Thirteen things I'm trying to figure out today:

1. The architect brought a variety of plans to us. He used my ideas, and I mostly like them, but with each one there's a "but". When you walk in my house, the den is to the right, and the kitchen to the left. I have never been crazy about having the kitchen being the first thing you see.
2. One of the options is to move the kitchen to the master bedroom, which has an east exposure, and the master bedroom to the dining room. There is a small room off the dining room, which we call the library, but is probably closer to a tv room. This would become the master bedroom closet.
3. I am not sure that I should give up a room to get a closet. Neither of us is a clothes horse.
4. The library is at the opposite end of the house from the den, and has been very convenient when the Professor and I want to watch different tv shows (more often than not), and for the grandchildren to play video games or watch Disney movies.
5. The flow is terrible -- more like non-existent -- in this house. The kitchen-to-master-bedroom option gives the best flow.
6. If we leave the rooms pretty much as they are, but enlarge the closets, add some storage and re-align the doorways, we get better flow ... BUT...
7. I would still have the problem of having to jog around the dining room table in order to get to the library.
8. You also cannot go directly from the kitchen to the laundry room and back door. You have to walk around a wall. For some reason, that drives me crazy.
9. The kitchen-to-master-bedroom allows direct access to the back door, but now the doorway is through the dining room. Will I now be jogging around the dining room table to get to the laundry?
10. Re-doing the house is very complicated because the walls are concrete and the slab is pre-tensioned. The doors, windows and plumbing are where they are. Moving any of them is hugely expensive.
11. We also have a very long back hall that is only 30" wide. The Professor wants to move all the interior walls to make it a standard width. I want to make the hall even longer by cutting through a little alcove in the Professor's study, bringing the garage forward, and putting a door from the house into the garage. This door would be worth the expense! But now the Professor's study goes from a big room to a rather small one.
12. The previous owners cut through a valley rafter so they could enlarge a small a-frame upstairs loft. We have battled roof leaks ever since. The architect told us the only thing to do is put the loft back to an a-frame. It will still be larger than the original loft was, and will have two small areas with a sloping ceiling. We realized that one of these areas would make an ideal place for toys and the Nintendo. Remember the closet in ET? --well, I'm thinking a nice gable window would give the kids a play area very similar to that.
13. Also in the plans are a fireplace (which we absolutely don't need in Texas, but I need emotionally), a big covered front porch, and something the architects came up with: a screened porch off the loft. Now we have to see what the cost of all this will be. That may change my mind about a lot of things!