Thanks for the feedback everyone! A little more information, we live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the local building department allows us to only have an engineers stamp, it isn't required to have an architect. Additionally, our builder (while not an architect) has a lot of experience drawing up plans, and if we could find a floor plan that only needed some modification then he could draw up the plans. Maybe we will end up going to an architect after all, however at the moment I'm just trying to collect some floor plan options to see if we can avoid it. Ideally, we are looking for a single story home that has a large great room, windows in the kitchen, 3-4 bedrooms and about 3000 square feet. We don't need a seperate dining room, or formal living room, though if a plan has a dining room we will turn it into an office, or some sort of other "flex" space. Thanks!!

This is really a random comment, but I'm currently loving having no window coverings. We do have custom blinds fit into every window, but we keep them pulled up almost all the time. There is no curtain to be found anywhere in my house. It was originally this way because my husband bought the house and lived in it alone before he met me, and he was not into decorating. But after I moved in and finally painted the builder white walls, I realized that I really loved the clean look. My windows are very similar to yours - 6 over 6 divided light, with white trim. (My trim might be very slightly wider than yours - hard to tell.) My instinct used to always be to put up curtains, but now I've moved away from that. As long as your trim is good, having no curtains results in a very clean look. You also don't have to worry about coordinating with furniture, wall color, etc., and about what length to use on windows that don't go all the way to the floor. And you get as much natural light as possible. If I were you I would actually remove those drapes. You've got a great clean look throughout the kitchen, without window coverings. If you need privacy, you could fit wooden blinds inside the windows. It's hard to tell exactly what color the walls in the living room area are - I think they are probably more the soft creamy yellow that it appears in the last photo, and not the pink/peach it appears in other photos. If it's the same as what is in the kitchen, then I think that color is actually very good. You might want possible want something slightly more taupe-y for the living room, but since it is open to the kitchen, you'll have to be careful about the color. I know, off-topic... it's just that I have been looking at a ton of real estate photos lately (might put our house on the market in a couple years, and I'm interested in what the market is like) and curtains always seem to ruin things. They seem to be the most taste-specific things and the things that most easily seem to ruin rooms. It seems like EVERYONE immediately puts up curtains, but they're often just messy and don't really do anything to enhance the room. Yours are actually pretty good - very pretty color - but they limit you a bit. The "correctness" of that length on windows that size is also debatable. I've read that you should make the drapes go to the floor, but I've also seen a supposed "egregious real estate photo" which was flagged specifically for having drapes fitted like that. BTW, would you keep that rug (which I really like)? Could you look closely at it and maybe pull out a color which doesn't immediately jump out at you, and use that on the wall? That would pull everything together. Just so you know, my furnishings are similar in color scheme to yours, and my walls are a similar yellowish, with one wall (which runs into the kitchen) being sort of a sage-y olive-y green. I don't know that I love the yellow, and the green is too dark to do on all the walls, but something in that family, just lighter, would work on all the walls. You might go for a light grey with an undertone of green.

Thanks everyone! We are installing hardwood throughout the entire downstairs.The revere pewter is actually through french doors off of both rooms but you can't really see itwell from either room so I am not so worried about that going with the other rooms as much. It is mainly this view I want to flow well. I considered van cortland blue for the formal living room but it might be too dark/bold for me. I tend to be more neutral/conservative when decorating. And yes I love the yarmouth blue but don't think I want it everywhere. It looks perfect in the dining room.

Based on what I can see in the photos (you didn't show the left side of the arch into the nook), I don't know that I would treat the nook and the living room as separate spaces. I might just spill the living room furniture across the space and ignore the minimal separation the architecture creates. If you don't want to do that (or it doesn't make sense because of something I'm not seeing), your could do a couple things with the nook. I think it would be cool to have a window seat in there. (Do you have pets? Pets would love a window seat.) If not that, then I would put a couple chairs and a small table there for games, puzzles, drinking a cup of coffee, or using a laptop.