Charlie, I'm so sorry that this turned out to be the case. How discouraging! What kind of a garage door are you putting on the sticks into the garage? Is it a true carriage door or some other configuration? It looks like the current F-150 is 17'-6" long. My DH has an Avalanche which is 1' longer that this and in the winter, we squeeze it into our current garage which is 19'-3" deep (along with my car and his Harley). It is TIGHT, but it keeps both are cars snow free. I'm just wondering if there isn't some sort of a solution for you guys... I'm still mulling over this issue. We are at the bidding stage of the building process, so I have time to make modifications. I just don't want to change the entire house plan at this point (although I would if a big enough issue came up). I believe I have figured out a way to add 2' to the width and 2' to the depth of two out of the three garage stalls. I know that this is still small, but I do know our cars (and a Suburban for that matter) would squeeze into the space. There is also room for garbage cans and recycling at the front of my vehicle, which leaves us an entire other empty stall for about another 12 years until the kids have a car. We KNOW that we will not be storing other "stuff" in the garage. Like I said, we have a second garage in the rear of the house which is 25'-6" deep and 10'-6" wide which flows into another 15'5"-12-'9" workshop. We intend to store our outside gear here (lawnmower, snowblower, etc.) and then we have a large unfinished room at the base of the basement stairs which I can line with shelves for storage of all the things that might end up in some people's garage. Add to this the massive amount of unfinished walk in area above the garage and the net net is that my husband and I feel we can live with this. We are the opposite of pack rats. We go through the house each year and donate to charity everything we aren't using, so we don't tend to accumulate "stuff". So, this morning, I think the small bump in the size of the garage is a reasonable compromise, although I am also considering resale. While I don't ever intend to move again, you can't plan for the unexpected... We will die someday and hopefully the house will still be standing. :) I guess that is why I'm still vacillating on this issue. I don't want to make a decision I will regret. Hang in there Charlie. I hope you are able to figure something out wrt to your garage. Jaymie

Two and three are pretty much the same thing. I think I just like two better because the fireplace is more aesthetically pleasing to me. As for depth, most library shelves are 9" deep. That's what I've read anyway, I haven't actually measured. :) If you have a lof of big books, you might want a bottom shelf or two to be deeper.

Thanks all -- I'm sold .. NO DRAWERS for the 15" deep section -- I'll go w/ shelves there and put the drawers in the small part of the L (the one w/ 24" front to back). next question ... what about the Door Heights in front of the shelves? We have to have doors as the pantry is a thorough-fair between our family room and the kitchen .. so we can't just have all our food showing. Our ceilings are 12' high ..but the walk-through is only 6 feet wide ..so anything too tall will look silly. We are planning to have about 8 feet of shelves (height wise) but not sure how to break that down in terms of how high to get each cabinet door... So assume we have 90" of horizontal space and say around 8 feet high. Should we break that down into 3 x 30" wide cabinets each w/ 2 doors? If so ..how about the height of each cabinet? Should we have the base cabinet the normal counter height 34" or so and then the top cabinet really tall? THESE are the cabinets we're REPLACING . it looks like a walk in now -- but we've broken down the wall on the right hand side and removed the door. My question is when I basically rebuild those shelves on the LEFT .. and put doors in front of them ... I'll have Left to Right 3 sets of 30" wide cabinets. How do I configure them TOP TO BOTTOM ... do I have a 34" high base cabinet and then a 46" high upper? given the narrow space worried that a really tall upper will look weird.

Thank you all for your continued input. Admittedly, this is more challenging than what I initially expected. To add a new twist, we found out a few new things today. When stacking all the shelves from both the left and right sides of the fireplace (note that there is a shelving unit on each side of the fireplace), we found out that shelves installed to the left of the fireplace were .5" shorter (18.25") than the ones installed on the right (18.75"). We then measured the width of the shelving units and the one to the left of the fireplace is 18.75" wide and the right shelving unit is 19" wide. The shelves that fell were on the left side of the fireplace and the shelves on the right side were sagging but had not fallen when we removed everything (items on the shelf, the shelf boards themselves) - part of the reason the shelves on the right didn't fall was because the shelves were a tighter fit and not putting as much weight on the shelf supports. The other thing we found was that within the shelving unit on the right side of the fireplace, someone had installed shoe molding along the inside (top, left, and bottom; no shoe moldings on the left shelving unit) - they're hidden from view so we didn't notice until now. When we tried putting the shelves back in again, the shoe molding appeared to help make it a tighter fit and perhaps there to make it less likely for the shelves to fall. We then realized that shelf standards will not work unless the the shelves are cut shorter, which we don't want to do unless it's a last resort and know for sure it will work. So this complicates the picture a bit more. Part of me still wants to try something on my own, at the same time, it looks like previous owners had tried to troubleshoot and the problem still exists. Perhaps it might be time to have a professional take a look and fix it.