My goodness, you guys are fast tonight! I was moseying through the Kitchens forum, stopped by here on my way to bed, and there are already three of my friends online and commenting! ML, I swear I did not lift a finger. I just pointed and Belinda did everything. The most I did was empty some drawers, then she carried the boxes. Belinda needs to earn spending money (she is on disability) and she does everything I can't do or don't get around to doing. Black for the desk would be perfect. I was trying to lighten the area, so did not think of it. The keyboard that will be next to it is black, though. So are the trombone cases, the music stand, and so on. We will have to see how it looks once the room is done. The fake red mahogany may look okay. The room faces east. The honeycomb shades are fairly new - we installed them the day his dad went blind about 3.5 years ago. DH may let me do a valance and side curtains, though. I can only imagine the fun I would have in a fabric store - I am a color and texture lover. Maybe I should look into hanging the 7.5' square rug on the one empty wall behind the loveseat? That would muffle a lot. The rug is in the basement, rolled up after being professionally cleaned. DH is weird about practicing. Lately he has been practicing in the hallway outside of the bedrooms, pointing his horn into the tiled bath. He seems to like that sharp sound. I will have to ask him tomorrow. He went to bed an hour ago, after struggling for hours to figure out a stock distribution issue with my sister's taxes. Her taxes usually take about 10 minutes to do, but not this year! I cannot take credit for the maple, it came with the house. I can only take credit for not trimming it back, or shearing off the bottom so that it looks like an umbrella, like some folks here do. I did choose the door to match it, though! For artwork, there is an interesting photo montage of parts of a trombone, all different angles and perspectives. DH also has a framed poster from the Montreaux Jazz Festival, from the year he played there. I have a picture of him with a mop of hair from his college days, playing. A friend gifted him recently of a sculpture of a figure playing keyboards. I do have a couple of those down lights that you place above artwork that I can use to illuminate something in the bookcase, I like that idea. We have an old broken trombone or two in the basement. Maybe I could look for more musical items in thrift stores and make a sculpture to hang on his wall. The horns live in their cases. I have offered to make shelves for them and DH has declined. Hi Marti, yes that is a barrister bookcase. I got it from Craigslist several years ago and had planned to use it for a display case - even purchased several T3 fluorescent fixtures to put inside some of the sections. It ended up just holding books because we ran out of space. Today we discussed what we are going to do with it, and DH wants to keep it in the foyer. I had planned to put my art deco buffet in the foyer, but the bookcase will fit better. The little curio cabinet next to it holds a few of my precious items. It is supposed to sit a bit down the main hall, where it intersects with the hall to the kitchen and family room, but when Dad was alive we needed it out of the way for the wheelchair and ambulance crews (who else decorates around what the ambulance crews might need!). Now, I leave it in the foyer because I do not want it near where Casey has his pee pads. I don't want it to become a target for him! Since he is on prednisone, he sometimes needs to "go" with little notice. Once the brain tumor or liver cancer take him, it will move back to it's proper place. The hall tree is heavy wrought iron and quite handy, so I may keep it there, too. I just envisioned the foyer looking a bit nicer, with a table and flowers and a picture or mirror on the wall! A tall bookcase (with my McCoy pottery inside) and a coat rack? What do you think? Hi Chris, I did ask the heart doc about the far infrared sauna, and he said it was okay. I got it up to about 120 degrees last night and it was just heaven. I felt well-baked. Know anyone driving through the Detroit area? I have two more shelves in the garage I cannot use. They are 30" wide, 91" tall and 10.5" deep. I do like the color of the bookshelves. They look nicer now than at the lawyer's office. That makes me think that maybe the shelves need touching up. I am not sure yet, since I am not picking them up to look at, since I still have a weight restriction. The shelves are solid pine planks. Jim wants me to look into replacing the metal shelf bracket tracks. They are silver colored and stand out. He wants me to look into getting them in antique brass. My feeling on this is that most of them will be hidden by books, and can't I just paint the visible ones? DH and I are having discussions on what material to use to top the three chests below the middle bookshelves. I want to get this nice granite tile with bullnose edging. He wants to spend less money! The link below shows the product I want to use. I would like the color Giallo Almafi. Here is a link that might be useful: Granite Solutions

Deb, one question that I haven't heard yet is, is your library-media room the main gathering/ tv watching in your home? It's a really lovely room (actually every room you've shown us is lovely). I'm so impressed with the gorgeous bookcases your DH built. I see that you have steps down to this room, which would mean that you'd be carrying platters and bowls of food, plates, glasses, etc, down those steps for every meal that you serve in there, as your new dining room. It's only two steps, but you need to seriously think about whether this would become a real irritant after a while, let alone a possible tripping danger. Unfortunately, having the steps would make it near to impossible to move the wall between the present dining room and library, to give you more space in the dining room. That would have been ideal . . . if it was possible. More questions and thoughts: ~do you have a family room or living room that you can move the tv into comfortably? ~ what do you and your DH actually need the most, a home office or a butler's pantry? ~ With both rooms having wide doorways that open into it, instead of actual doors that you can close off, will you be happy seeing a desk and other office things in full view from your kitchen (which is lovely, BTW)? Friends and family will be passing through it getting from your kitchen to the new dining room. ~ If you turn it into a butler's pantry, are you willing to set it up nicely enough so as not to detract from your kitchen or your new dining room? ~ another idea to consider is to just incorporate the present dining room into the kitchen with, perhaps, built-in cabs to house your nice serving pieces, china and crystal in glass-fronted cabs with closed cabs below for storing what ever you need. You could set up a seating area on that side, too, and/or a secretary desk and chair that you can close up when company arrives for a meal. Personally, I think that turning your present dining room into a sitting room, would be a wasted space, that probably wouldn't be used all that much. But, that's JMHO. Anyhoo, just some other things to think about. Lynn

Ditto what Annie said. You are talking about the structural integrity of your house and it looks like you have a second story, and you probably also have a basement. By removing the wall, the beam needs to support the floor above and the roof. And if you're in a "snow zone" that has to be factored in as well. Another thing, walls are distributing the load from above to the floor or foundation. When you remove a portion of the wall, you are creating point loads on the floor or foundation, which may require additional work to your foundation in the form of footings or additional beams below. These are examples of how removing a wall can get complicated. Maybe you are already aware of this. I hope so! Edited to add another thought I wanted to share regarding openings to let in light. You're only going to get sunlight during the daytime. How often are you home during the day when you can benefit from the daylight? Painting the paneling and better lighting in the family room will to wonders for making the room look brighter. Also, consider replacing the back door with a slider. That will allow more light into the family room. This advice is coming to you from someone who is considering taking down walls to let more light into her dark family room. :) But I've been in my house a long time whereas you haven't even moved in yet.

We are having a bit of a challenge trying to figure out the best layout / set of furniture for our approx. 6x10m kitchen/diner/lounge room pictured below. Especially the area between the TV and dining table where we want some more storage and space for an electric piano. Would be really grateful for any advice or ideas! I want to try and build most of the furniture myself so am limited by what I'm capable of doing. Happy with MDF/Plywood/other sheet goods, spray painting, willing to have a go at concrete worktops and cutting/hacking together metal box profile or attaching metal legs etc. I don't weld and any overly ambitious shaping of wood with curves is going to be 'ambitious'. The 'zones' for the kitchen/lounge/dining area are fixed. We will be keeping the same bookcase, sofa kitchen and dining table. We are planning: Wall mounting TV, building a low-profile media unit with three large drawers. Likely in same 'Railings Blue' as the bookcase. Possibly 'floating' mounted to the wall. A "built-in" bench running along the wall, the length of the dining table. A small wall mounted corner desk in the far corner. The above 3 things in isolation are straightforward - but we are struggling to fill the 'yellow bubble' gap in the picture above and shown in the photo below: Ideally we'd like: More storage: currently the area is filled with toys. Some of these could go in the media unit drawers. We also need space to store more books, magazines, and various 'stuff'. Space for a piano: intend to get an electric 'console' style piano (145x50x95cm). These normally seem to go against walls, but doing so would cut down the potential for storage, so I'm thinking about whether we can build some storage against the wall - perhaps a 'dresser' style unit with cupboards from the ground to the top of the piano, then shelves above. Most of the cupboards won't be accessible without moving the piano - but that is OK long-term storage. Space for pictures/photos: We definitely want bare wall above the dining bench, shelving in the middle area could be used to display photos, or the wall could only have sparse floating shelves. Breaking up the room without boxing in: Wonder whether something sticking out to break-up the room a little would be good. The consequence of putting something in the gap above means we are joining the TV area with the dining area. Somehow we need to transition to blue (lounge) to white (kitchen/diner). While we want to break-up the room - we don't want to 'box in' the lounge area too much. And given the bench is against the wall - or perhaps with a 20cm or so surface behind it, we have to be careful not to build anything too wide in the middle area that makes getting into the bench impossible. Finally, there is a question of how 'build in' we go. There could be a continuous run of furniture from media unit to desk, with sections of 15cm deep shelves at waist height (almost wainscotting). Or each piece/section could be distinct with bare wall/floor between them. I tried playing around in Sketch-up: This is a couple of views of just one several designs I tried, so don't read too much into it, but it hopefully illustrates my thinking. By creating a half-height 'box' we get some more storage, and can have some 'open' shelves running to the ceiling. This breaks up the room, but also creates a new corner for the piano. The top of the media unit, and the half height unit could be concrete. This would break up the "blue" - but match the dining table, and be more hardwearing than a spay painted finish. The blue 'half height' extend 106cm from the wall. This is perhaps a bit far and makes the lounge area feel enclosed. It could extend less, but I need to leave 50cm for the piano; add to that 35cm (which I think is the minimum viable for a storage cupboard - maybe I'm wrong); it can't really get any smaller than 85cm. Most of my 'designs' have been variants on drawing a similar blue half-height box connected to the media unit, but with different sorts of shelves on top; and difference arrangements of drawers and shelves. Originally I just had an open shelf at the narrow end (facing the sofa); but was experimenting with an 'open corner'. However, I don't like how it looks. But, it is quite a bit blue box to only have deep drawers/shelves on the narrow end. I've shown a unit behind the piano, taller than the back of the piano, but shorter than the height of the blue 'half height' unit. Transitions in this area seem OK, but I'm not 100% about the piano being against a storage unit at all... Probably needs cantering at minimum. My rough modelling suggests I can fit a bench against the table and have 15-20cm space between the back of the bench and the wall. Maybe the storage unit (or the worktop at least), could taper and continue along behind the bench, right up to the desk area (not drawn)? Transition from the shelves to bench seems tricky generally... There are a couple of boxed in 'steels' which I can't change. The one running floor to ceiling sticks out 185mm. This feels a bit slim to also be the shelf depth, but figured it worth mentioning. Sorry - this has got a bit long. Really interested in hearing what people would do in our situation and any thoughts on the thinking above. Thanks!