Hi! I'm a lurker here because y'all have such wonderful ideas. kittypawz-WOW! You live across from the Priddy Fountain? I went to junior high and part of high school in Highland Park and used to drive past that thing (before it was rebuilt) all the time. oceanna-Your siding pics are too funny. My last home had a huge picture window in the dining room that was 6' from the neighbor's house (all brick). I finally built a trellis on the outside to grow vines over the window and block the view :) Here's what I see outside my windows now..

Some gorgeous floors shown above. I actually love all the floors in our home except the carpet in the bedrooms. That will some day be replaced with hardwood, but with all the other floors (hardwood, marble and ceramic tile) that needed to be installed, by my hubby, he wanted a break and had carpet installed. I guess the pattern and the veining on this marble combo would be my favorite. More so because it was one of those happy surprises that come from a goof. The was the first flooring we'd purchased and didn't think to buy extra. We knew better, just didn't do it. HoDe was out of the premixed mortar that hubby had used for other tiles he'd laid and was happy with, so I talked him into mixing his own. How hard could it be, right? Well we heard later that the type we chose is even a bit tough for the pros to always get right. Some of the tiles loosened and broke when walked on. We searched high and low for matching marble to no avail. Then I saw the darker tile at Lowe's and thought we should take some home and see if in our lighting they worked well together. Hubby wanted to just replace them all, but once we found a way to lay them out, after he carefully removed the original tiles, he loved it. Here it is.... Click Photo to Enlarge

I'll definitely 2nd the completely separate laundry, I would have liked our laundry room to be a bit bigger for a table but just the fact that if I'm crazy busy and can't do anything but wash the clothes and they stay in there on the floor and I just close the door, it's SOOO nice, greatly reduces the stress that endless laundry brings. We also put our main laundry upstairs with the kids bedroom and added a separate washer/dryer hookup in our master bedroom closet for a small stackable. Our house build I also love that we have a an island big enough for 5 chairs and our breakfast "nook" (which isn't really a nook, it's just in between the kitchen and the family room) is big enough for a dining room table and we can also add a foldable table for when we have large family gatherings. Everyone can be in the same room, which was never possible when we had a formal dining room. We also put in an attic fan or whole house fan. It's great for energy savings if you want to reduce your a/c usage. At the end of the day when the kids finally go upstairs to get ready for bed we open the tops of all the windows and turn on the attic fan and it pulls in the cool night air, cooling it down fast. We also put in a full freezer and full freezerless refrigerator in the kitchen, side by side so it looks like one unit. We can fit everything we want and not constantly losing stuff in the back of those super deep fridges. We also had insulation put around our 1/2 bath so that we can't hear people in the bathroom and it really works!! I really, really wish we had done that around our master bedroom so if one of us has to get up early it doesn't wake the other still sleeping. We really like our blue star open burner all cast iron rangetop. We just take off a grate and put in a round bottom wok and we're stir frying. Blue Star is a great price for what you get. The cast iron stays looking better than stainless steel and we love the open burners. I love the layout of our kitchen. The kitchen is mostly used for those quick and easy meals, like cereal, sandwiches, or reheating leftovers. We really thought about that in the design. We open the fridge take everything out and put it on the island right next to it. Then we have the microwave in the island and the pullout trashcan right under where we put things. So it's easy to brush trash and crumbs into the trash and heat stuff up and our sink is close for washing. But for more involved meals we spread out from there which really works if there is more than one person in the kitchen. That's where our sink in the island comes in. We've had 6 or more people in our kitchen preparing food and there was plenty of room. We have a place for a formal dining room but we made it big enough to be a formal living room which is how we use it. I love it, I sit in there for some peace and quiet while the kids are in the family room. It's close enough to keep tabs on what it going on but separate to relax. I could go on, but I linked some pictures to my house we built, we since added some things, like built ins in the family room. I do wish our mudroom was bigger and had a door b/c it needs to be completely functional and it's always messy. I think I would have liked to have a desk in there since that is where mail ends up, oh and a table or something for all those kids crafts that are messy and don't get cleaned up right away.

DAT = "Design around this" They were sort of hypothetical decorating genres or challenges for which interested participants would create a mood board and explain their design concept. Cawaps and Pal did a lot, iirc. http://ths.gardenweb.com/discussions/2407228/about-the-design-around-this-threads