I agree that the entry is just badly conceived. Entering into an office -- even if you do run a home business -- is just a bad plan. A better choice: Create an entry hall. Build the office to the side of the house (not in the middle of everything) so that you can regulate business to that side. From that same entry hall, you can have doors leading to the downstairs bedroom and the other rooms. Whether you sell the house or keep it in your family for posterity, this will be a more functional, logical arrangement. If your children do not farm in the future, they can still use that office for another purpose. I also agree that the garage is over-sized. It's kind of like a garage dragging a house. It seems to be the main event rather than an accessory. First, I'd consider how much you really need this oversized garage. You say your parents are in poor health. How long are they likely to drive? Are they likely to each need a car? Teenagers typically don't have garage spaces -- they're simply too expensive. Unless your budget is very large, I'd cut back to a plain old two-car garage . . . and you can later add another detached two-car garage, if finances and need are there. One thing I don't see is a back-door entrance. It might be that I just can't see it on this small schematic, but I'd look into adding one in that mudroom area. It'd allow people to come straight into that easy-to-clean spot and use the restroom or take off dirty shoes before coming into the real living area.

Thanks for the responses everyone! Let's see if I can address them all: There's a lot of focus on my guest bedroom area. My intent for that space is really to "flex" with us as our family ages, like you said, @lavender_lass. For now, I see it being used as an extra room- play room, or whatever with a bed or pull out couch for the infrequent times we do have adult over night guests. It can also be used as a BR if someone breaks their leg or has surgery or something. Then, as we age, it will become our Master bedroom. The Guest bath is large because we needed one that is wheelchair accessible. We have 3 friends and family members in w/c now, so it was drawn with them in mind. (And any future handicaps in ourselves.) So currently, it will be used as the bathroom that every guest uses when they visit. I didn't want it to open right on to the family room, cuz I think that's a little tacky! :) I don't like the door being where it is to the "guest suite" or flex space or whatever you want to call it. I was thinking about moving the door down, like you suggested, @kirkhall. Since you mentioned it, I'm thinking that's probably a really good idea! @fotomatt- just curious what you meant about the small look/sq footage? Didn't know if you meant that I haven't used the space well, or if I did use it well! Does the exterior elevation look wrong? I was actually worried that I have too much sqft. Just wondering- I won't bite, I promise! :) @andi_k- good point! And actually, after looking at those pics again, they don't seem to have alot of usable counter space, either. I might have to rethink my vision for that room. Adding a little footage to the mudroom might be on the agenda. I need to check and see if it will jive with the upstairs. So....what do you think about my front windows, then? Should I cut them down to 2 casements w/ transoms? That would give me a little more room to play with in the mudroom, but would that ruin my exterior look? So many good things to think about! I appreciate them all!

I knew a lady who had a 'Formal Room'. Her house was known, locally, as "The Castle", and was a Tudor dating from 1925. Anyway, the 'Formal Room' was a large walk-in closet next to the kitchen, where, when the maids weren't doing anything else, they could go and get a 'Formal' (party dress/evening gown), and "iron-on-it" for awhile. The lady's daddy had owned a beer joint, but she'd been Miss-something-or-other, and had snagged the richest boy around. It was real smart of her to have 'The Formals' where the maids could grab one, when the Lady of the House, or her Daughter, called from upstairs, or from the Country Club, and said, "Vinah! Git me thaaayit blue Dior ready. Wuhrrr goin' ta thuh University Club tanite!", or "Git me up some formals, Queen Esther! Tha inlaws are flyin' us up ta thuh KENtucky Derby." That 'Formal Room', now that you've jogged my memory, was probably the house's original Pantry, and is roughly the size of YOUR pantry. In fact, your house is roughly the same size as 'The Castle'. And its facade seems about as complex and expensive-to-build as 1920s Tudor architecture. Yours is a HUGE, luxurious house, by most people's standards. So, I'm baffled as to why the dining table is relegated to a 13'x13' 'Dining Area' off the Kitchen. I'm guessing you're in someplace like Northern Michigan, where people are very unpretentious. But still, there seem to be a lot of people in your life, and jamming them all into that little space, when food seems rather important in the scheme of things (the well-developed kitchen... the large pantry....) would seem to potentially make for tense and unpleasant meals, when the whole family is together. We recently moved back South, when it turned out we'd taken over another corporation (honestly, I didn't mean to...), and someone was offering us too much money on our almost-complete house outside Portland, and somebody else took our lowball offer on a silly, overgrown "Old-South-Style-Dream-Home" (on considerable acreage, with millions in landscaping and embassy-style electric fencing that we were getting basically for-free). As much as I hate Mississippi, all those tempting numbers made the move back home impossible to resist. So, here we sit. This house had the typical tiny, prissy little Dining Room, just big enough to hold the previous Owner's "Mamaw's (Grandma's) Mahogany Dining Set from Montgomery Ward" (C. 1957). The space was too small. It became my husband's Library. Stretching across the back of "The Gracious Mansion" was some bizarre free-flowing conglomeration of space, that was a den/great room... something... I had that space gutted before I even let my Decorator in the door. Didn't want to give him a cerebral hemorrhage... and it's cheaper to let your design team know the raw dimensions from the get-go. They're going to come in and take measurements, and photograph every stub-up and framing anomaly... So I had studs, sub-floor - tutto - sprayed in white primer, before they arrived. Well, I had sold our Portland house before I was able to use my custom table built for 30. But that table (and a kitchen designed for caterers) turned out to have made the house irresistible to my Best Friend's Daughter, who ONLY entertains formally, and otherwise has meals across the meadow at her Parents' house. I have a history of selling my houses to pairs of surgeons. These particular surgeons, despite their youth, paid cash. Seems they'd each been letting their trust incomes pile-up while they were in residency. Good kids. So, here, in my newly-acquired bargain manse, I wanted the same thing: long table, with three big chandeliers overhead... lots of sconces, mulberry silk shades for really soft lighting... but with a big, long buffet, because this IS the South, and we ALL dine buffet-style. In Portland, caterers and rent-a-butlers are fun people. In Mississippi, they're failed actors and musicians, and are bitter, spiteful little bundles of passive aggression. And anyway, everybody at our table here, even when there are 30, are 'family' in some way, and the Caterers really don't need to overhear whatever schemes we're hatching, or whatever dirt we're dishing. Although we use fancy plates and fancy goblets and Whiting's 'Lily' flatware from 1902, we DON'T DINE FORMALLY. Everybody's too busy, and it's basically an open-house-in-the-Dining-Room: arrive at some approximate hour, grab a plate, leave whenever... But the table seats an easy 30 (three feet for each person), with blazing chandeliers overhead, and my favorite ancestor, a banker from Riga, glowering over everybody, from the center of the longest wall. It's a practical room: brick herringbone floors that can be mopped with strong soaps; fractionally non-parallel walls for better accoustics; embossed velvet 'papering' the walls, for even better accoustics; a tented ceiling where it once 'cathedraled', for soaking-up our family's cacophony; sturdy chairs, and a sturdy table... And "immediate family", for us, can easily fill the room. We totally fill up the room with people, at least once a week. I'm thinking that you're happy 'Yoopers' (or some sort of Central European/Alpine types, in a snowy part of America) with none of our Southern pretensions or obsessions. But still: wouldn't you be able to use an old-style English 'Long Room', with a long, rugged refectory/trestle table (a long, narrow, rustic table), in a more expansive space? A refectory table can be used for reading, computing, etc., when not used for dining. What I see on those plans just seems like the 'kitchenette' in a 1950s tract house... a tract house that just grew and grew. Your house is the size of a MANSION, but the dining area is like a breakfast nook in Levittown.

I'm a firm believer in a flex/getaway room, but you have plenty of those. I agree that what this house needs is one large living area for the family to gather. If you are hoping for your children to grow up and for you to retire in this house, this plan is not the plan for a large family gathering! A couple of friends, kids, their spouses, a couple of grandkids, and that room is going to seem like a closet. (With three sons-in-law and 3 grandkids, I know of which I speak! :) ) Anyway, the back six feet of the room are dedicated to hall area, so you won't have any furniture there, and the opening to the other two walls have doors on them. This makes the family room about 13' X 15', which seems EXTREMELY small for a house this size. You will have to squeeze behind the chairs to walk into the "getting away" room and you will have to squeeze behind chairs to get out to the porch. Where else you would you put additional seating? It's a nice plan, and I like the upstairs, especially, but it doesn't seem suited to your purposes. If I were building a house to grow old in, I would want something more spacious than the study/bathroom on the first floor and certainly more closet space. Perhaps you could put more money into more square footage there, and finish out some of the rest of the house at a later time. Good luck! There's certainly a lot to be excited about in this plan. :)