I can believe the 100's (1000s?) of hours spent drawing and revising and redrawing. I worked on my house plans for 3 solid years before we were finally financially ready to build. The last year was just making tiny little tweaks like moving an electrical outlet over 8 inches so it wouldn't wind up covered by the table that I wanted to put right there. By the time I took my plan to an architect, he ended up just drawing the floor-plans exactly as I had them. Didn't even change a single door-swing. And, once the house was framed, except for all the construction crap lying around, I could have walked thru the house blindfolded because I'd walked thru it in my mind so many times. It was an amazing experience to watch it take shape and turn into the house I'd been picturing in my mind for so long. Now, after living in my new home for 16 months, I remain totally and completely ecstatic about the floor plan and about the way my home lives. It just "fits" us. I love coming home from work and still get a huge thrill when I catch that first glimpse MY HOUSE thru the trees as I round the corner. Your design shows the same careful thought about how the house as a whole and each room individually and each element within each room will work together to be a home for you and your family. It is going to be lovely and totally personal to you. Exactly what a custom home should be. If you've spent 100s (1000s?) of hours on your plans and haven't thrown up your hands in disgust, you obviously enjoy do this... and you are good at it! A word of warning tho, playing with floor-plans and designing living spaces can be totally habit forming. That's why, now that my house is actually built, I still haunt this forum and spend (waste?) uncounted hours suggesting tweaks for other people's floor-plans. I suspect you may already be a fellow addict. We'll know for sure if, once you have your final plans back from your architect and start building, you're back here on this forum making tweaks to other people's plans in between trying to ride herd on your builder and make sure he gets your home built right. LOL! Anyway, thank YOU for letting me get my fix for the day by tweaking on your house plans!

The vertiginous staircase is practically a Philadelphia midcentury hallmark. (It's a 19th c. hallmark and these houses are either remodeled 19th c. houses or on 19th footprints). The Esherick has been on the market for years, once offered at auction (I think) through Sotheby's or Christies. It's National Register, it's one bedroom, its practically a perfect cube. The only way that you would be allowed to add to the property would be by a separate structure tethered to the house, I think, and the lot isn't large enough to allow this. So, there is a particular buyer profile: an affluent single, or childless couple who likes the house essentially exactly how it is and doesn't mind people walking up the driveway to see a masterwork. --This is a limited market.

Rina, no greenhouse, they spend the winter in south facing bay windows after I chase the cats out. The aloes and haworthias this year will be on shelves in front of a window, the new starts will probably spend some time there as well. tj, no stairs just lots of rearranging to get the best fit-and check for pests. Leslie, the echie is dusty rose. For me it colors like olive patent leather flushed with pink. blue ruffles-it's about 8 in.across and perfect.

The style isn't my cup of tea, but in a way, I kind of like those stairs. If they were mine, you'd have a tough time convincing me to tear them out and replace them with something generic, modern, and bland, even though it might be safer. The lack of a landing doesn't seem grossly hazardous to me, but then I've lived with stairs that curve like that in other houses (it seems to be a mid-century thing), and I'm still here. I think. If the stairs were code compliant when they were built, they're "grandfathered." Current-code requirements kick in with some kinds of modifications, though. No idea whether modifying the railings would trigger that. I agree that the railings need a little upgrading, especially if you have little ones. Heavy tempered glass sounds good.