Are you wedded to the idea of a 2 story great room? That's alot of unused space on the 2nd floor right there. 2 story rooms like that can be hard to heat/cool, and can also make the 2nd floor noisy. (Think about watching a movie after the kids, if you have them, are in bed. And if you plan to add a surround sound system, think about where the speakers will go and how close to the 2nd floor bedrooms they'll be.) OTOH, the laundry room and closet by BR 2 and the closet and bathroom by BR4 will help block noise from the great room. I really like the size of your secondary bedrooms. My DS's room is only about 12x13 or 12 x 14. He just turned 13 and is already 6' tall, so we got him a full size bed to replace his old twin size. It's kind of tight in the room now with the bed and his other furniture. The point of telling you this is that if you have young kids now, before you know it they could be outgrowing their current furniture! Sorry I don't have other suggestions. There's alot I like about your plan.

Based on my experience, I'd say that trying to divide an open area into two zones won't work. We built a 1000 sq ft addition of several rooms and and an open area - it has its own furnace and a new furnace was put into the existing structure at the same time. The connection between the areas is a wide-ish hallway. When both furnaces are on, the house is evenly warm. Without closing doors, it's not feasible to have the heat on on one side but not the other because the cold air mass on the "off" side keeps the "On" part of the house from warming up. The areas most distant from the border will get too warm as the system tries to compensate, and the areas near the border stay cold. Neither cold nor warm stays put because you want it to. In your plan, I think there would be a constant flow of warm air to the cold area along the ceiling and cold air to the warm area along the floor. Not a question that you asked, but your plan suggests you're going to have a very dark region by the dining room and stairs. You've got a long wall with no windows between the living room and the family room, and the fireplace will block light coming from the front. Good luck

I did not do it, but my DH finished the upstairs of his small cape into two bedrooms with a bath in between. The bath upstairs is above the original downstairs bath. He made two small dormers, one for each bedroom, overlooking the front of the house. If it had been me, I think a shed dormer would work much better. All dormers are not created equal. If you want to keep it traditional looking, that longer dormer could be placed on the back side of the house, not the street side. At the Cape, big bedrooms would not be too important, would they? Just room for a couple of twin beds and make two bedrooms, one for boys one for girls, very useful when they bring dates for the weekend. DH's cape had steps going down to the basement, and he put in the stairs going up to the bedrooms directly above those, and they are not far from the front door. If you have NO BASEMENT, and thus no stairs to muck up the placement of stairs, I think a metal spiral staircase would be interesting. Just so you have a place to get the furniture upstairs, even if it is through a window with a block and tackle built in to do the honors. They used things like that to offload haywagons into the barns in the past. I've always wanted one. It would have come in handy when our daughter bought a monster TV and had to remove the spiral steps and put in a ramp to do the TV.

I also lived in a small but charming 1930's Tudor many years ago, and like you, had the formal living room - formal dining room - tiny kitchen floorplan. I loved the charm, but missed the openness and space of our prior home. Then I got divorced and kept the house, but ended up with half the furniture I'd previously had. And only half the money. So remodelling was not in the budget! What I ended up doing was moving the remaining casual furniture and TV from the 'family room' (a back bedroom) into the formerly-formal living room. (It was right inside the front door.) I arranged the furniture the best I could and resolved to learn to live with it - though it didn't look half bad! Then, since I lost the dining room set in the divorce and had a two-year-old son, I bought an attractive but sturdy and child-friendly table and chairs and set that up in the formerly-formal dining room. Another surprise -- it looked good. Then something amazing happened. I fell in love with my house! I began spending the majority of my time in the house's prettiest rooms, and actually lived in the house the way it was meant to be lived in -- living in the living room and eating in the dining room - every day! All it really took was relocating the comfortable and livable furniture from the 'back' rooms to the front rooms. A pretty throw dressed up the 'shabbily-comfortable' couch, and a casual dining set changed the entire tone of the dining room. If you're spending your time in the basement, and not using the dining room, that's the problem that needs to be addressed! If your living room has the house's best architecture, use that room to live in. Move the TV up there, or if it's a ginormous honker, get a smaller one that won't take over the whole room. Try 'dressing down' your dining room first until it's a comfortable place to eat. Move the 'too good to use' furniture to the basement instead. Or use it anyway and give it a 'patina'. If the furniture is really good (and not merely 'fancy') it can take the use. Try that first before moving any walls -- You might be very happily surprised.