This plan is one of the few house factory plans that has given thought to the design and appearance of each exterior face of the house. All sides have a pleasant variety of projecting and receeding planes, and avoid the boredom, massiveness of unbroken planar walls and the inherent large, bulky roof masses that go with such walls. If you "square-off" any of the elevations you will be losing what makes this plan special and appealing. Builders will tell you that you will pay more for more corners. What they won't tell you is the price you will pay for a visually boring and uninspiring "box" house! The revised kitchen with the enlarged island looks very large to me, causing a lot of walking and travel, since the kitchen "triangle" is so interrupted. I hope your feet, legs and back are such that excessive walking on hard surfaces with hot and cold items is not a problem. Your revised garage is located too close to the house for access to one of the garage bays. Turning it the way you have means: 1) it will have to be placed further from the house than the original plan; 2) your garage doors will be a major visible element from the front of the house and be what guests and visitors see, since the doors will be so large and numerous as to catch and hold one's eye. Garage doors are always the single largest item on the elevation of any house. More so with triple garages! It will be better design to return to the original plan configuration and hide the garage doors from view from the front of the house. Adding the bedroom and bath on the first floor results in a much longer corridor and "tunnel" from one end of the house to the other. Is this of concern? Finally, the stair is highly decorative and will be a major visual feature when using the dining room. Does such a stair work for your style of living? It will be beautiful, but quite expensive. Good luck with your project!

One other observation: you seem to be trying to eliminate as much "unnecessary" interior space as possible. But there is a graciousness in allowing a little extra space. If it were me, the absence of a water closet in an otherwise nice master bath would be dealbreaker. As much as I love ample garage space, your 3-bay garage looks out of place on a modest 3 BR, 2.5 BA rancher. Also, as a home office space has become a necessity to many people, the lack of a 4th bedroom or flex space of some sort seems to handicap the utility of the house, since you've also foregone a formal dining room in lieu of a bigger kitchen eating space. There's a reason homes have grown bigger. We live differently. Your home needn't be 3,000 SF, but a little more interior space and a less cavernous garage will put your home more in line with 21st century housing.

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.

Roofs are overrated anyway :p