Our floor plan isn't very detailed yet, but I wanted to post it before we got too far along so we could get your great comments while things are still very changeable. I have been so impressed with the thoughtful feedback you give posters. I try to explain your kindness to my friends but they assume I'm exaggerating!

I'm also going to post this on the building forum too so please excuse the duplicate. This is my primary forum so I really want your input. Especially since you will all eventually be designing my kitchen anyway ;) !!!!

Mudhouse, you encouraged me to show my progress on the DAT Rustic Modern thread so I thought I'd go ahead and do it now even before I need much help with the kitchen. We are at the very early stages, but we plan make this modern with touches of refined rustic (I got that term from Palimpsest)

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What we are trying to accomplish:

The house will be south of San Francisco up in the hills with very pretty nature views. The homes are very spread out and while it will be our primary home, it's largely a second home community.

We love wiews, nature, and light filled open spaces with as many windows as we can reasonably have.

It is just me and my husband and we don't have children.

We are building a 4,000-5,000 sf home

We only have one other bedroom in this house but there is land available on our lot to build two more structures if we should need more guest rooms or if a future owner would need better arrangements for a large family. More rooms could be added where we have the guest room placed if they needed it too.

We want to be wise about resale because you never know, but we plan to live in this house until we are old enough that it's not possible.

The oval drawn around the lot is to show you where the land drops off. We are on a hill top. The entry to the property comes down a hill towards our hilltop from the top left (NW)

We will have porches and screened porches

The thought behind the garage placement is so the garage isn't the main view when approaching the house.

It will be very windy at times so we probably plan to extend the courtyard towards the left so we have more outdoor protected space to use.

We will have some outdoor spaces on south side outside of the entry and to the right of the living room

We realize the entry is a little hike from the garage, but it is a good trade off for us to be able to have the kitchen/living/dining rooms facing the south and south/east view.

I put little dots lining all of the hallways to help me visualize the space. We may have some sort of columns or not. So you can ignore those :)

The main hallway/gallery will have opening clerestory windows to create natural airflow throughout the house. The hall is quite large and could wind up shrinking. We like the drama it adds however. There will be a lot of windows lining all of the hallways.

The house will be modern with some refined rustic features and decorating to warm it up.

We will have solar for the dipping pool (it's purpose is for exercise). We envision it on a screened porch with the ability to close it for warmth or open it up if it's hot. Maybe some sort of cool garage doors?

We will try to add green components to the house whenever reasonable to do so. We will have large overhangs to try to help offset all of the windows and provide some shelter from the sun.

We haven't figured out the master closets/bathroom yet, so for now it's just a blank room.

My bigger circles are just landscaping and the squiggly lines outside are my attempt at showing stone walls.. you can ignore those too

The office and bedrooms are open to the hallway which is in turn open to the view outside.

The kitchen is a very rough shell right now so you don't even have to pay too much attention to it. I may play around with trying to copy a pantry from an inspirational pic. The pantry was behind the stove run with access on each side. In the pantry behind the cooktop, would be open shelves with food storage. On the sides, it would have counters and be reasonably attractive to leave out appliances so you can work on things while still being open to the kitchen. Picture a U shape behind the cooktop run with the ends of the U coming out past the cooktop a little bit. I'd have a big rectangular island and then on the other side of the island would be dishwashers, dish storage and a clean up sink. This isn't in stone but it's a something I want to explore.

There will be some sort of back entry to the master suite into the hallway near the garage

None of the rooms sizes are set in stone and are subject to shrinking a bit. We are just trying to visualize layout and flow for right now.

If we want more space or storage in the master suite, we can easily carve out space between the office and media room or to the left of the media room. This would push those rooms right, towards the east and we have room to do that. One thing we wondered about is having the media room pushed right so it is open to the living room instead of the kitchen wall.

This is our first time building so we'd really appreciate hearing anything you particularly like or don't.

Here is a link that might be useful: click on this if you want a bigger version