into a nursery, I think the new entry should be where you show "lower cabinets". Master bedroom: what's the enclosed space between bath and closet? It doesn't look big enough for walk-in closet. The little hallway to the MB is wasted space. I would flip the bath and closets so you could have a window in the bath, and the door could be closer to the kitchen. Now, about the kitchen. There are two huge issues: first, the island blocks the flow between range, sink, and fridge. Second, the range is so far from the sink. Imagine lugging a pot of boiling water and pasta from the stove to the sink, with a 4-yr-old running from the living room to the bathroom! I would flip the kitchen, so the range is on the outside wall, and put windows on each side of it. Sink/DW on the peninsula. I would put the fridge on the other side (backed against the office), along with pantry storage. The down side is that I can't figure out where you'll put your dishes, unless you can squeeze the island back in and have dish drawers.

Thank you guys for the response. I am already in love with this site. Angelaz: I have considered the walk with groceries and completely understand your line of thinking. We are building on our land in the country and really want views from every room in the house. The home will be positioned around beautiful oaks with no neighbors in sight. Call me strange, but I love the idea of being able to stand in the kitchen and see out the front of the house, the side, and the back. I think that we are going to close the ceiling on the living room. I'm not to crazy about it being open to below, but I will check out the thread. I'm not to crazy about the master bath/closet area. I'm going to ask our architect for suggestions. I though the laundry chute was cool too :) Palimpsest: I agree about the upstairs being too small and cramped. I'm going to have our architect work on that as well as bumping out the laundry room. I am also going to expand the living room to 24x18 and center the fireplace with the seating area (not to include the walk space under the balcony). I do like the idea of maybe moving the fireplace to the side wall to accommodate a double fireplace. I will have to think about that because I don't want to jeopardize the views to the backyard. Cas81611: I plan on using the sunroom as more of an adult area. A place for morning coffee or a place for the women to congregate when we have people over. And I agree with you, I'm not too sure how I would feel about anther door to the master bath. It is something to think about tho :) Oaktown: Thank you for the suggestions. I actually considered a detached garage on that side of the house. Have you posted your house plan? I would love to see it. Red_Lover: I'm not sure who the designer is. It's house plan W32548WP off Architectural Design. Thanks again everyone, I really appreciate.

I have shaker cabinets too (white) and went with the Amerock Mulholland pulls for drawers, knobs for cabinet doors. I went with 96mm pulls on the 15 & 18" drawers, 128mm pulls on the 24" and larger drawers. The 96mm ones looked too small on the bigger drawers, and the 128mm pulls looked a little crowded on the smaller drawers (especially because of the shaker stile/rails all around the drawer fronts).

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to read through these posts and to post advice and suggestions and constructive criticism. I am taking all of it into consideration and some of it was not what i wanted nor expected to hear, but what I needed to hear. I feel as if a little more explanation is needed. We found a builder that we really like and everyone that he has built for has been really happy. He had several plans that we could look at or if we had any plans he could build whatever we liked. He has a gentleman that could draw and customize a home for us. We thought it was architect at first and the price was so good because we were going through him and he would then be able to have our house plan to use in the future. Upon our first meeting with the gentleman that was going to draw up of dream home so we could make it a reality, we learned that he was not an architect, or designer. He's retired now from 40 years of experience woking on/building homes and is good with the software. He is very kind and has been very patient with the many changes we have made along the way. However, we soon discovered that he really has no design ideas or suggestions. He just draws whatever we ask him to or whatever I draw to send to him. If we wanted something a changed, the standard procedure was to just make part of the house bigger, we had gotten up to almost 4400 square feet! If we didn't like the way something worked and asked for a change, he would fix that issue and cause 2 more. I got so frustrated that we are trying to build our dream home and pretty much the only person I had for design help was myself. Uhm, I really want someone with much more skill and talented and better taste to design my home. I know what I want, I just do't know how to get there. We have been working on this for 8 months. I got so frustrated that I gave up for 3 months. Our neighbors are using the same builder and they had difficulties getting their design as well. However they had found a floor plan that they liked and just had him make changes to it and add a mother in law plan. I firmly believe that we are his first truly start from scratch home. Again, this is the guy the builder sent us to to have plans drawn, not our builder. Giving him credit he has taking my very very basic sketches and turned them into something the builder can build from, but pretty much the design is about 99% me, not that I wanted it that way. Here is where I'm at, so you can see that he is doing all the builder type stuff. We don't want to be difficult, but we want a good design. We don't want the builder to think that we are difficult or indecisive because we just can't get there with his guy. I'm at a loss! Several people wanted to know the lot dimensions. So here they are: It is at the top of a ridge, has some slope to it and has a nice open are in the middle. Of course we want the house to sit about at the arrows part of the lot. There is an utility easement of 20 feet on the right side of the lot, but the utility poles are more like 30 feet inside the property. I really do appreciate all of your insight. It has been eye opening. I'll make another post addressing questions and comments. Sorry to be so long winded.