7000ft, I am totally convinced you ought to write a book. Your family sounds very interesting and it sounds like you all work as a cooperative of sorts. How much of your food do you produce? The tomatoes that I grow are primarily for sauce, so I use Roma-type tomatoes. They are odd-looking, being long and quite large. The variety I grew this year was Super San Marzano. I've tried some others, but this one is the best. The sauce-type tomatoes are awesome for making sauce. They are very meaty with minimal juice and seeds. Making sauce is a breeze because you can skip the steps for squeezing the juice and seeds out. According to the catalogs, some varieties have pectin in them that helps to thicken the sauce. We ended up with 25 jars of sauce in the freezer. That is a record for us, so we are pleased! That's 25 dinners during ski season that I don't have to cook. :) I also grow a cherry tomato and some sandwich-type tomatoes. I've had good luck with Early Wonder, which is early yet tasty. (way better than early girl!) Inside the GH we enjoy our first tomatoes in mid-July. Without the GH we are lucky to get any red tomatoes at all. I'm sure it's the same for you. My gardening efforts are pretty much solo, but my husband was instrumental in building the GH and in helping look after things as needed. He is an expert at raising seedlings because I tend to travel a lot in the spring. He also built a root cellar and he is fully on board with our quest to grow as much food as possible. It's a bit of an oddball pursuit, so I'm happy that he's into it!

We have to share our building and property with Soil,water 4 H and the Housing Authority.We are downtown without much land(not much of anything to be honest)Anyway they did plant a tree for a fellow MG as a memorial but we have since been told we cannot do that everytime someone passes away. Maybe your MGs could put in a garden and add a brick or stepping stone for each of them as sort of a memory garden. Heres an idea I am doing for my family WHILE they are ALIVE. I am not much on parties but I want a stepping stone memory party. We will all decorate our own stone and it will be in my garden NOW but of course have so much more meaning when they pass on. Each person is to bring things about them to decorate their stone.(like a mosaic) A broken favorite plate . a key or coin of theirs,a horseshoe ,an old peice of jewelry,My son has some old plates he hung on his wall as a kid with ships,new wife won't allow them in their home so that is perfect.My in laws have a cottage on Lake Erie and have collected lots of sea glass.A carpenter may add nails. Maybe as gardeners they could make impressions of their favorite flowers by pressing them into the wet cement. I told my dad when he died I'd cremate him and put his ashes IN the mortar or grout!He can be with me in the garden every day!LOL

Thank you, all, so much for the feedback. I really appreciate it. Bpathome: phenomenal ideas about reworking that right side of the main floor. I love your idea of the friends/family entrance and adjusting some of those spaces to make it more kid-friendly. Your comment about your boys getting distracted while walking in to get a water bottle totally cracked me up! Been there myself a thousand times and would never have thought of adjusting that space to make it more user-friendly for them, but ultimately, me! :-) Thank you for the ideas! Let me answer a couple questions that you all had. 1. The whole house actually has been designed together, not piecemeal. The reason I didn't include the lower level, bonus space over the garage, and the outside elevations is because those are currently being reworked by the architect and he's making so many changes that it seemed pointless to even show those at this time. 2. I should've clarified that the views are beautiful out both the back and the front of the house, but the front is especially gorgeous, with the added bonus of being a spot where my boys will likely be playing and riding bikes, so I like the idea of placing the kitchen with those views so I can keep an eye on them most of the time. But the back yard views are lovely, too. 3. We will have neighbors behind us, but probably won't see their house much because we have a deep back yard and a buffer of woods between us. 4. The office is small because we will have an office in the basement if anyone ever needs to work from home, which neither my husband nor I, do. (Yet I know it's important for resale, so we will have one). What we really need on the main floor is a "home management center" instead...a place to have a couple of filing cabinets, a printer, charging center for phones, and a place to drop and deal with mail. We don't have a desk top computer (both my husband and I use laptops). Thus the small size of the main floor "office". 5. The garage is angled because the contour of the land on the right side of the house is very low. It's going to require a lot of fill to get it to a manageable slope and to bring a driveway in over there would be difficult. So that pretty much eliminates a side entry garage. And other than a front facing garage, we're basically left with the angled option. As for the master closet/bathroom area, it occurred to me to square off that area, too, but even in doing that, I'm not actually gaining a ton of usable shelf/hanging space. I gain a little, I suppose, but moving around in it is still tight because of its narrow nature. I suspect that entire closet/bathroom area needs to be reworked (i.e., remove the walls as they're drawn in those two rooms and start from scratch with the existing footprint to reallocate space). My brain just doesn't work this way and I'm TERRIBLE to "seeing" the potential on paper, which is why I was hoping that someone here would have some ideas about how to fix it.

I'm sorry, but there are so many things wrong with this plan beyond the layout of the master bathroom. For example, the living room is virtually impossible to furnish due to the diagonal circulation path. Given the limited size of your bathroom, would you consider omitting the trendy free-standing tub and replacing it with a shower? And replacing the free-standing tub in the small second bathroom with a built-in tub/shower?