bsntech wrote: "I cannot see how anyone can keep up a 12,000 square-foot garden - or even what you would do with all of the produce!" The key to it, IMO, is to use as many labor and time saving devices and tricks as possible. I do things a lot differently than I used to, and it all works out pretty well, if I do say so myself, other than the ravishes of weather, disease, and animals, which will always be with us. I cover all of my main garden beds with black plastic. This really helps to keep the weeds at bay. In my perennial borders, mixed borders, and shrub rows, almost all of them now have black plastic or carpet under thick layers of organic mulch. This reduces the weeding to an absolute minimum. I also use Preen in some areas to help assist the mulch in those places that black plastic is not appropriate, such as certain beds where I have large drifts of spring bulbs naturalized. I do use Roundup and Ortho Grass-B-Gone to help keep edges tidy, etc. Weeds are the # 1 issue, as far as I am concerned -- keep the weeds out, and it goes a long way to keeping things neat and tidy looking. Now, my problem here is -- what is a weed -- a lot of 'volunteers' of various things pop up where they don't belong, but I tend to leave them because they're either pretty or useful, when by rights, I really don't need amaranth in the middle of the tomato rows or self-sown cosmos or celosia in my corn! As far as what to do with the produce, well, I can and freeze a lot for myself and family members, give some away to friends, neighbors, and coworkers, feed excess to my chickens and ducks, who process it back into fertilizer. But, there is always extra that goes bad, and I don't feel one bit sorry about it -- it is a great source of green manure and rots into high quality compost that enriches my soil.

Ok, here is a new suggestion. If the office is supposed to be bedroom technically, then it needs a closet, and it needs to be handy to a full bathroom. http://i.imgur.com/dBOGnO5.jpg 1) What I have given you is not a particularly big room (fits a twin or a full bed if you squeeze), but you are using it as office, so that is okay. 2) I am proposing that you make the current laundry room a full bathroom. It is 5' x 9', right? That is the perfect size and location for a full bath adjacent to the office bedroom. I moved the laundry to the 8' x 6' space next to the stairs. 3) I found closet space above the stairs. So there is your office that can be a bedroom. What that buys is you is the humongous open floor plan you liked: a) Huge kitchen island prep area with views of all the living areas, the TV, the fireplace, and out the big sliders. b) Dining room centered prettily on the sliders that seats 8 normally (10 if you add leaves). c) Giant living room area with a natural place for a TV flanked prettily by matching windows. Despite all the changes, no windows or doors need to be moved. I enlarged the current kitchen window and added a second window next it to mirror the double sliders on the other end of that long wall. You'll be able to see these two new/modified windows from almost everywhere in the whole open room, so your nice view will really be a feature. I would also suggest adding a skylight in the new laundry room at the very least, but I think two (ish?) skylights over the kitchen would be nice too.

>>...didn't have a pantry?>> Well, I wouldn't have any room to store any food, LOL. I cook a lot so I have doubles and even triples of every size cookware I use, plus 25 yrs ago I moved in with six sets of dinnerware and three sets of flatware. I have three separate spice drawers because I cook everything from Indian to Chinese to French and half a dozen other cuisines. It was my first (and so far only, thank goodness) opportunity to design a kitchen, so I crammed in all the storage I could. We were handicapped by only having 1 wall of uppers. One half-wall holds the frig and is open to the LR and DR. The other wall has floor-to-ceiling windows to capture a great hillside view: I worked with graph paper and managed to get everything behind doors. It was about a week before I realized I had FORGOTTEN to put in any food storage! I did have three narrow closets in the DR (a former bedrm) for the upright freezer, the microwave and wine stemware, and the table linens/vacuum/stepladder. But nothing for dried pasta, Asian condiments, dried mushrooms, cans of soup, etc. So.....we had fortunately not placed the order for the kitchen cabs yet. Two 18" wide pantry units were hastily added, and placed in-between the DR and kitchen. The top doors hide fixed shelves, the bottom doors hide rollouts. All are height adjustable, heavy-duty. I'd never had a pantry before. Now I'm spoiled and can't imagine living w/o one! A walk-in would be nice, but there's only two of us so not really needed. Ten years later I had a handyman built us a custom storage unit for our indoor back porch area. It was such a pain carrying the vacuum up and down stairs, I finally broke down and bought a second upright. I don't have any good photos of it, but half is deep enough for the vacuum and BBQ tools, about 12". The other half has shallow, 7" shelves that store dry goods like spray paints (for DH's hobby), DW tablets, Brita filters, vacuum cleaner bags, etc.

IME, they're drawn to paper, cardboard products because of the glues used, I believe. Here in buggy FL, they LOVE books. DE works as well as boric acid powder. Both are sprinkled along the bottoms & edges of spaces & kill crawling insects that walk through the powder. I regularly dust the backs & underneath my bookshelves & other areas where paper/cardboard is kept. FWIW, the linked article states they do not spread any germs or diseases. http://www.extension.umn.edu/garden/insects/find/silverfish-and-firebrats/