Your lot and idea sounds like it is very similar to the home we just built. We just finished a ranch with walk out basement home on 3 acres fully wooded with creek at the bottom...I have lived in both a single story and two story. I always thought the 2 story was the way to go until I owned one. With two young boys I hated having to live on 2 levels. Carrying laundry up those stairs, keeping an eye on the kids when I was doing dishes, the utilities (oh man what a difference our ranch has made!) etc. We built our ranch with 3 bedrooms on the main level approx. 2000sf on each level. We left the basement unfinished but plan to finish in the next few years. It has 9'6 high ceilings, tall double windows with transoms in every room except for the storage room and bath. It is very bright and doesn't come close to feeling like a cave. In fact there seems to be more light than the average above grade home. There are 2 bedrooms framed in the basement with a large bath, huge storage room, storm shelter(we are in OK) huge living room, pool table area and bar area. The main level spare bedrooms are on the small side, 12x12 but since we will have the huge basement bedrooms I was ok with that. It is SOOOOO nice to live on one level again. I feel like we really use the space, in the two story I felt like I never went upstairs other than to put the kiddos to bed and dust the bathroom that was never used. I feel like the space allocated on the main level is very comfortable and we were careful to use every inch possible to make the main level very functional. Overall, even with young children I wouldn't have a two story (other than the awesome views from up there, we found out after we built would have been great for a playroom or something) Another thing I hated about our 2 story was the kids being on the upper level with our master on the main level. I always thought about fires and how I would get to them. At least with them down you can access them better if the stairs are blocked. I wouldn't want my boys downstairs by themselves yet but it works out well that they can be on the main level until they are a little older. Regarding the appraisal, we did not get even close to the going rate for the basement that above grade gets. They did a net adjustment for the basement and comped us something like $20,000...not even what our 4 car garage added! Another con if you want to call it that, is the home looks smaller from the front than a 2 story would. Honestly that doesn't bother me much since you can't really see our house from the street anyway, it is about the same as any other ranch out there.

Hi, northcarolina. Right, the paint looks fine in some lights and on some walls. I do have a carpet scrap; didn't think of taking that to the paint store, but I will on my next trip.. We have 32 sample cans of paint in our basement, we still don't have the downstairs painted, and some of the rooms upstairs after we finished still don't look quite right to me. (I also am not known for my design sense.) I haven't tried a gray yet, although I put a dot of the Kilim Beige in our MB on top of this Cochise we're trying out in the basement, and it looks very gray in comparison. But it ended up looking "dead" upstairs (next to the purple wall in our MB), and I already wish I could change it in the MB. I probably will, although DH thinks I don't paint carefully enough and gets in a twist every time I say I'm going to redo a room. Can't really blame him, we're in this house 3 1/2 years and the paint saga is still going on! I did ask SW to give me 50% of the Cochise, and we're going to try that next, although a one-foot sample on the wall is a pretty uninteresting color. The Sagey looks great with the carpet upstairs, and on the one wall that extends to our basement, but if we use that it would mean green in the LR, DR area, and down here. With the green granite in the kitchen, I think it's just too much green for me, although now I'm thinking maybe we should do that in the family room in the basement and do the basement office and guest room, which have more light, in different colors. So much for "unifying" the look down here. I'd really like to know how your color adventure turns out. I hope you'll post pix,maybe in this thread? Thanks for your help, and good luck! More ideas, anyone? And thanks in advance.

OK...point #1. If any part of your slab is 'below grade' the ENTIRE THING is graded as 'below grade'. Personally I would pick different flooring for the 'wet' rooms such as the bathrooms and laundry. The reason: 'water proof' flooring is expensive. So WHY pay for the entire basement to be covered in 'water proof' when only a few hundred square feet actually 'need it'. The other thing is: a floating floor is really all you want to play with. Tiles in bathrooms/laundry room can be adhered to the concrete, the rest can be floated. The basics for ANY floating floor is the same. You must have a vapour barrier (not always underpadding) and you must always have a WELL PREPARED concrete slab that is flat (no wonky subfloors for a floating floor...ever). A laminate floating floor and a vinyl floating floor and a cork floating floor (and even a linoleum floating floor) all require the same thing. And the mechanism to install is always a 'click-together' system. An engineered hardwood can be floated but it almost always requires glue on the seams. Again, all of the same PREPARATION is required. So go ahead and start paying for the concrete slab to be fixed up so that your flooring of choice can be laid down as soon as you can. The 'nightmare' the sales guys are talking about relates to installation and moisture. They are TRYING to get you to purchase the product THEY NEED to move. Yep. I would hazard a guess that these guys have been given 'targets' to meet and/or they have been offered bonuses for moving a certain TYPE of product (too much in the warehouse is costing the company TOO MUCH money). In a nutshell, the reason why you are getting 4 different opinions is because you spoke to 4 different salespeople with 4 different 'company agendas'. That's it. There is no mystery in that. My questions for you (if I were your sales person): 1. What is your budget (do NOT fudge numbers with sales people...it pisses them off and makes them less likely to get the RIGHT floor)? 2. What is your FAMILY situation? Animals? Landscaping issues such as pools, etc? 3. What are YOUR expectations? Can you accept the limitations of certain flooring if it gets you the LOOK that you want for the price you are able to pay?

Thanks everyone!!! I will try to answer all of the questions. 1. We've been here nearly 2 years now. So we've uncovered the issues, etc... 2. The neighborhood is AMAZING. Our house was very cheap. But most of our neighbor's homes are much larger than ours and sell for twice what we paid (most homes are going for 270-340,000). A tornado hit our neighborhood last year (first one in over 20 years), and the homes that were damaged/destroyed are getting built back much larger and fancier, so property values may go up even higher. The location is also very good in terms of being near a mall, a park, and other amenities. 3. JuneKnow and Patricia, I would take a sketch to the architect of how I'd like the house to work and flow. Obviously, I'd still work with the architect and listen and would have a working relationship (that was my major in college, but after a few years I had to stop to care for a sick relative, but I know a little bit about how it works). My second choice (actually my first) would be to build an addition in the front of the house (on the top part of the slope). This addition would be around 16'x24' (2 story) and would house the entrance, stairs to the basement and to a second floor master, and a formal living room. Then I'd remove the stairs from the middle of my now living room/dining combo, and be able to get an open family room, kitchen combo. I just can't shake the feeling that I am being wasteful by not using the 1000sq ft of already built space that my house is sitting on. But, at least there would be no need to build a second garage. The only other "con" is that I'd still have a crappy, sloping yard. But I guess I could build a huge deck to compensate. It's just that option seems a lot more expensive and I am trying to do the most cost-effective remodel. Ps. GN Builders, the house looks lovely!! That's very much what I was thinking! But I thought it would be more expensive than working with the existing basement! Here's a sketch of what option 2 might look like. And this would be a "split". Not as high as the current house, as the ground is lower, by about 4 feet (there's a deck to enter the home).