Hey Kirkhall, glad to see you're still moving forward! But, I thought there was a vent stack just about exactly where the hinges on the door into the NW bedroom are shown. Have you decided to go ahead and move that vent stack or am I just misremembering exactly where it was? Could you show exactly where the vent stack will be on the drawing above? I don't want to spend too much time playing with your sketch only to find out that that danged vent stack is in the way of every idea. But, I do agree that the sketch your GC's designer provided looks awkward. I'm comfortable with angled walls but they do need to look PLANNED! Where two walls meet at 135 degrees (90 + 45) they usually look planned. And, if you have two matching sets of angled walls that meet at 120 degrees (90 + 30) or at 150 degrees (90 + 60) they also usually look planned. But,where (as here) walls meet at some other odd angle, they often look like a mistake was made in the building process and the angled wall was just stuck in willy-nilly to make all the walls connect up. I'm wondering if something like this would work. (Probably depends on where that danged vent stack is!) The hallway to your bedroom would be made about a bit wider and the laundry closet a bit shallower than on your GC's design...but the laundry closet still should be plenty wide for the washer and dryer to sit at the ends as shown on the GC's design. The dotted red line is just to show how I envision the wall beside the NW bedroom would line up with the outer wall of the laundry closet. The only angled walls would be one at the top of the stairs and one in your bedroom and both would meet other walls at 135 degrees instead of some odd angle. If you put a small triangular table or some nick-knack shelves in the corner across from the hallway angled wall, you would create an angled hallway effect that would look planned rather than haphazard. I know one issue you're dealing with with the girls bedroom closets is that you have a kneewall at one side which is making it hard to figure out how to fit in a full sized door. But I think you could do their closets like this using 24" wide regular doors set where you have a full height ceilings. (Yes, I know 24" wide doors aren't exactly "optimal" but where space is tight, they will work FINE as closet doors, particularly for a child's closet!) Both closets would then be shallow walk-in closets (3.5 ft deep x about 6.5 ft wide) with hanging rods to the left and right of the door and a narrow aisle down the middle. Since you wouldn't have to walk very far into the closet, it wouldn't matter that the aisleway was narrow. Obviously, on the side with the low ceiling, you would not have any storage above the hanging rod but I had a similar closet in one of the secondary bedrooms of our old house that was built under a stairway and it was actually pretty functional. With kid's closets, you often want to put set the hanging rod pretty low anyway.

gordonr, If there's nothing else I've learned during the course of my renovations, I've learned that everything ends up being more complicated than you expect. Once you open up the ceiling or the wall, there always seems to be something in the way of what you want to do. A floor joist where the tub drain needed to be, pipes where I wanted recessed lights to go, and now the recessed light over the tub is where it would make sense to run the duct. I can hardly wait to get to the kitchen renovation! I spoke with a rep in Miele's technical service group yesterday. Initially he was telling me he thought what I wanted to do entailed too long a stretch of duct - that it would reduce the performance of the dryer. I told him I expected that it would not be optimal performance, but what I was trying to determine was whether it would reduce it to the extent that a condenser dryer would have the same performance. He didn't seem to understand what I was getting at, so I gave an example: If the vented model has 15% better performance than the condenser model and the venting I'm doing reduces performance by 15%, then the condenser model would be generally equivalent, but if the vented dryer's performance is 50% greater, the same 15% reduction in performance would still mean the vented dryer was a better choice. I asked if he could give me any information about how much better the vented dryer's performance was than the condenser model and how much the venting I was considering would reduce the vented dryer's performance. At that point, he said he wanted to talk with one of the senior technical reps and put me on hold. When he came back, he told me that the dryer was rated for up to 60 feet (which I already knew) and that I should be fine with what I was planning on doing. He also told me that the sr. rep had indicated that having a condenser dryer in a closet could be problematic because it puts off a lot more heat than a vented dryer - you'd need a lot more air circulation into the closet with a condenser dryer. The closet I'll be putting the w/d into is 68" wide by 29" deep, so the extra heat and air circulation need may not have been as much of an issue for me as it might be for others with a more confined space. One learning that I took away from this: if you start to get the sense that the technical or customer service person you're talking to may not be as knowledgeable as you'd like, ask to talk with a senior rep. Like anywhere else, initial phone calls will be answered by more junior staff who will route the more complicated issues to more experienced staff. I've decided to go with a vented dryer, and now just need to decide between the Miele and the Asko. I'll let everyone know which one I end up with. Jan

Peke unfortunately, yes. the number of record high days are increasing. here's one article. worse, the summers of 2017 and 2018 had terrible wildfire smoke, with air quality worse than Beijing -- each time for about a month. we're being told to expect "wildfire season" more often due to climate change. in spite of all that, I still think Seattle has some of the mildest weather in general. not as hot or as cold as other places, and we don't get a lot of bugs. yes, it rains for about three seasons, but it's usually a sprinkle or mist, not a downpour. also, all that rain brings SO MUCH GREEN. it's beautiful here!

Some excellent comments above. I'll take another tack... Have you seen what this floor plan looks like on the exterior? Have you seen how this plan fits and works on your site, ie, access and orientation as two examples. So many folks posts floor plans on this web site, as if the plan exist in isolation, when, in fact, floor plans, exterior elevations and roof plans and site plans are all inectricably linked together and should properly be studied together. Changes and improvement in one directly affect all the other characteristics of a house. I lived and practiced architecture in Palo Alto and San Francisco for many years. It used to be a wonderful place. Good luck on your project.