Thank you so much for your thoughts! When I say "judicious" use of bump outs, I mean "having, showing, or done with good judgment or sense. sensible - reasonable - prudent." So only using them where they greatly improve the use of the space. Our house could go a *little* wider but not significantly. The current floorplan is approx 60.5 feet wide. The buildable width of the lot is approx 68.4 feet. The great room bumps to the left 2 feet--we could easily remove that to bring the base floorplan down to 58.5 feet wide. (The lot is a relatively square corner lot with a beautiful view out the back (west), nice views to the left (south) and front (east), and a future neighbor immediately on the right (north). I think I like where you're heading with moving the stairs/study/mudroom around. I'm having a hard time visualizing it though. What would the view from the front-door looking in be? Where would you suggest placing my workstation and the piano? I just want to make sure I follow what you're saying so I can try to sketch it up and visualize it. (I'm the kind of person who doesn't "get it" until I can see it.) :) I agree about the garage...I TRULY hate houses that look like a garage with a house attached. That said, a large garage does fit our lifestyle. We live in a very cold climate where parking outside requires 30 minutes of heavy labor just to get on the road in the morning (I am too old for those shenanigans!!!) I have an SUV my husband alternates between his sedan and his motorcycle for his daily commute. We will also need space for a lawn mower, snowblower, and kids toys and sports equipment. I don't want to build a large house for the sole purpose of making our large garage "look" right. I feel like there must be some creative way to accomplish all of the goals of an aesthetically pleasing house, a house that suits our needs, and a garage that suits our needs.

Thanks everyone, I was starting to think I was just here by myself, lol. This is getting addictive...I am trying to figure out why I have been hauling around that bookcase since college days. It's outta here.. Last week the "church lady" came by with a horse trailer and took the armoire and two French chairs, window treatments, all that fireplace equipment, some Christmas ornaments and myriad of other stuff. She was so excited she and her husband carried that heavy armoire down the steps by themselves. I have never seen a tiny woman carry that big of an object!! It was superhuman strength I guess when you want something that bad it pumps you up!! So I open the armoire and there is even stuff in there! OMG, I have always prided myself on being the anti-clutterer. It was some sort of denial. No wonder! It is all behind closed doors. So anyway, she took all of that stuff too and the fake ivy!!! There were pillows, yet even more Italian linens and some tassels from who knows what. They would have taken more stuff but it started pouring down rain. I told her about the drop leaf table in the basement that needs fixing and she said her husband could fix it and the two matching chairs. In the meantime I finished the kitchen cabinets and got rid of about 20 lids to tupperware/grocery store storage containers that have no bottoms probably my dogs chewed them up. Of course I almost got away with getting rid of more lids but my husband was there getting them back out of the garbage saying he might need those for something. I even cleaned out the "junk drawer" that everyone has, that scary kitchen drawer full of old curtain hardware, errant screws and picture hanging apparatus from days gone by. Even telephone hook up stuff that probably doesn't exit anymore to some fossilized princess phone. There was another cabinet with these special diet mixing devices that whir up fabulous healthy drinks that you never end up making and has been in the cabs since the '90's. Gone! Remember the lady with the horse trailer is the chef from church so she brought me dinner for that night. Some wonderful herb pork chops with these twice baked potato things that were heavenly, guess I better give away those tiny clothes because this isn't helping that cause and not to mention another whole batch of her special jalapeno pimento cheese. Nirvana!! I could get used to this. This might be moving along faster but I have to sneak and give some of this stuff away or my Archie Bunker husband is standing there saying you're giving that away? That's worth something and having a running repertoire going on the whole time with hands on hips watching things go by: YOU'RE GONNA NEED THAT@#$%!! He doesn't look like Archie more like Gerald McRaney but his personality is eerily similar these days. What's up with that? Do all men turn into Archie Bunker after about 25 years of marriage? FYI: I don't look a thing like Edith, not that there's anything wrong with it. Anyway, I have to schedule these sneak horse trailer hauling soirees when he's out of town. My neighbors are getting nervous seeing all of this Sanford and Son going on over here and think we might be moving, the height of all insults moving from the neighborhood. But I assured them I was just doing spring cleaning so all is well on "Wisteria Lane" for another week.

Thanks for all the input so far. Suero - I didn't understand what you were asking about the entrance being in the office, then I looked at the plans again and I totally see where you are coming from. You can't actually tell from the plans, but the entrance is actually at the bottom of the plans - the stairs go down towards the bottom wall, so that at the bottom of the stairs, you see the TV area to your right and the door to the exercise area to your left. The door under the stairs is a closet in the office where my hubby wants to put the router, printer, fax machine, etc. There are only two small windows - one is behind the furnace (go figure) and the other is in part of the basement that is a crawl space (everything above the "top wall" on the plans is only dug out to half-height, so the floor in that area is about waist high if you are standing in the full-height part of the basement. The round thing in the workshop is the water heater - it's actually not there yet (it's under the stairs) but we're moving it to getit out of the middle of our finished area. There's also a central vac along that wall. The big X in the workshop is an area of indented floor with a floor drain -- the PO's of the house used the area to wash their dogs. Also, above that area the ceiling is crazy low -- the upstairs has sort of a sunken foyer so the ceiling there is probably only about 6'6" or so. We have shelves along the left wall that hold all our paint and are using the floor drain to drain the dehumidifier. The workshop area also holds the electrical panel/breaker box. It's really not a suitable area to finish because of the multi-level floor/low ceiling and all the stuff (w/h, central vac, breaker box). Oh, also, the "top wall" in the workshop is an opening to the half-height area that we plan to leave open. This is really hard to explain - perhaps a pic will help (excuse the mess - we've purged a lot of stuff out of the basement since these were taken): To address some of the other concerns you all brought up, I don't expect that hubby will be using loud saws or whatever while someone else is watching TV (for one thing, the tv is primarily for him, LOL!) The workshop is pretty small (the whole darned basement is cramped, to be honest). I mainly just wanted an area where I could do projects - strip a piece of furniture, use the miter saw for a quick cut or two, etc. And somewhere to store my massive collection of paint cans, LOL! Also, as far as finishing the exercise room, the original plan was to have 3 rooms, one being a dedicated exercise room. But when we got down there with our painters tape and marked it out on the floor, the exercise room ended up being so cramped that it felt claustrophobic. And we don't want to finish that whole "unfinished area" because we still have the furnaces and a whole bunch of well stuff (water softener, a few tanks, etc.). So we figured we'd just omit the wall and leave the exercise area as part of a bigger unfinished room. The shelves/desk along the stairs are for my kids - I envision a long countertop with two kneehole openings to serve as "desks" for the kids. I do plan to use the area under the stairs -- part of it will be a closet accessible from the office and the lower part will be accessible from the exercise area for storage of random stuff. And again, the sliding closets along the top are there in part to incorporate the half-height area. Here's a pic to show you what I am dealing with: I want the closets to be about 2 feet deep at the bottom but where the openings to the half-height area are, the shelves will be deeper, going all the way to the back of the columns that support the ceiling there. We should get a lot of toy storage out of this plan, and I want to build the back of one closet such that it will have an access panel to get back to the half-height area (though we'll have an opening in the workshop area, there are some low hanging pipes and beams back there that would make getting something bigger than a box into the other side of the area very hard, so we want a big access panel to get to the other side if we ever need to (our oil tanks are back there, and someday they may need to be replaced.) So because we want to take advantage of the half-height areas and allow for access back there, those closets taking up the whole top wall seem the only way to do it that I can think of. I did enterain the idea of putting the TV built-in into one of the openings, but ruled it out a while ago when my sister pointed out that putting the media stuff along the "top wall" and the toy storage area at the "bottom wall" means that the first thing people see when they walk down the stairs is a whole pile of toy mess. At least flipped so that the TV is along the "bottom" side, the toy mess is tucked up behind the seating area and not the first thing visitors see! Please do keep the opinions coming - you are all giving me a lot to think about and I'd much rather second-guess things now than after it's built!

Grandma, do you mean take down the high shelf and hang the banner up where it was? If I hung it about a foot from the 10ft ceiling it would still terminate with about a foot behind the headboard...is that what you mean? I am not sure I would do that....The shelf is not something we put up, it is not easily removed, and would require extensive drywall repair, etc. I don't love shelves like that generally, but it is the same weight and profile as the 12" of crown moulding and looks very integral. I have blue and white porcelain displayed there that would have no other home. I have thought about using the small round table next to the chair, will try that. As to the plates, there are currently 16 displayed in the room now, but i have many more and could make an entire wall behind the bed with them. I am not sure the plates and the banner would make the right kind of grouping on a wall as they seem mutually exclusive in terms of content. I guess, having just read that, I should either keep the plates and forget about the banner or buy the banner and pack the plates away.