Circa September 2013: This brain of mine

So, in typical fashion, I am starting to doubt all decisions regarding this house.

Doubt 1: Should we still get the engineer to do a soil analysis

Doubt 2: I am wondering if the floor plan is too closed off. Samurai and I are not very good at socialising, but this is our house so if anyone comes over it will be both of us to meet and greet. We, or at least I, keep thinking of myself in this house as still living under someone else's roof and rules. At my mother's, if she has people over, I'll just camp out in my room until they left just to avoid the expected pleasantries. So, I am now thinking open floor plan or at least partially.

One of Samurai's friend's recently purchased a house and in addition to being just luxurious, it was also open concept and was so welcoming for everyone else to mingle close by while Samurai 'christened' the new kitchen with a Sunday lunch. I'm wondering what people would do and where they will go if we are entertaining. All there is, is the back patio for them to go and talk to us through the kitchen. So here's what I'm thinking... make just the TV room and Dining room open concept. We initially decided on closing this off so that we can all cozy up as a family and watch movies but I think we'll just use the second floor game room for this purpose and it will be even easier to go to bed when we're sleepy instead of climbing those stairs. I wonder if HGTV is playing a role in making me think like this, hmph.

Doubt 3: I'm also wondering if the master is too far from the other bedrooms. If my daughter wakes up in the middle of the night, would we be too far to hear her? But then I think about when she gets older and she wouldn't even have time for me, she'll love the position of her bedroom.

I saw this floor plan and I love it. I think it will work well because the staircase is more centred, upstairs all rooms are basically off the same hallway and there is also a spare bedroom downstairs. But then, if I were to really tweak this with our wish list, it will get way too big for us to afford.

I have to keep reminding myself that I designed the position of our Master Bedroom with it being our little haven, tucked neatly away from everything else.

If we could have really incorporated that third internal staircase everything would be great but this staircase quite to the front of the house will prevent us from seeing who is going up or down and with a little child, that may be very important. But then I saw this on houzz.com and even though it's not exactly like ours, the details are similar and have comforted me with our design decisions. I just think that we'll definitely open out the back by removing the walls between the kitchen and TV room.

I have been doing all kinds of changes to the floor plan to see what should be changed but I eventually sat down and thought about why we designed it like this in the first place and it all made sense again. The only change now was that I wanted a bedroom downstairs for guests so I wonder if I should just add on a little piece to make that happen.