Hi Heather, I apologize if my comments are redundant since I didn't read through all the previous comments. We have 5 kids, and we have a similar upstairs loft type set up, but ours doesn't have the open railing along it. We have a 2 story great room similar to yours, and the railing is open between the foyer and the great room. We like the 2 story great room, although it can be challenging to decorate. One thing that we did that I love was make the "cat walk" the upstairs hallway overlooking the great room and the foyer extra wide. Ours is 8 feet wide. It makes that hallway feel less scary with openings on both sides, and it feels welcoming. I know this is personal preference, but with kids, I would close off the overlook from the loft to the great room. I'm imagining that you are giong to use that loft space for toys and video games, etc., and it is nearly impossible to keep that looking nice at all times. Plus, the noice traveling down will be difficult to control. Also, my kids have thrown or accidentally dropped things from the "cat walk" which is around the corner from the loft (like your set up) to the great room. I know that there would be many more things being thrown over if that railing were open all the way around. The other things I was wondering about was your 1st floor laundry room. In our house, the kids generate the most amount of laundry, and it is a TON. Our laundry is upstairs and it makes it so much more convenient to gather up their clothes and put them away. I couldn't imagine hauling baskets and basekets of clothes up and down the stairs. The other thing I agree with are the windows in the kitchen. I'd try to get more natural light in the kitchen, and have windows on the wall with the fridge (since they aren't covered by a 4 season room). I worry that your kitchen will be dark otherwise. Finally, since your dining room is your main and only dining area where you will put a table, I wonder if you'd want to have a sight line from there to the great room. We have only one main dining area as well, and I know it's nice for us to be able to have a sight line into the great room. Although we start dinner as a family, kids start taking off/wandering off while we're still eating since it takes the adults awhile to eat since we don't sit down from running around untile everybody is practically done. Anyway, as much as we'd like everybody to sit at the table the entire time and engage in lenghty dinner conversation, the reality is that we're just glad that we got everyone around the table for some part of dinner and that we can still keep an eye on them in the family room and feel like we're still having dinner together. Anyway, best of luck. It looks like it's going to be a wonderful home.

The link below should take you to a wiki pedia site about Elvis Albums. I don't know how accurate this source is, or if the list is complete, but it appears to be a good start. This source lists albums and all the song titles in each album. Here is a link that might be useful: Elvis Presley Albums

"I am paying quite a bit for this" oh honey, no. I'm with 3onthetree in that this is a really bad job for a "pro". when you said you didn't want to insult the tiler, I thought maybe you meant because a friend or relative did it. the job looks very amateur. did you pay in full yet? don't. you should try to negotiate a full or partial refund if possible (suggest to them that there could be bad yelp and google reviews -- including photos -- if they don't comply). or at least a free do over -- and watch them like a hawk. if you get it redone, I'm not a huge fan of the trim used to transition the floor to the hearth. it's probably covering ragged floor edges, which is normal. one fix would be to have a tile "pad" set -- so it looks like it's sitting on top of the wood, overlapping the edges slightly. even better, a stone slab cut to fit. you would need to find out how thick you could get away with that doesn't block the vent. kind of like this hearth below, but yours may need to be a bit thinner: or this:

When coir is used in most greenhouse/nursery operations it makes up <10% of the total volume of the grow medium, and is used primarily in bottom watering applications like ebb and flow. In large part, that is because it loses its loft very quickly and compacts severely when top-watered. Coir also has chemical properties that vary significantly enough from peat that it would be unwise to believe that coir can serve as an exact substitute for sphagnum peat w/o having appropriate work-arounds in place that take into account both the physical and chemical differences between the two. Coir is also known to be allelopathic to a notable % of plants, though I can't say with any certainty if almond trees are on the list of plants affected allelopathically by coconut hull products. Most plants I've tried to grow in media comprised of large fractions of coir/ CHCs were not at all cooperative and fared poorly. There isn't enough information to make a diagnosis with any degree of certainty, but odds would suggest that you are up against one of the fungal pathogens often gathered under the umbrella of damping-off diseases; or, compaction of the coir fibers has created an hypoxic root environment favored by fungi that thrive in anaerobic conditions. It's highly likely the seeds that have split into 2 cotyledons are perfectly viable. They can be planted in river sand which has been screened over a 2mm screen to eliminate the finest material. Start fertilizing when the plant is pushing its first true leaves. Al