Living Area Pics

I promised a few people I'd post more pictures of the inside of the house.  Here's a few from the main floor.  I tried to take them in a way that would help to get a feel for the layout of where each room is in relation to the others.

These are the pocket doors to the office on the right.  This is taken standing in the entry way with the opening for the front door at the end on the left.  The entry ceiling is 9'.

Coming further in from the entry the wall curves around the corner and the stairs wrap up to the second story.  The end of the entry is the start of the living room and from there the ceiling jumps up to 2 story.

I tried to get a picture that showed how the stairs get wider at the bottom as they wrap around the curved wall.  This angle sort of makes it harder to tell.

Then on the right side of the stairs is an entry to the kitchen.  It will be an arched entryway that actually has two other arches continuing to the right on that wall.

So here's a view of the kitchen area.  I designed the ceiling to be 9 feet to get really good lighting in there.  So there's a skinny window arch over the bar and a long archway continuing to the right of it that goes over the entrance to the dining room.  The arches are nice to divide the living room from the kitchen/dining area.  They have part of the bar framed in.  It wraps back into the kitchen more with one more cabinet.

This is the dining room.  This picture is taken from the living room.  You can see in the last picture how the 9 foot ceiling ends and starts a peaked ceiling.  That's where the dining room starts.  I didn't do a separate formal dining room or a small nook.  I didn't want the formal dining room because I like to be able to use the kitchen and see guests or keep the food all in the food area.  So having the f. din. rm. and a nook would just be a waste of space for me.  I just made a large nook area off the kitchen and made it feel formal.  They haven't fully cut out and sheeted around where the top windows will be yet, but there are three windows above the 3 on the long wall in there that form an arch up top.  They'll finish framing that when the windows go in.

We went with the same thinking on the living room.  A lot of homes have a formal living room in addition to the family room or great room.  We actually have a formal living room in this house and had it furnished to be used for that for 2 years.  But we NEVER used it.  We finally turned it into an office and sold the liv. rm. furniture.  It just seemed silly since everyone could see my family room from the entry anyway so the idea of keeping our messy lived in space out of view and using a room that never gets messy for guests, just didn't work for us.  So since I'm used to it being that way, I only did one room to be the family/living/great/whatever room in this house.

This is the living room.  I'm taking the picture in the dining room/nook/whatever.

It's probably too hard to tell what is being framed in here because the boards all blur into a bunch of 2D lines. But on the left, there's a fireplace box framed in a little over a foot above the floor. On either side of it they've framed back the depth of the walls to put shelves there once it's sheet rocked. Then the squares up high on either side will be arched shadow boxes to put decor in. The area off to the right has an entrance to a hall and a piano corner for our piano on the far right since Todd won't let me put it in the office =) The farthest right side of the back of the living room leads you back to the entry hall. So that's the full circle of the living areas.

The living area floor plan is really similar to the one we're in, only stretched out and with fancier ceilings.  I really like the ceilings all getting jazzed up since the rooms are all open to each other.  It gives each room its own identity and makes it feel like a separate room.

The progress report:  the H-Vac guy is almost done. 

The plumbing is piped.

We spent several hours on Friday walking through the house with the electrician and this morning his crew was already installing outlet boxes.  (Labor Day and all.)

Things still seem like they're happening fast.  Although I think the framers are a little burned out.  We're still waiting for the windows to be installed but they had a lot of little interior things to finish up this week the couple of days that they showed up.  =)  It'll be nice when the windows are in because it gets really cold in there now.  The temperature out has dropped considerably these last couple weeks and the mornings feel like parka weather.  Enclosing the place in should help that a little bit.