Excellent points dcarch and jessyf !! I hadn't even thought of just asking the rental company what they expect the house to have, LOL. I will send them an email now. I guess the point of the exercise is a little of both ... We do want the five star rating. Our house is brand new in 2011 and rents near the upper end of the market for rental rate, so one would expect the most expensive houses to have the highest ratings. Also, the houses with the highest ratings are going to be the most desired houses. (assuming they are priced competitively and have not priced themselves sky high out of the market) But also, we do want the house to have the things the guests need. We spent five years designing this house before we built and had all kinds of lists of things we needed to remember to include. We had one guest tell us that everything she looked for, we had. We want every guest to feel that way, that our home exceeds their expectations. My husband and I are not gourmet cooks by any stretch of the imagination. We sometimes go literally months without cooking anything more than an occasional breakfast. We are on a cooking kick right one, but as I said, when we cook it is fairly plain and very easy stuff. Therefore, we really have no idea what kind of tools gourmet cooks use. We don't want it to be a frustrating experience cooking in our kitchen. We want our house to be well stocked with things people regularly use! We even want to include some of the occasional use items if they are not too expensive, for example maybe a garlic press is not a regular use item but they are used fairly often and are not very expensive so it would be a nice thing to include. However, we don't want to waste money on the specialty things that everyday gourmet cooks rarely use. It sounds like the sous vide falls in that category, LOL. There may be other things that are hardly ever used that we would not want to waste money on, no matter how inexpensive they are. (ok, maybe garlic press is not a good example as starting price on one that gets higher than 2 star rating is around $10 and quickly goes up from there) I am very interested to hear what other things you guys would expect to find in a house advertised as having a gourmet kitchen.

We recently bought a 15 yr old custom home (2300 sq ft, 3 bd, 1.5 ba). On the bedroom floor (lower floor, on slab) there is a space a little over 20' by 6.5' for bathrooms, laundry, utility. There's nothing structural in the space, but there are not many options for expansion except into the master walk in closet. We think they were probably getting to the end of the budget and just decided to do one larger common bathroom and a smaller laundry/utility room. The result is no master bathroom, but laundry has to be accessed through the master walk in closet. We'd like to reconfigure the space into 2 smaller bathrooms and move the laundry into the new common bathroom. Our plan is to clear the existing bathroom out and move the existing dividing wall over. A small utility room would be created by adding a wall and pocket door in front of the remaining hot water tank and electrical panel (local code allows this as long as it's a dedicated space with a separating door and proper clearances). The new small master seems straightforward, but accessing the shower in the common bathroom may be tight. Any thoughts/recommendations on my current layout are welcome. Current layout: Proposed:

Sophie Wheeler, yes, it will be more than $1.98. According to the plumbers and my contractor, the septic is oversized so it will be fine. I will get another opinion though. I am not sure exactly what size it is. I have asked about building codes, and I am not scorning them. Zsmith, the real estate agents I talked to told me one giant room would not sell as well as having more bedrooms would. They also mentioned that since waterfront lots are scarce, people are adding on to their homes or building separate "cabins" for rentals. One of the agents sold a home like this very quickly in 2016. The main home had 1,050 sf and the garage apartment was even smaller. I looked it up and it sold for $276,000. It had never been updated and only had 1/3 of an acre which was waterfront, but with a steep drop to the water. The other agent said that people are adding cabins and A frames on their properties. We have no intention of renting to anyone. Insurance would be prohibitive. My contractor had to put a 35 ft beam in my living room five years ago. I don't know if he talked to an architect, but he did talk to an engineer. They also cut out some sheetrock in the garage ceiling and found a 12 inch support beam there. He said he would add another one if we add the bedrooms, but I don't know where he will put it. I am sure I drive him crazy with all the questions I ask and all the research I do. He will be replacing the vinyl siding with Smart Board in a few weeks. I researched it for days then I started asking him questions to see if he knew the requirements for installation/warranty. He did. Before anyone says anything about me not treating him like a professional, I have learned to ask questions because there are a lot of "contractors" where I live that are self taught. We ask for and check their licenses and insurance; even the company that cut down 17 pine trees had to be insured before we hired him. We went through about 7 or 8 electricians before we found one that actually knew what he was doing and had a license. We spent a couple of months searching for a certified roofer. He was located almost 2 hours away. We are very careful with codes and safety, and we don't take short cuts. The contractor hasn't given me a diagram of the upstairs bedrooms yet, but I wanted some idea of what homeowners would think about weird angles and small bedrooms. We might not even put bedrooms upstairs. After the siding, our next project is removing that awful popcorn ceiling in the bedrooms and upstairs. We already had it checked when we sent off samples. No problems removing it thank goodness! Anyway, if anyone has any thoughts about the proposed bedrooms with angled walls please let me know. I tend to think things to death before I decide what to do. You can tell that by the 20 different paint splotches on my living room walls. Just can't decide on a color.

When we moved from NY to Florida, we faced a similar problem. My husband was a classical pianist who had a concert grand. We had a large contemporary in NY, but were now downsizing to Florida. He decided we couldn't take his beloved Steinway and asked our daughter if she would like to take it for her home. She had a large home and he was always hopeful she or her two daughters might play. She agreed to take the piano. So, we hired Steinway movers to move it from NY to Connecticut. We moved to Florida and my daughter bought him a very expensive keyboard so he could continue to play piano. We made one of our bedrooms, in the Florida home, his office/music room. He used it occasionally, but it wasn't his concert grand!. He wound up volunteering for a large library in our area in their music archive area. The floor had a large, old Steinway which he played and helped young students studying music. It was a such a rewarding experience for him working with music majors. Much of his old sheet music was given to the archive. He missed his beautiful piano at home. But the house and its acoustics were not proper for such a large piano. He used the keyboard occasionally, but loved playing the piano at the library. Jane