Its a pretty house but I think you're going to find it a bit "tight". The previous poster's comments about the garage not being deep enough or wide enough for two full-size cars is spot on. With three kids under six, you probably drive an SUV -- or at least something big enough to fit 3 child car seats into! Go out and measure your cars (length and width). Then consider that you need a couple of feet (at least) on each side and a couple of feet between the two cars when they are parked in the garage to get doors open. You also need a couple of feet (at least) at the front to manuver around the car and at least 6 inches of clearance at the back to close the garage doors. And those are minimums. If you're lugging an infant and all his/her stuff while shepherding the other two little ones and getting them buckled into seat belts, you're going to want more than the minimum clearance. Most people "solve" their tight garage issues by loading and unloading passengers out in the drive way so that only the driver has to squeeze into/out of the car while it is in the garage. With three small children, you are NOT going to want to do that. And, if you plan on storing the kids' bicycles, a lawn mower, and/or any garden or yard tools in the garage, that 2 ft deep "storage" bumpout is totally inadequate. I also don't like the 6ft wide utility room that also must serve as the family's entrance area from the garage. With 3 small kids, I would bet you do several loads of laundry every single day. You need space to sort dirty laundry and to fold clean laundry that is NOT in a high traffic area. You NEED a separate laundry room even if it is very tiny. And, having a "mud room" area with cubbies to collect coats/hats/books/etc would make your life so much easier. If you read this forum very long, you'll find that most posters absolutely love their mudrooms and cubbies. Additionally, the master closets each appear to be barely 6 ft wide and yet are drawn showing hanging shelves along both sides. Once you have clothing hanging on both sides, the remaining aisle way is going to be barely 2 ft wide. A walk-in closet with hanging rods on both sides needs to be at least 7 ft wide. The lack of a pantry may not bother you as you will have a fairly decent amount of kitchen cabinet space. But, where do you plan to store brooms, mops, and the vacuum cleaner? I also don't see any provision for the HVAC unit or hot water heaters. Since there are no stairs going down to a basement, will these be in the attic? I strongly recommend against putting your hot water heater in the attic. Those things do have a tendency to burst when they get old. And besides, getting a new water heater into the attic when you need to replace it is a real chore!!! If you're planning to use tankless water heaters, that won't be a problem. Otherwise the water heater is going to take up part of your utility room. You said you've been settled on this house plan for a several months so I rather doubt you want to start over fresh looking for something else. But I think you can modify the plan without significantly altering the overall floor plan or the elevation to solve most of issues above. I hope the Gardner people won't mind but I've taken the liberty of using my paint program to sketch out some possible revisions. The red lines indicate where the exterior walls have been pulled out. You'll note the right hand wall is pulled out by about 2 or 3 feet and the front of the garage is pulled forward by a few feet. The two bedrooms are about the same size they started out as. This gives you room for a separate laundry room - albeit a very tiny one so I'd recommend that you to look into getting a stackable washer and dryer - and a shallow broom closet. I also think this gives you room for mud-room cubbies in your back entrance hall. And, it would solve the tight garage issue. To gain useable storage space in the garage, the storage bumpout portion of the garage is pulled foward an additional foot or so. If the bumpout is 3 or 4 feet deep, it will be much more useful than if it is only 2 ft deep. Finally, to increase the master closet sizes, I pulled the masterbath and the room labeled bedroom/study forward by about a foot. (Whatever amount is necessary to make the closets a full 7 ft wide.) You'll need to move the bathtub down a little bit to make room for the closet but the bathroom will be a little bit larger overall. Again, the bedroom is kept the same size as it was initially. Sorry but I couldn't figure out a good place to add in a pantry without totally revising your plan. Maybe someone else on this forum can come up with an idea.

How to Post Pics on GardenWeb: Setup: 1) Go to photobucket.com and open a free account. 2) Follow their instructions for uploading your pics to their site. 3) To enable sharing of the pics and posting on sites like GW, click 'Share' from the menu right below the pic you want. A new window will open. 4) Click 'Get Link Code' 5) Select the first box next to 'HTML for websites and blogs'. Make sure it is the only box selected and click 'save'. (You can also choose to apply this setting to all pics in your album with a link in your album). Now your pics are enabled for posting on sites like GW! Posting pic in GW message: 1) Begin the written portion of your posting on GW. 2) When you are ready to add the pics you desire, open a new browser window and log into your photobucket account. 3) Copy the contents of 'html code' box below the desired pic. 4) Go back to your GW posting on your other browser window, place the cursor where you want to pic to appear, right click and select 'paste'. Your pics will appear in the preview so you can ensure they appear properly before the final submission.(I know, this looks like a lot of potentially confusing steps, but trust me, once you copy the pics into your posts once or twice it's a piece of cake!) The Frank Betz Stillbrooke is also a very nice plan. The layout is similar to the Blenheim plan I mentioned above. It was on our list as well until we decided to 86 the formal living room. I like the size of the family room of the EastHaven. Like you, we have had such a hard time finding a houseplan we liked when our Plan A of building our ultimate dreamhome fell apart with this national mortgage mess. I think I looked at every ready to build plan on the internet. We ended up going to a designer in our area who was an accomplished framer before he got into designing. He took our ideas & square footage requirements and came up with a very efficient yet spacious plan that meets our needs and includes our desires. I've attached our floorplan & proposed front elevation. We are looking at adding a staircase for attic/future bonus room access &/or basement access. Summerfield Designs also did a couple excellent mockup floorplans for us which we loved, but we had to keep the square footage as low as possible. We are however using the exterior he designed minus the parapet walls on the garage & bedroom. The house is 2307 sq ft. The room sizes didn't show up very well in the photo--Master is 16' x 14', secondary bedrooms & dining room are all 14' x 12'3", family room is 19'7" x 21'8", kitchen is 12 x 21'8", Laundry is 8'6" x 8'6", foyer is 7' x 12', mud room area is 9' x 5'6".

Really like this thread. Wish i found it sooner. I'm an OB in NYC suburb. We are near the plaster phase of our project. Meeting with a sub Saturday. I have no clue on price. And we haven't picked a plaster yet. We have about 1500 SF surface area. Anyone have a clue on what this should cost? Here are some of the prices we paid for major items: Dig: $900 for excavation (local one-man show, took 5 hours). $950 for two tri-ax dumps to truck out fill. I did the layout. I also did the finish scraping and shaping. This was hard work. Next time I'll get labor. Gunite: $185 yd (shot), 58 yards. Tri-State Gunite, they were great, but not one guy wore a mask, which I found very disturbing. Plus my wife got them KFC for lunch and I tipped them 20 each. Electric: Best Quote $6,600, 110 ft buried conduit run, no. 6 wire, 4 lights connect only. (no equipment except Intermatic Timer). I ended up paying a licensed electrician $1,000 to coordinate with the underwriter and am doing it myself with 100 amp service to a subpanel and intellitouch i9+3. Pentair has GREAT tech support, very friendly people with lots of time. If you have electrical aptitude, do not be afraid to try this. Gas: 100' buried run with 2" HDPE. Then 40' inside with 1.5" black. Best price 7,500. Did it myself for 1,600 in pipe and sand. Bought a 400K pentair mastertemp online for $1,800. If you are handy you can do this. Rebar: Grade 60 about $0.75/lb. ($5.70 for 20 foot #3 bar). Delivered about 60 miles, I unloaded. I would leave install to a sub, it took me 2 weeks working 7 PM to midnight, and it was not fun and my hands took a week to stop bleeding. Tile: We paid $6/SF from MSI Stone for quartzite mosaic. We're DIY install this weekend weather permitting. I see a lot of "upgrade" cost on plaster, but we would like to get insight on total plaster cost. if anyone can help with some insight on 1500 sf of plaster, thanks.

I would consider whether your kitchen is open to other rooms in your decision. Is this a new build, major remodel? You'll want these elements to blend. I must say that my island happened by accident. It was originally marble. That's a long story on another thread. Several problems came up during my remodel starting with the floor. My large sample did not have the light and dark variations, so I was quite dismayed when it was delivered. I could not take looking for another product and waiting for delivery and acclimation so I decided to keep it. It made finding countertops difficult. In my case, walnut was a low cost choice to pull in the colors in my wood floor and my brown/black island cabinets. It ends up that the floor gets the most attention, until their eyes move to the island. I think you are wise to think this out now. I would choose the White Macabaus on all surfaces if you go with the charcoal. If you decide on the walnut, I would do a rustic finish so the dents and scratches blend. We grew up up with many fine wood pieces in my parents home, all of which had the surfaces ruined by a household of kids. We did homework on our large dining table, but it had protector pads. You might do a shout out to those that have a Waterlox Satin finish to see how the finish is holding up, especially for scratches. A furniture finish like mine will require lots of maintenance to deal with scratches. I plan to experiment with the recent scratches that happened when family was visiting last week. My nephew dragged a serving platter to get it closer to his plate. The finish does seem to level out over time. I had deep scratches from bathing my puppy last summer that are hardly noticeable now. Another thing to note is that Waterlox has a long cure time.