Ashley, Thanks for your kind comments. We deleted the garage from the footprint of the house and kept the rest of the footprint as designed. The kitchen/dining room is open with a bar wall between the two to keep the cook safe and congenial. We live so far out in the sticks that 95% of out meals are home cooked and have a large garden that inevitably means canning produce. The kitchen works fine for us and is the same size as the plans. The smartest decision we made was to turn the house around such that the front as designed, is actually the back of our house. The large screen porch faces due south and the master bedroom is our day room, with lots of windows facing south. The plans do not call for screening the porch, but without screen we would have every bird, bug and bat in the neighborhood to contend with. Ten years out, if we were building now, this is probably the house we would build. Randy

It includes Word, Powerpoint, Excel and something else I have never used, and forget what its call, it does not include Outlook. I just ordered MS Office Home Student for $124.99 free shipping form Amazon.com. Heck, and I just, with the help of friends on the web forums, managed to set Open Office as the default application for doc. ppt. and xls. I know my wife will be happy to have MS Office back on her machine, MS has really outdone itself (money mongers that they are) in making Office available for home use at a reasonable price, keeping in mind I can install it on both my and my wife's machine, plus another home machine, for the $125 price tag.

We have a small study (I think about 11'x13') in our new house and DH is determined to have built-in bookcases and desk done to finish the look. I know for the type of design we want, custom work is going to be beyond out budget (budget around $5k-$7k). So looking at some alternatives of quality hardwood modular home office collections online, I came up with these options: 1. Parker House Furniture - Da Vinci Collection (7 piece unit here and we'll add an outside corner piece separately: http://belfortfurniture.com/Item.aspx?ItemID=511270891&ItemNum=DAV-7P) 2. Aspen Home Furniture - They have a lot of different collections. Maybe something like this: http://www.aspenhome.net/default.aspx?tabid=223&pid=568. We want to stick with the peninsula desk design because having a stand-alone desk in that room looks way too crowded (seen it in my neighbor's house and didn't like it). We are open to any other brand that makes high quality configurable home office units, with more intricate design. And for the price we are paying, hopefully we are not going to end up with a bunch of MDF boards like Hooker Furniture uses (they were on my list before I learned about their quality issues). Many thanks for any suggestions! Here is a link that might be useful: Parker House

If you decide you aren’t going to have the desk against a wall, put a floor outlet in now so that you don’t have cables running across the floor. I did a floor plan with my desk and rug then figured out where I would need sockets.