Finally! Someone is building a nice, "boring" plan with a good use of space and access to various rooms. Good for you! A couple of comments (of course!) 1. Ditch the fireplace in the MBR, romantic but will just be used as a clothes hamper... 2. Make sure the "future rec room" is well insulated (floor over garage and walls) since it looks like it will be constantly used as a path from kitchen to bedrooms. Or wall off the stairway path from the rec room, so you don't have to heat and light the rec room all the time. 3. Might increase the size of the pantry into the garage storage space. 4. Don't wall off the garage storage space from the rest of the garage- it's cute, but will just make it hard to wrestle stuff in and out of that area. 5. You might put a wall and door from the corner of the utility room to the corner of the back stairs, to seperate the side door, garage door, and utility room from the kitchen, creating a "back foyer", and preventing cold air from blasting into the kitchen. 6. You could move the family room fireplace to the outside corner of the room, leaving the wall space available for normal height TV placement. I've also seen houses that put it where the picture window is, but that stinks since it ruins the nice view. 7. Bravo on using the space over the family room. Another possibility would be to change the His/Her wardrobe to a bathroom for BR#3, and expand the master BR into the space over the family room, including a couple of big walk in closets (one his, one hers....seperate wardrobes help with family calm...). 8. Nit-picking, but you might look at the flow from the living room to the family room, it seems a little odd that it looks like it has an open hallway from the family room and then a closable door into the LR, not sure why the door. (maybe for sound blocking?) If a door, should be a wide one for visual and flow. 9. "Entertainment center" seems useless for a TV and such, but maybe a good place for stereo and storing vids and music. 10. I agree with folks on leaving a full bath downstairs for illness/handicap issues, and making doors and hallway access wider into the bath and into the whole area. 11. Do you really need an entrance from the LR to the stoop? That means stuff will get tracked onto the LR rug. It might be nicer to just put another big window there and have an L shaped window seat in that corner. (If you have dogs, they LOVE having a window seat. Trust me.) If you want a wide/double door, put it in the breakfast area. 12. Why not put a washer/dryer on both floors? An up/down compact in the utility room for first floor stuff, and a full set on the 2nd? That would be a "touch of luxury" that you will actually use, and would get a LOT of good comments, for not a lot of extra expense. 13. Don't ignore the space under the stairs! Have it finished with access doors or shelves or such, storage space is valuable! But overall it's a very nice plan, very "livable", just needs a "few tweeks" to make it a great plan!

Hi Anna! Just got your message. I can give you lots of feedback on the TC, but the most critically important piece for you is that we DO NOT use the self clean feature for the speed oven - and in fact were advised by the TC folks themselves not to use it!! (long story cut short is that we had a TC technician from Dallas install the oven, and he was the one who told us this). There have been various threads about self cleaning ovens in general and you may want to start a thread about that here and x-post to Kitchens. It seems many do not use the self clean feature. So, if that is important to you maybe it should be your starting point. As to more general feedback (warning! this is long!), here's an excerpt from an email that I sent recently to another GW'er asking about our TC. Important to note is that ours is the first model off the block, and I am sure that TC has continued to refine the ovens based on consumer feedback. We are a two person household. But we do entertain a lot and cook frequently during the week. Pros: - I love having two wall ovens. The convenience and ease of preparing food for entertaining is great. I would imagine that would hold true for a family of four, for instance. - There are some dishes that are now TC standbys for me, the most popular of which is roast chicken. I can roast a stuffed chicken in less than 30 minutes and it is DELICIOUS. Cooking fish in the TC is also something we do frequently, as well as roasting veggies, which take a fraction of the time. I've also made quick breads with great success, and rack of lamb - something we do less frequently - is a breeze. - Overall, I would say that all of the food weve cooked in the speed oven is excellent - From a pure aesthetic perspective, I love the look of the ovens, and I also think the fact that the oven door colour can be customised is a pretty neat feature. There are about 190 RAL colours to choose from and although it may not be obvious, our red is custom - the "standard" TC red is brighter and we wanted a deeper, almost cherry red. - The conventional oven is excellent Cons: - Cleaning the speed oven is a nearly impossible task. The extreme high heat means that the ceramic plate at the top of the oven is constantly "dirty". Now by this I donÂt mean that bits of food are sticking on it; just that the plate is completely darkened. With the extreme high heat that oven reaches, I am not concerned about whether that is a problem, but it is definitely a consideration if you are a clean freak and like things to look as you bought them. This definitely doesnÂt. BTW, the oven sides are also affected by this but less so. I do two things to clean the oven: first is something I read about on GW, and that is to leave a small bowl of ammonia in the oven overnight. The fumes flake away the residue on the top and sides and donÂt harm the plate. I also bought some cleaner directly from TC. ItÂs not something they advertise or talk about on the residential site, but if you go to the commercial part of their site, they have all kinds of info about all of the products they sell (I bought extra oven racks for the bottom oven as well, for my Christmas baking marathon). - The bottom oven is the same to maintain as a regular oven  no issues. But note we don't use the self clean feature there either - After more than a year of use IÂve come to the conclusion that the speed oven is really designed for ppl who either donÂt cook frequently or who are less confident with cooking. In other words, itÂs highly pre programmed and even though TC touts the fact that you can adjust settings for your favourite dishes, it is only but very small increments way from the presets. This hasnÂt created a problem, as I can always find something that is close to what I want to cook and you can stop/alter the cooking process along the way, but it bugs me that I canÂt adjust the temp settings more. - And speaking of temp settings, because the bottom oven dial is analog rather than digital, there isnÂt the fine increments of temperature that there might be in another model. For example, there isnÂt a 225F, 275F or a 475F setting. - The fan is LOUD  and the oven takes a while to cool down. If you eat in the kitchen (as we do), it can be annoying. Even more so if you have guests over I guess the bottom line is: would I buy them again? I would certainly put TC in my consideration set. I love the speed of cooking esp when I have several things on the go. The bottom oven is excellent and I use it more frequently. I look the look, and the few times weÂve had to deal with TC for service issues theyÂve been great. At the same time, I would also consider more closely other speed ovens  the Advantium for instance, or Miele. If you have the opportunity to test whatever you buy "live", that I think would help. We did see a demo of the TC, and that helped sell us (3 min roasted cauliflower that was addictive!). Regardless of model  FOR SURE I would go the double oven route  love that! HTH! Eliz

Sounds like a brilliant plan to me! I love color, and I love working with color. I find looking at color online very unsatisfying and misleading and downright frustrating. And little paint chips are the next worst way to look at color,And lighting effects color too. The Benjamin Moore Stores here (Maryland), and probably everywhere, offer some colors in larger sheets, maybe 20" by 20". Very easy to take home and look at in the room where you'll use it. They are not free, but much less expensive than buying a quart of color paint - and then you have to bring it home and put it on a board yourself, but that works too. The other thing I like to do is ask what colors they put in the can, and how much of each color. That helps me compare one shade to another. It sounds to me like the griege you're seeking does fit the dictionary definition. If what you're looking for is a cool beige more than a true grey it certainly has some yellow in it and probably some green. You may be surprised at how many different base colors can be in a can of paint, and yet when you look at the final color, you don't -see- them at all.

KSWL, I agree with a lot of your observations. I think we both see it as a more traditional, classy room and some of the changes lean too trendy, or as you call it not appropriate. I was going to suggest using the lamps as the art on that wall and choosing carefully, either something traditional or transitional. But she is trying to "update" the bedroom by removing the large mirror. I have a dresser and large mirror in a guest BR and have thought of doing the same. I suggested moving the lamps to the dresser because they DID look buffet-ish to me. I wondered if it would look wrong in the bedroom, but now I think "Why not put them on a dresser?" Someone came up with the idea of putting tall lamps on a buffet and that style was adopted, but it doesn't really make a lot of functional sense. To me the engineering prints aren't bedroomy. Who are those people and what are they doing in my bedroom?? J/K, I know it's just an example. The question for me is how do you update traditional without getting trendy, especially when you're purchasing expensive items like lighting and art that you'd like to keep for at least 10 years.