1) I think it is a very nice 1st floor plan and, yes, the kitchen/greatroom ought to be beautifully spacious - plenty large enough even for a family of five! 2) If you want to ADD something to the exterior to give it more pizazz, I'm afraid I can't help you. I personally think the problem is that you already have too many different finishes/textures. Between the stonework, two different siding textures (one on the gables and one on the rest of the house), the roofing shingles, the unnecessary porch column that partially hides your front door, and the rather complex textured garage doors, NOTHING predominates. The exterior is a broken up jumble of textures with nowhere for the eye to rest. If it were me, I'd get rid of the stone entirely and I would use the same siding in the gables as on the rest of the house. I think these changes would allow the eye to flow across the front of the house and notice the rhythms of the repeating pairs of gables and the three paired sets of windows. I'd also get rid of the porch column. Your porch is short enough that you don't need the support for the roof. Without the column, your front door would become the focal point instead of being hidden. I did a little playing around using "paint" to see how the elevation would look with fewer textures and this is the result... 3) Have you considered swapping the location of the screened porch with the deck? My concern with the screened porch attaching to the great room is that the porch will block natural light from reaching your great room. If the screened porch attached to the dining room - with sliding doors where you currently have three windows, you could add additional windows to the north wall of the dining room for extra light there. Just a thought. 4) Like you, I also don't like having my closet open into the masterbath so this would be a BIG deal to me. Do you really need that separate little linen closet that is outside your master bedroom door? If not, then how about pushing the masterbedroom entry door down the hallway a couple of feet (creating a little entry hall in the masterbedroom). Then you would have the room to put a door into the closet that wouldn't be blocked by the master bedroom door. The little linen closet could either be turned into a built-in bookcase/display unit just inside your masterbedroom or added to the linen closet in the bathroom. Maybe something like this... Now, a couple of questions... Where do the stairs go? With a family of five, you must have more bedrooms but I don't see any windows on the front elevation for upstairs rooms so I'm guessing the stair go down to a basement and you have bedrooms down there? Basement rooms, especially bedrooms, can be problematic if not well designed for PLENTY of light so do post that plan too so we Gardenwebber self-styled experts can pick it apart too. Just in case your architect missed anything... ;-) The only other thing I notice is that, with a family of 5, I would want my larger laundry room to be quite a bit bigger. I'd probably make that closet off the mud room smaller and my laundry room area bigger - but that is just me.

This is stage 2 of an extensive reno. For this stage we're pushing out 2 kitchen walls 6' each and turning the existing breakfast area into a mudroom with a new entrance off the driveway. The laundry/pantry is space we took from a landing to the left of the stairs going down into the family room surprisingly the family room looks larger after the reno :) I got the idea for the dishwasher in the hutch from http://consciouskitchenremodel.blogspot.ca/ I don't think I'll be painting mine red, but I love the idea of having the dishwasher up 6" higher so I don't have to bend so far down (we're a family of tall people). All the dishes are them stored in the hutch. I do have room to make it wider, but the symmetry seems okay in the inspiration pics. The wall oven is out of the way, but the M/W is also a convection so unless I'm cooking a turkey I'll be using the small oven on the south wall. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by zones? The far right of the south wall has a small pantry (laundry room/panty is for overflow and large items), then the fridge followed by the cooking/prep areas and prep sink (in the 4x7 foot island), and last is the main sink and dishwasher hutch on the east wall. The space to the right of the oven on the north wall is being left open for a free standing piece of furniture. As for the laundry: I can't decide what would work best - stack laundry with shallow shelves around or side by side with deep shelves above and shallow shelves around the remaining walls. Here's the pics of the hutch: Thanks

ILoveRed - I love that vestibule idea! I'll ask the architect about something like that. mrspete - I think I agree. I do like the front elevation overall, but losing that garage gable might be a lot better. And cheaper too. I'll have to see how the 2nd floor goes, as we might need that area above the garage for a bedroom, so a gable might be necessary. My husband didn't like that indentation between the house and garage (in front of the breezeway) in my sketch either. Rather than add square footage to the house that we really don't need, he suggested making that a storage room accessible from the garage to store bicycles and other misc sporting equipment. I think I like that idea and that would free up the back storage area of the garage for the lawn equipment and tools. Again, would need to see how that works with a nice looking front elevation though. I was playing around again with how the rooms could be placed, specifically what it would look like if I flip flopped the pantry and laundry room. What I think are pros of this idea: - Mudroom and laundry room are combined. One area to drop the dirty stuff as you enter from the garage. - Eliminates corner door in kitchen that breaks up my L shaped counter space....my primary work zone. - Laundry is now right off the kitchen, where I could change out loads of laundry easily with just a few steps. - Carved out 2 extra storage closets. One off the foyer, so could be a large coat closet and/or vacuum cleaner storage. Second one accessible from the Study and would be my Xmas decorations, suitcases, sleeping bags, wrapping paper/gift bags, large extra blankets/pillows, etc type storage. I have a closet like that in my house now and I love it. - With that extra foyer closet, I could recess a regular refrigerator into that space to appear like a counter depth fridge. What I think are the cons of this idea: - Now I have to walk through my kitchen/dining area to get to my laundry room. Basically the furthest point from all bedrooms. - Not sure I love the layout of the pantry. Seems like an excessively large one, but I only have a reach in pantry now, so maybe I just can't fathom needing that much space. I do like that I have room for a hutch/butler's pantry type area in there. What do you all think of this idea? Does it flow? I didn't bother drawing the master bathroom and WIC details. I think I have few options for that space, but I'm liking the size and placement so not too worried about those details at this point. Also, as mentioned above, we could also add a garage storage area in the little indent between the garage and house. Thanks for any feedback!

Thanks for all the hints, guys. We like the corner sink now-as I mention above, the view is great and I’ve spent a lot of years watching kids climb the tree outside while doing dishes. Willing to reconsider though. I share your though about the front door and the stools-except we never actually use that door. We always come in through the kitchen door, which will be a mud room after the remodel. I mean, we use the front door when we have trick or treaters and solicitors. I really think of the mud room as our entry. We will use the front door ourselves to go to the porch but don’t see it as a main entry generally though hopefully it will look pretty :). That being said, we’d love to expand our kitchen more in a useable way. We are pretty constrained in space in this part of the house, unless we switch the kitchen to the dining room area which I think would cause all sorts of other expensive changes.