belleville rose - Glad you are enjoying your gh so much. As for the concrete, that is usually an unnecessary expense with little,or no,advantage to 3/4 in. crushed rock.

We aimed to build a 2000 sf house and ended up at 2150. No basement, because we're in Hawai'i. Our great room (kitchen + dining + living) is 18 x 33, open on 3 sides to the outside. We would have loved bigger (who doesn't love bigger!) but everything seems to fit and we have the option of moving our dining room outside to a covered patio, since we have year round good weather. The great room is connected to another 800sf of outdoor living space. It really helped us to layout our furniture and go from there.

@mark: Sorry, posts as in..a couple of your comments are exactly what we're doing. :-) A doc is a Microsoft Word document, or in my world it is a Google document. A sharable & collaborative digital document of notes where people can add or edit as a group. My cousin is a licensed architect and I have been picking his brain and he definitely has neat ideas and has been very helpful, but we still decided to hire someone local that our contractor has experience working with, after walking through houses they had designed and built together. My notes and initial design have been shared with the firm as well as my contractor. This process really just started today. They are going to physically go to our lot along with the contractor, read my notes and look design, and are then going to provide an initial floor plan based on all the things provided / environment / passive solar etc and the 3 of us will collaborate and iterate. We also have hired a land surveying & engineering firm for help with our building site. We decided on our builder before moving forward with an architect, outside of the family advice i am receiving for free. My wife and I are new to this (outside of a main floor gut and remodel in a previous home) and I really appreciate your thoughts and time. We live in Driggs, Idaho - about 20 minutes from Grand Targhee Ski Resort and about 45 minutes from Jackson Hole. Our first snow storms started in early October.

We did what you are contemplating but thought we would save money and tax Bill. It was less expensive and we designed HVAC to be easy add later. I put loads of electricals so we had flexibility down the road. That was less cost to do at construction. Certain fire code items were needed as well. Truthfully, that was about 2/3 of the cost. So, we saved but then when we finished off that was cash out of pocket. So it’s a choice. If I had it to do again, I would do it all at initial build. Ours was 750 sq ft heated/cool space. And I wouldn’t have had the mess after moving in. Getting sheetrock up to second floor was messy! Good luck.