Summerfield, So sorry it took so long to get back to you but we had a lovely power outage this morning so things came to a big halt. I wanted to wait til hubby could be with me so we can look at this together. Yes, you are right - the French Doors should be at the Living Room leading to the bedroom. We forgot that wall is a shear/bearing wall. Sorry for that mix-up. KITCHEN How big is the island? What do you think about moving the prep sink to other end of island? I debated whether to just make my cooktop a range so I can get more space on the left side of my main sink...but my back issues still remain. I went round & round over freezer access in the kitchen but with my idea below - that may be addressed. Why don't we go back to the original L-shaped part of the kitchen (leaving your island in) & put the kitchen freezer elsewhere close by. IDEA: Put kitchen freezer in entry to control center. Recess freezer as far into the vestibule as possible & whatever space is left over,make into storage. Would that be possible? Hubby's words for it: For door directly above entry that leads to vestibule, show door swing to the left against east wall of vestibule. Move west wall of vestibule which is opposite that door to the east to make room for the installation of the present kitchen freezer in what is in the foyer that leads to the control center. (The deck arctic entry will rarely be used by anyone else other than us so it doesn't have to be accommodating so much to gear as the carport entry does.) CONTROL CENTER Could we remove the door from the kitchen entry area into the control center & makea pocket door where the dotted line is between the two cabinets? This would also give me easy access to the kitchen freezer. BATH You are right...please put back pocket door in bathroom :) UTILITY AREA IN BATH Put transom window in bathroom above linen closet. We've decided to heat the main floor with in-floor radiant heating utilizing a boiler-driven thermal system that will be located in the utility room adjacent to the bathroom. Enclose utility area by extending wall that borders rod & shelves to the east ending south of west wall of linen closet. Install wall between west side of linen closet & utility area. Install pocket door opposite what is now the heater. (This also removes the window above the bathroom heater). Within the utility room will be located a direct vent Bedaris boiler about the size of the water heater shown in your latest rendering. Also we will retain the existing water heater shown in the rendering. (Toyo-Tomi fuel oil demand). We have be able to put the surge tank along that utility wall but we'll field fit that as we go. OUTSIDE DIMENSIONS I think I see what I did with the dimensions. I looked at my original and see I put 20 x 16 for the Living Room. I should have put 16 x 20. It's 16' from south to north. I looked at hubby's original graph paper & the outside dimensions for the living area are 32' north to south (living room & bedroom) and the deck adds 12' which brings it to 44'. So sorry for the mix-up. Office heat source: We are going with in-floor radiant heating. I am so sorry for all these changes...we really appreciate all your kind help. You've made our plans so much more useable - thank you!!! melaska

"Just out of curiosity, who here thinks that you can build an new old house? " You do not have to use old materials, just old techniques in most cases. Plaster instead of drywall, mud beds for tile floors and walls instead of cement board, etc. You neither can use nor want lead plumbing (DWV or supply), but cast iron is still available (though not with poured lead & oakum joints). Electrical wiring has moved a long way since K&T (and the lack of any electricity before that in many houses). Hardwood floors are not going to be as tight a grain as very old stuff (especially if it was virgin timber) but there is no shortage of wood flooring, even in very large widths of you want to pay the cost. Virgin reclaimed (from old buildings or bodies of water) is also available. There is no reason to use full size dimension lumber (though it can be found if you want to look & pay). Joist spans are likely smaller than in very old structures, so extra wood is likely to be needed (I have never considered the bouncy floors of an older structure a 'feature' worth preserving or repeating. I do not think anyone wants to exactly recreate the old house, just the important parts of the surface finishes. I have repaired 18th century townhouses in Alexandria, VA so that you cannot even tell without putting a hole in the wall to see the new framing and wiring.

Just to provide an update: We listed for $113K and we're under contract for $107K. The buyers are a late-middle-aged couple that wanted a single-story and called the house "pretty." They really clicked with the next-door neighbor that showed them the house too, so that probably helped. :-) BTW, sorry for abruptly dropping off this thread before. I felt like I was arguing (particularly about the condition of this house relative to its neighbor comps) when there was no way to settle it other than to let the market speak. NC, we did send DSS to visit the comp around the corner. He said it was very nice inside, and the sellers said it had been on the market for a couple months. It hasn't yet sold, and the listing expired mid-December. I'm assuming that was either the 60- or the 90-day mark, as that's how listing contracts run with QCFSBO. I've been watching all the comps since we listed and none of them have sold yet either. Some have dropped off the MLS, but they're not showing on the assessor's website as changing hands, so I'm assuming.... Could just be a time lag, though.

Before I launch of into the ether, LavenderLass..... Your husband is doing OK now, and y'all are over and out of perils and pitfalls that befell y'all? This is gonna be a fairly long ramble, 'cause I’m really good at such things, and I sorta kinda in a way wanna brag about it all anyway..... We started on our new place at the end of this past June. Well, if you count the well and septic as starting, it was the first week of June We have a nice 1888 sq ft house on a couple of acres surrounded by a couple of acres of county owned "Storm water run off ROW" right down town here in the middle of the big city, Well, OK, with the "finished basement" I reckon it's really more like 3456 sq ft, but around here nobody counts a finished basement as part of the house. It's kind of just expected. We have always had a place way out in the sticks since we first got together 33 years ago. We had a really nice almost 2.5 miles off the road down a private ROW in the middle of an Appalachian foothills hollow out of the way almost 40 acres that we bought when the kids started middle school and we decided I was keeping the "new" job and that we would move closer to the real world than our 105 acres in the middle nowhere Tennessee was. Then a moron in a great big hurry passed a school bus on a curve and there I was. To make a real long story short enough to bear, everybody but me thought that being a "Neurological disaster area" that far off the road with no neighbors and cell phone service only if you're in the right spot is totally unreasonable. My wife said she would be OK with me finding a place just as country just half as close to home (which would have been 13.75 miles) and half as far off the road with a neighbor or two...... Which of course no one thought I would ever be able to do. So, I asked everyone everywhere that I came across and looked and looked and drove down every un-named pig path around and at last found a very nice 17.3 acres located almost right where three counties meet right in the very middle of the NC Piedmont. Unbelievably rural for considering its' being just 7.5 miles from the square in the booming metropolis of Mocksville, NC. and pretty much equi-distant to Salisbury, Lexington, Statesville, and Wake Forest University/Baptist Medical Centerin Winston-Salem. And it's just 47 miles to the terminal entrance at Piedmont-Triad International Airport in Greensboro, NC. and 67 miles to the terminal entrance at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport in Charlotte, NC too. C was at first in shock that I actually found such a place and was a tough sell on me getting us this, but she finally realized that I was never going to shut up about it said if I could swing the deal that she would sign her name on the dotted line right next to mine. Everybody concerned, the people selling it, the real estate agent, the neighbors, the county folks, the people down the road, everybody, said we were never going to get it at what I was willing to pay. Everybody, except me of course, had little enough faith in my unfathomable charm and and bull dog (though many call it bull something else) tenacity to think that I would ever be able to talk us into making such a deal. But, I DID! And so C just like she said she would ended up signing her pretty little signature right next to mine and it's since Dec 2013, it's ours..... Very private at a little over 1.3 miles off the pavement across three cattle grates through pasture and woods down an excellent shared private drive with one neighbor 500 - 600 feet distant on each side of the home-site. A school teacher couple with no kids on one side, and a retired serviceman and wife on the other, and an absolutely palatial estate behind across the river. Due to the location on an oxbow of the river, and being in a three county "Designated Agricultural District", that's all the neighbors there will be. And the "Designated Agricultural Area" is bigger than this whole one town one high school county of maybe 40,000 is, and near as I can tell has a population density of 32 per square mile, which for east of the Appalachians, especially in the Ga/SC/NC/Va Piedmont, means it's virtually empty. Sort of a pie shaped property with almost 2100' on the S Yadkin River. From a +75' bluff above the river down to several hundred feet of actual real sandy beach right down along and with two great big and deep swimming holes including one with a great big rock sticking up right in the middle for an excellent diving platform into its' 12 - 13 foot deep hole, with 300' fronting the "drive", +3000' along the longest side of the property with +1200' along the "opposite" side. And the river is from beginning to end one of the very few NC state "Protected Watershed"s and there willnever be any kind of development adjacent to it, no industrial plants, no sewer plants no nothing except woods and farmland. C had serious doubts about the rational of buying this place, but, the chances that anybody could now talk her into selling bit and buying something else, are substantially less than zero..... Approx. 5.5 acres of very nice and healthy pasture/field - with close to 12 acres in large mature hardwood's from level river-front floodplain to gently sloping to fairly steep hillside. And several acres of those hardwoods down in the flood plain that will one day make another several acres of beautiful shaded summertime pasture too. We have us a new permitted and tested and approved 282' well with static water at 60', and a new permitted and tested and approved septic system installed. We bought a really odd 14 X 68 half of a double wide with an odd 2 separate pitches roof that we stripped out from end to end and is now in the process of being completely and totally ever so slowly redone by ME formerly 2 bed/2 bath - now being turned into a luxurious 960 sq ft 1 bath, 1 bedroom with a small alcove, an entrance-hallway/laundry/closet, a 9'6" X 13' "spare" room (for ME!), and a large sewing room and walk in closet. VERY rustic in the outside appearance as the neighbors are like minded and none of us are concerned with what the drive by traffic that will never be, nor are any of us about impressing the county tax folks or anybody else except for the Great Blue Herons, Beavers, Bald Eagles, Deer, Turkey, Fox, Bobcats. Rabbits, Raccoons, Skunks, Possums, Wood Ducks, and according to one local lunatic, Bigfoot too, that are all in abundance here. A wonderful retirement place for us, our now grown and hopefully permanently gone kids, our 5 dogs, horses, cattle, goats, and chickens, and our peace of mind too..... You could look and look, but it's it's absolutely no exaggeration to say that no one will ever find another "almost like being in the mountains" place like this anywhere in all of the Ga/SC/NC/Va Piedmont. OK. The youngest of the great big Great Pyrenees wanting to go out and play in the snow, I am done with my brag..... As next week is the first time this season since early November that we'll see temperatures hit 60F, work is about to once again, begin in earnest. And regular reports of perils and "progress" and pic's too are soon to follow.