Thanks for all your hard work Karen! Can't wait to read it in its entirety. Jodi-

laura, I think you need to make a big level decision before committing to a floor plan. It seems as if you are not sure how you want the southern light to affect the interior space of your house. I would commit to that decision before thinking about other issues. Do you want that for the kitchen or the family room? There is no right answer. You have to analyze your lifestyle and commit. Don't let others pursuade you to the perfect 'kitchen' design until you have committed to the light first. This seems like an exceptional house with an abudance of natural light. Natural light decision is the fundamentally the MOST important decision for your house, much more important than the kitchen decision, IMHO. The way the house interacts with natural light sets the tone for your mood and feeling immediately upon entering the house. Breakfast area is nice facing out east for obvious reasons... Another big level decision is the TV viewing and noise in general. Depending on how you will use the TV, there maybe way too much light for TV and media in the options B and C revised. My kids use the TV more for gaming than TV viewing and we have it in the basement. There are families that manage to raise their kids without any gaming consoles. My hat is truly off to them! We have made our TV room double as a guest room because we don't have guests often enough. I also don't want the noise to bleed into the rest of the house. You need to make a high level decision about the 'noise' associated with 'TV and media'. We have a completely open floor plan with a grand piano. There is no way TV and piano can compete for noise in the same open space. In my house, someone is at the piano quite often throughout the day (much like yours, it seems). Again, you have not addressed that issue. If you have multiple kids and one has a friend over playing a console game/watching a movie and the other wants to play the piano.... (Do you have a digital piano that the practice can be done with a headphone?) To me, the house has not solved the essential question of separation and togetherness; noise and quiet with many of your plans.... I am not good enough of a parent where I can limit TV/media viewing to only night time and only when it will not interfere with anything else in the house, hence the TV's banishment to the basement. I wish you the best. I have a 12 yo and a 9yo. I have TV/media room in the basement and piano on the second floor. Our LR/DR/K is on the top floor to maximize the light and view. Having said all of the above, I like the original plan the best. This is why. 1. The kitchen has the most amount of light. You will spend the mose of your time in the kitchen as a family. The breastfast island is facing East if you eat on the island. This is a nice way to eat breakfast. We see the sunrise nearly every morning with our breakfast. 2. If you will keep the TV where it is (NW interior corner), it is the most isolating of the noise. You have essentially relegated the least desirable area to the kids to watch TV and hang out. IMHO, this will create the adult zone in the formal LR/DR when you have company. When we go to people's houses and when we have families over, this is essential: separation of adults from kids. As your kids become more independent, they do not want adult interference. Basements work exceptionally well. You do not have that option.... In the absence of that, this is the best option for kid/adult separation. (can you make your guest room into the media/kid zone? That seems not to be an option for you) 3. With the original plan, I see your family using the DR regularly to eat and the banquet as the kids school work zone. You will use the DR more because it will be quite pleasant and easy to use due to the window placement and the proximity to the kitchen. IHMO, DRs are not necessarily formal rooms. It is just another room in your house. If you have it, you should use it. I only have 2 eating areas. The island and the DR which is open to the kitchen. Many families have 3 eating areas. The time that is handy is when you entertain. In your house, you put the kids meals (banquet) separate from the adults (DR). 4. The kids will sit at the island preferenctially because of the view out the garden (over the other plans where they look at the wall of cabinets.) If you were sitting, do you want to look at a wall of cabinets or out the window? In other plans the kids may prefer the banquet because of more light... Again, what you do want? Do you want the kids at the banquet or the island? Even children instinctively gravitate toward light. I like your house's abundance of natural light and easy access to the outdoors. I also like the open floor concept very much. I wish you the best.

I was paying $190 (with HBO)to Comcast. I switched to Verizon for $117, still way too much for the junk that is on tv. I actually used to enjoy the HBO documentary programs, but not enough to pay that amount. Once my intro price runs out, I will consider going to the most basic cable and getting programs through Netflix or something similar. I am most disappointed with the morning news shows. They have become so fluffy. Every day it's showing silly youtube videos, cooking segments, interviews with idiots like that Snookie person and very little real news. Bring back Dave Garroway. The Today Show is the worst. I like some of the HGTV shows, even though I know they are staged. I like Modern Family and Suburgatory and the one about the rich girl who works as a waitress. Most nights I turn off the tv and play around on the computer. There are some great shows on The Smithsonian channel but I no longer get that with Verizon.

<Individuals may become sensitive to high pitched sounds as they age> I guess this must be the reason that I cannot stand to listen to screaming children, but then I've never liked high-pitched sounds or voices. At this stage in my life, I especially hate the sound of any kind of screaming. Sometimes I will watch snippets of The Donna Reed Show or Leave It To Beaver in the morning - during commercials of CBS This Morning, or while waiting for Perry Mason to come on, and I find the 1950s family shows to be a bit irritating - partly because of the rigid stereotypes and partly because they are way too conservative. Wally and Beaver were never allowed to express themselves fully, and when they did, they were reprimanded for it - no individuality was allowed. And Donna Reed was too much of a stereotypical housewife, although perhaps less so than June Cleaver. Some of my tastes in entertainment have changed, and some have not. I still like a lot of music that I liked when I was a teenager, but I also like music from when I was in my 40s. There's not a lot of 21st Century music that I like, but there is still some. I have not bought new music as often as I did before the turn of the millennium, however, as it has not had time to grow on me. There is some that I like - just not quite as much as previously. One of my favorite periods was when I was in my 30s, and one of the worst was when I was in my 20s. Recently we've been watching reruns of Schitt's Creek, which I love, but somehow I missed it when it was first on. Maybe because it was on Netflix, which we do not subscribe to and do not need, since we have more to watch than we have time to watch. We have Samsung TVs in our living rooms, and we get a lot of Samsung streaming channels, including the Wipeout Channel, which is one of our favorites. We watch a fair amount on DABL as well. In addition to TV reality shows being scripted, Hollywood movies follow strict guidelines as well. I took a screenwriting class in Hollywood around 1993, and I was taught that certain things were supposed to happen on page 12, for example. Screenplays can almost write themselves, if you have the right software. I have Finaldraft, but I've never completed an entire screenplay😵 I'm fairly good at pitching ideas, however.