Our doors all open into the house. We live in a 100+ year old house. The french doors that open into the dining room are the only ones that we ourselves (as in hubby and buddy, not actually 'me' LOL) replaced. I do know they put flashing of some sort around it to make sure that it didn't leak. We have never had a drop come in around any of them. All of those doors have decks off of them so they are built up off of the ground. Only the deck off of the dining room is ever cleaned off of snow. In fact, if I went to open one of the kitchen doors right now, I would probably end up with a couple of inches of snow in there since the snow has drifted up against the doors. From the pictures, it looks like it might be coming in under the door, which would definitely make it an installation problem. Is this new construction or remodel? Have you ever had any problems before?

When you say perimeter drainage, do you mean something like a french drain where you dig out a trench around the perimeter, install a perforated pipe and back fill it with gravel? I just want to make sure I understand your suggestion. Yes, although there is more detail than that. As in all things there are degrees of doing as well. Code, best practices for the area and absolute best can be pretty different. Retrofit on a slab on grade is easy to do absolute best. Dig your trench, line with geotextile fabric leaving enough fabric for the last step. Place your bed of drain rock such that the drain pipe will follow the actual foundation all around. So your trench will have to be deep enough and wide enough to accomplish all this. You probably can't make it too wide but there are material constraints and you want to leave some yard, eh? Fit your perforated pipe. Do not use the black, corrugated stuff, use the white perforated drain pipe. Before you glue, figure out where all this will drain to. Out the front, side or back? It has to go away, not just in a circle. Use sewer pipe if there is any chance of vehicle traffic running over it. Sock the perforated pipe. Lay, don't throw, drain rock over the pipe once all fittings have been glued up, do not dislodge or break the pipe. Wrap the geotextile fabric from step one over the drain rock/pipe install. Top the geotextile with pit run, then with a decorative mulch or a stone garden or anything but plantings. Place foundation beds/plantings out from the home, leave the area in which your drainage runs clear. As your plantings mature the void behind them goes away. Most people cram the foundation plantings way to close to the house anyway. OK, so there are technical terms for all this but I've tried to keep it simple, for me, lol. Kaib has it...think like a rain drop or in this case like ground water coming up and/or surface water percolating down. You want to make it easy for it to go somewhere else. Its all downhill from there. And, if I may say, a fun and satisfying project given slab foundation. I've done too many basement foundation walls and that entail a lot of digging.

Sadly the way the house has evolved over the years the side laundry room is the most used entrance into the house.Why would anyone want to use the nice wrap around porch entrance! ;) Anyway two thoughts are stopping me from wanting to move the fridge to the top wall, but I have considered it a 100 times myself. 1. How interesting is a fridge in a bank of cabinets decoratively when it is the first thing that greets you? 2. DH gets a bit antsy about drilling 'another' hole in the wall when we have a perfectly good one already! But I have thought about this idea too as it would eliminate the ungainly soffit. Placing the stove on the bottom wall would also have to run through the soffit because the exterior wall is the window wall.They built a soffit all along the top of the kitchen, except on the radiator wall. The laundry room has a bank of wall cabinets that run perpendicular the bottom wall, behind just about where the stove would be centered (sorry I probably should have shown that better). BUT I have checked that also and I may be able to exhaust the vent through the top part of that wall cabinet if it can clear the existing piping that is concealed in that corner, so maybe the whole soffit could go. So I won't say it is completely out of the question Bmorepanic. How do you plug up a wall vent? Lavender- I never gave the backsplash a thought! That changes my impression of what would be facing me from the Dining room. The fridge is nice cause it's always clean! The sink.... no matter what it is always going to be a constant magnet for mess =( So in that regards,I think the sink has to make a design statement but main focus-no. Would it make any sense to say that since the kitchen is a traffic pass through for both guests and even us, that I will need a little wow upon both entry into the kitchen, and exit when they leave coming back from the dining room? But again, I have no clue on this either. Beuhl- measurements: # Window width-50" # Top (north) wall? 89" # Doorway in top wall? 32.5" # Each wall segment on top wall? At present I have no wall cabinets there, so I will be gaining in that area. I also plan on all drawers wherever possible, and pullout for trash. You are right about the lazy susan and it spins. It will house larger nested pots, and heavy bowls on top. and potatoes and onions on bottom. The radiator area may eventually house some sort of peninsula but at the beginning I will likely do some sort of small table with seating. I realized last night that a solid bank of wall cabinets will not sit well with me, and much prefer to at least get away from those awful big corner cabinets that are hard to use because they sit out over the counters, and become stash bins because things keep getting pushed to the back and the top two shelves are even harder to access.

The issue is most likely where the ROOF of the garage meets the WALL of the home. If you look, there isn't any form of eaves or flashing. That means water is running DOWN the slope of the garage-roof, hitting the edge of the house, running DOWN the wall (just to the right of the window) and into a chink in the siding...or possibly into the cement slab below the siding and then seeping UP into the space. Water will follow gravity but it will also soak UPWARDS. Like putting a dry sponge on a puddle of water. Eventually the water is "sucked up" into the sponge and into the middle. Water moves away from it's own concentration gradient. That is to say water moves from "wet" to "dry" very nicely.