Put all your specs into this: http://www.carltonbale.com/home-theater/home-theater-calculator/ It will help with seating distances and such based on your screen size. Ours is 12 wide by 15 long, drywall to drywall. 144 inches wide is just enough for a bank of 4 chairs on our rear, elevated seating, just one step up. The front is a bank of three, creating a small "aisle" on each side. We have a 100" screen (diagonal) which is basically a 4x8 screen. Keep in mind, that neither of your designs allow for a raised second row. For two rows, you either need to elevate the second row, or elevate the screen, which can look odd. In your first plan, can you swap the bottom bedroom with the home theater, extending towards the pool table where the couch is? Then the door into the HT can be on the extended wall by the closet and the closet can be made larger for that bedroom. From the grid in your pics, you could get about 12x21 without impeding on the pool table, and narrowing the closet slightly (while making it longer). You should be able to get all of your seating (and dry bar) in there with raised levels going back. Brian

Thanks for all the input so far. Suero - I didn't understand what you were asking about the entrance being in the office, then I looked at the plans again and I totally see where you are coming from. You can't actually tell from the plans, but the entrance is actually at the bottom of the plans - the stairs go down towards the bottom wall, so that at the bottom of the stairs, you see the TV area to your right and the door to the exercise area to your left. The door under the stairs is a closet in the office where my hubby wants to put the router, printer, fax machine, etc. There are only two small windows - one is behind the furnace (go figure) and the other is in part of the basement that is a crawl space (everything above the "top wall" on the plans is only dug out to half-height, so the floor in that area is about waist high if you are standing in the full-height part of the basement. The round thing in the workshop is the water heater - it's actually not there yet (it's under the stairs) but we're moving it to getit out of the middle of our finished area. There's also a central vac along that wall. The big X in the workshop is an area of indented floor with a floor drain -- the PO's of the house used the area to wash their dogs. Also, above that area the ceiling is crazy low -- the upstairs has sort of a sunken foyer so the ceiling there is probably only about 6'6" or so. We have shelves along the left wall that hold all our paint and are using the floor drain to drain the dehumidifier. The workshop area also holds the electrical panel/breaker box. It's really not a suitable area to finish because of the multi-level floor/low ceiling and all the stuff (w/h, central vac, breaker box). Oh, also, the "top wall" in the workshop is an opening to the half-height area that we plan to leave open. This is really hard to explain - perhaps a pic will help (excuse the mess - we've purged a lot of stuff out of the basement since these were taken): To address some of the other concerns you all brought up, I don't expect that hubby will be using loud saws or whatever while someone else is watching TV (for one thing, the tv is primarily for him, LOL!) The workshop is pretty small (the whole darned basement is cramped, to be honest). I mainly just wanted an area where I could do projects - strip a piece of furniture, use the miter saw for a quick cut or two, etc. And somewhere to store my massive collection of paint cans, LOL! Also, as far as finishing the exercise room, the original plan was to have 3 rooms, one being a dedicated exercise room. But when we got down there with our painters tape and marked it out on the floor, the exercise room ended up being so cramped that it felt claustrophobic. And we don't want to finish that whole "unfinished area" because we still have the furnaces and a whole bunch of well stuff (water softener, a few tanks, etc.). So we figured we'd just omit the wall and leave the exercise area as part of a bigger unfinished room. The shelves/desk along the stairs are for my kids - I envision a long countertop with two kneehole openings to serve as "desks" for the kids. I do plan to use the area under the stairs -- part of it will be a closet accessible from the office and the lower part will be accessible from the exercise area for storage of random stuff. And again, the sliding closets along the top are there in part to incorporate the half-height area. Here's a pic to show you what I am dealing with: I want the closets to be about 2 feet deep at the bottom but where the openings to the half-height area are, the shelves will be deeper, going all the way to the back of the columns that support the ceiling there. We should get a lot of toy storage out of this plan, and I want to build the back of one closet such that it will have an access panel to get back to the half-height area (though we'll have an opening in the workshop area, there are some low hanging pipes and beams back there that would make getting something bigger than a box into the other side of the area very hard, so we want a big access panel to get to the other side if we ever need to (our oil tanks are back there, and someday they may need to be replaced.) So because we want to take advantage of the half-height areas and allow for access back there, those closets taking up the whole top wall seem the only way to do it that I can think of. I did enterain the idea of putting the TV built-in into one of the openings, but ruled it out a while ago when my sister pointed out that putting the media stuff along the "top wall" and the toy storage area at the "bottom wall" means that the first thing people see when they walk down the stairs is a whole pile of toy mess. At least flipped so that the TV is along the "bottom" side, the toy mess is tucked up behind the seating area and not the first thing visitors see! Please do keep the opinions coming - you are all giving me a lot to think about and I'd much rather second-guess things now than after it's built!

Your bedrooms, closets and bathrooms seem to be nicely sized. You might consider scaling back your great room, 27'x27' is pretty big. That is 729 sq ft. Try putting some furniture in the layout and see what you think. Instead you could have a slightly smaller but still generous 20x20' or so (400 sq ft) great room and an additional slightly separate kids space with the remaining sq ft. The remaining 329 is enough for a 18x18' room, also quite generous. Then you could have an area for kids toys to be corralled and not out in your main living space. In my experience this needs to have sight lines to the main living space or kids won't use it. Later it can be a place for older kids to have friends over etc. Or that remaining sq ft could just be trimmed to save money or dedicated to a guest or kid's bedroom upstairs. You also might consider having the children share one one full bathroom (maybe #3) and convert the other (bath #2) to a powder room for guests and have linen storage in the extra space. Right now your main family entrance moves through back halls and then through the kitchen (sharing space with where someone might stand to wash dishes). You might move the clean up sink elsewhere and use that area as a buffet space when you have guests and a drop zone for mail, groceries etc. as people move in from the garage. You also don't have any space dedicated to dropping shoes, coats, backpacks etc. as you come in from the garage. I know that is something that I can't live without :). When the rest of the floor plan is more set I would take the kitchen layout to the kitchen forum. The house has a very irregular shape which will make your roof and foundation both more complicated and expensive. Depending on your budget this could be something to consider. Do you have an idea of what the exterior will look like? and what you want it to look like? If you can have one garage bay side entry could you have all of them side entry? Most people seem to prefer that look, up to you though. It looks like a beautiful spot and a lovely large lot. What kind of climate are you in?

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