wow - thanks for all the great responses feisty68 - does it feel dark or cramped or unfriendly in the kitchen? There is a lot of natural light in all the rooms - good point, I don't want to mess that up. chiefy76 - I read your response to DH - he was like - ya' - did I say that? Robotropolis - thanks - I printed your sketch - many thanks for your time to do that. I am trying to envision how that would look with the change in ceiling height going from 12' in the Family room to 9 ' in the nook - I guess there would just still be the 4' top of the wall there. raee - we use every inch of the dining room - often we fill it up with the Sunday lunch bunch - it could stand to be double that size. We eat on the porch as often as we can for the extra space but the dining does get used a lot. Gooster! Yes I have considered closing off the door to the porch - especially when I thought I was going to duplicate your to "die for" kitchen! That is something that will probably happen - depending on the final plan. elizardbethday - I wish, but there is no place to go with the bottom stairs - there is a half bath just behind the kitchen off the laundry room. I have an onsite meeting tomorrow at 2pm to discuss it all - keep it coming. I think I may need to post pictures of the actual rooms. THANK YOU ALL - I want to hear more of your thoughts, you are a bunch of awesomeness!

I want to be logical, and not try to design my whole house around a dream kitchen, but alas, I am after all, TKO. Talk me down? I am flailing here, as you will see. I feel your pain because I'm in nearly the same position as you except it's my roof lines that are driving me batty. I've gone through countless iterations of what I want on my first floor and because I have fewer room needs than your plans shows, meaning fewer combinations, I've tried my hand at playing with orientations in order to achieve my multiple goals. What I'm finding is that no matter what I do, when I pull on the string in one place the rest of the tapestry is affected, so design, as I see it (I'm no professional) has to flow organically, one feature flowing naturally into the next. I'm sensing that you're hitting that same wall - the combination of shapes/orientations isn't working throughout the whole house. I wouldn't hesitate for even a moment in scraping a plan that you don't feel completely comfortable with and I wouldn't for a moment think that you're illogical for building a whole plan around your kitchen. I'm pretty much doing that right now. What I found was that the kitchen was the room that was/is driving me the battiest, so if I start with a blank slate (still mindful of my conditions, which in your case would be the underground garage plus other points) and then play around with the kitchen shape + workflow + adjoining rooms & features and get those issues mostly settled in the kitchen then the rest of the house can flow outwards from there. I noticed that your architects original plan had an angled section and that he put secondary rooms in there, leaving the primary rooms in the traditional square/block pattern. The square rooms are definitely easier to work with. Your attempt at a compromise put a functional room into the angled wing and this created an awkward junction between the family room and the kitchen right at the kitchen. Why not continue the angle with the kitchen included and then try to use the space where the two wings of the house meet in a way that serves a purpose. So my words of advice to you are to break the problems down into individual problems and then try to solve one at a time before proceeding to the next. Count on a 3 steps forward, 2 steps back type of process as you'll find yourself going back to what you think you had solved which now presents as a problem due to something you've just done, and then begin the process again, one step at a time. I don't know what you want to accomplish with the kitchen design, but one thing I would try is to orient the kitchen with the family room. In your crooked picture, find the point where the DR meets the kitchen and draw your 45 wall starting there. Then draw another 45 line right at your door, losing the little window wall to the left of the entry. Now the awkward angled space is right where your pantry and closets are located and it is here that you can hide the awkward space into secondary rooms. You have a lot of room to work with in your kitchen space, so mix it up, try things that you normally wouldn't, and may well reject, but try these new ideas in order to see how they play out and how they affect other aspects of your plan. Try bumpouts, try peninsulas, try a banquette, try a bay window, try an irregular shaped room (beyond just a room at a 45 angle to the adjacent room.) Most importantly though is to spell out what you want in your kitchen and which of the designs that you posted most speaks to you.

I will mainly be growing Indoor under grow lights, I will line the walls with reflective materials and use cfl bulbs (I got about 100 of the nice globe ones for 50 cents a pop on liquidation at staples) HID or LED for the trees. In terms of space/environments: I have an abandoned stairwell that isn't used (my apartment used to connect to the one above), it's extra wide so on one side I will be doing my dutch buckets staggering one bucket per other step. My Avocado tree is at the base of the stairs, I'll guide it to grow upwards so it has about 16 feet to spread out. This entire area can be tented/controlled pretty much as I would like. The facing side I will set up my herb garden which is just a bunch of 6ft nft lines. The stairwell is about 16 steps and I just use books and such to vary the height of the buckets. In addition to this I have a 14 ft wall dedicated to the two S nft towers, this is ambient temperature space and can't have crazy temperature/humidity versus the home. For the fig and apricot dwarfs I want to put them in a tent in my tech room which is much warmer. They'll be hand tended. In regards to blueberries and rasberries from my research it's looking like dutch buckets might be the best way for those? Any comments that way? Thanks for showing an interest! Z.

If you don't like corner cabinets, don't do them. =) Seriously, ignore the corners (void them) and go with wider cabs on each side of the corner. You lose very little usable space, IME. I'm curious why your wife is dead-set on a double bowl sink. Many of us have switched to single bowl and would never go back. If she's concerned about how to do hand-washing, that's an easy fix. Fill the largest dirty pot and use it as a basin or use a plastic dish pan for the times she needs a "double" bowl. If you went to a single bowl with off-set drain, then the garbage could go under the sink - dual bin, same as my set-up posted above - which would help with your storage needs. But if not, then I think this tweak to your plan is worth considering: I moved the trash to the left side. You'll have 21" of floor to stand to unload dishes into the to-counter cab in the upper left corner. It's a bit snug so do a mock-up to make sure this is enough room for you. The plus is that you avoid door conflicts. In your plan, it's possible that an open DW door could hit the pantry cab. My open DW sticks out 26" from the cab face; you only have 24" of floor between cab face and pantry cab. I turned the left side into pantry cabs with a MW installed in the right pantry cab, similar to this: The above is a built-in MW but it can also be a counter top model installed in a cubby like this one: This gives you a good spot for the MW while also giving you more pantry storage. The dish cab would be something like this: Or the one on the right in this pic: The fridge wall would end up something like this (but with closed storage): You'll notice that I voided the corner - in fact I voided both corners - in favor of wider drawer storage. Store big, bulky things in the pantry cabs and keep the drawers for small things, like measuring spoons, measuring cups, dish towels, etc. Those don't store well in BCC or Susan cabs. IMO, your plan lacks good storage for small items. Mixing bowls, pots and pans also store well in wide drawers. I moved your coffee maker to the upper right corner. It's out of the way but not out of reach. You could move it to the upper left corner in an open area similar to the last pic I posted and move plates and glasses above it. Then all you need to do is find a spot for silverware. If you make the pantry cab similar to the cab with the built-in MW, then you've got a drawer for silverware.I also voided the upper corner cab so that you'll have the same amount of wall showing on each side of your window. Unless I'm missing something, I calculate that you'll have a 43" aisle between end of peninsula and fridge doors. I'm going by current fridge depths, not what your fridge measures, so that when you replace it down the road, you will still have a decent aisle here.