I like everything I see at your website homepage and have been following your kitchen progress from onset at the Kitchens forum. A young newlywed couple embarking on this whole house DIY renovation is truly ambitious and impressive! Your progress pictures and narratives of the plans and dreams make me look forward to MORE. A hallway connector from the breakfast room to the sunroom would look great and better serve you than an outside-only narrow alley betweeen the two rooms. (You'd be hard pressed to turn around with a broom in hand in a deadend alley between the two tall walls.) I have no doubt you'll find a perfect connection solution. So, who will be riding the lawnmower come spring? A huge homesite spread you have at seven acres (compared to So. Calif. standards anyway), but fortunately it looks that a goodly portion is wooded. Oh, the energy of youth!

Thanks, lavender! We don't have a furniture plan, really. It had been a outdoor porch (hence the step down from the rest of the place) that had had the screens replaced by windows. It's heated by an electric baseboard heater that you turn on with a knob on the wall (and then hear $$$ flying out the dozens of windows...). There's a huge sliding glass door from the current DR/new kitchen area, which we pretty much keep closed in the winter, and open in the summer when it is our (my) gardening dumping ground. Making it into a real room is basically adding a whole new room on to the house, and we're not really sure WHAT to do with it. We'll probably put a table and chairs near the bumpout on the long wall, but that leaves a lot of empty space. Because it will be so sunny, I'd like there to be some plants, probably mostly herbs, in there - but again, it leaves a lot of empty space. Thoughts on how to fill it, anyone? :)

Sounds pretty unanimous; we had better rethink the 2 separate rooms thing. Our original concept actually was to connect the two, but then DH had the bright idea to make the window into french doors, and having that entry into the sunroom seemed a better idea than having to pass through the nook to get there. Plus it allowed us to close it off for HVAC reasons. In addition, it made the roof a bit simpler/cheaper. But that's probably not worth the savings if it looks dorky. One detail I didn't include is that the nook will be 2 stories high, and the 2nd story will be a sitting room off the master with the same window configuration. The sunroom will likely have a radiant heated tile floor (we've got them in our master bath and kitchen and have grown rather addicted). SOOOOO, what if we modify as follows: --connect the two rooms by adding a wall parallel to the existing outside wall, making the far right window in the nook into a doorway (roughly 7' wide), so there's a hall about 4' long between the 2 rooms. --keep the existing french door from the FR, as that's the easiest entry. Open hallway on both sides? I don't really care about feeling like the nook's separate, but should I do something to make it more aesthetically pleasing? Perhaps columns? As for the advice on slider placement, I haven't given a lick of thought to furniture placement (we were just focused on wanting all those windows!). I'll mull that one over. Wouldn't a slider look odd if it weren't centered, though? Thanks to everyone. It sure helps to be able to bounce this off of others!

jane ny, I was in a similar situation last year. For me the sequence was paint first, then flooring, then baseboards, But it looks like you may have baseboards already installed. Painting first worked for me because I did it myself and there were spatters on the subloor before I was finished. You might want to check on whether your subfloor is indeed covered with plywood, because you may need an underlayment before installing your floor, depending on what you choose. Best to check where you buy the flooring. With some help from a friend who knew what he was doing and owns a Skill Saw, I installed a plywood underlayment in less than two hours. I too wanted tile with a slate or similar look, but the room was already over budget (long story) and I chose to spend my money on high end French doors because the floor could always be changed later. I got some advice from the flooring forum while deciding. You can always post a message there before you proceed. We narrowed floor choices down to either loose-laid sheet vinyl or vinyl tiles. My friend chose the tiles because the color and pattern seemed to fit well in the sunroom/porch. The original intention was to keep those tiles for about a year while I shop for tile and find a good tile installer. But the floor has held up well, despite some abuse like beach sand, rain coming in when some airhead (