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.

I will tell you my experience with 5-1-1 mix, which I changed for a 6-1 mix (I will explain it). Until one year now, I used a commercial mix of compost and peat for citrus containers, with very good results in the short term (several months), but with further problems due to organic matter decomposition with lake of air and and the resulting problems. Then, I decided to move to 5-1-1 mix, but it is difficult to find pine bark of 3/8" size. Repti bark and Orchid mixes are very expensive. I buy 1 inch size bark mulch in 6 gallon bags at a very good price. Later, using a pruning woods chopper, I triturate the bark mulches and screen out pieces bigger than 3/8" size. What I get is a family of bark particles from fines to 3/8" size. I tested by myself several mixes in a container of 25 Oz volume and 6 inch high and I got the following results: 5-1-1 mix (chopped and 3/8" screened bark+perlite+peat): Total pore volume: 300 ml Aeration pore volume: 130 ml Total porosity: 40 % Aeration porosity: 17.3 % Water-holding porosity: 22.7 % 6-1 mix (chopped and 3/8" screened bark+perlite): Total pore volume: 400 ml Aeration pore volume: 250 ml Total porosity: 53.3 % Aeration porosity: 33.3 % Water-holding porosity: 20 % As you can see, I got better results, by far, from 6-1 mix, without peat. I decided to try without peat, following a Josh (Greenman28) advice in an old post. He said that sometimes he didn't use peat in 5-1-1 mix with good results. Peat decomposes faster than bark, and you know that decomposed particles penalises aeration. Well, after one year of use of 6-1 mix, I bare rooted the past week a healthy Tango mandarin grafted on Poncirus trifoliata in a 12 gal container, for planting in ground, and I can tell you that the mix was in a very similar condition to the original, and I don't remember so well developed and healthy roots in a container citrus plant. I am very satisfied with this mix. Just one additional care with it, you have to monitor more closely the fertilization, because minerals leach out easier than in a traditional peat mix. In any case, it remains for an acceptable time. And, coming back to your question, I don't remove fines. If you removed fines, in my opinion, it would be imperative to use peat.

After reading through the thread, I agree that your plan to sub lava rock for perlite and a commercially prepared potting soil for the medium's peat fraction should work fine, as long as the size of the bark and lava rock aren't too large or widely divergent in size. I also stand on the side of Pam in her assertion that you cannot expect a soil you have to water in sips to regulate moisture levels to cooperate with you as fully as a soil you can water at will to beyond the point of saturation without having to pay a tax in the form of diminished root health or function. If we take interest in the growing experience of others to the extent we get a sense of satisfaction from knowing we helped, providing information that allows them to recognize or create soils they don't have to battle for control over their plants' root health is probably the most significant help someone could offer. So moving away from soils that demand micromanagement when that ability might be in short supply yields significantly more potential, even to growers with years of experience, for plants to realize more of their genetic potential. Al

I like #3 because of the contrast.