Here's the floorplan of the home that's being built for us. Not shown here is the feature that really got us to make the purchase: a 400 square foot office with bathroom above the garage. The garage is detached from the house, which is a plus for us; we've been looking for a way to really split up work and home. When you work out of your home, the line can get more than a bit fuzzy, and it's easy to spend all of your time working, to the detriment of other interests and family life. By having a separate office, we can shut the door behind us and leave work behind.

One thing that we like about the house is the big kitchen. As you can see from the plan, it's got tons of counter and cabinet space (at last!). The room just to the right of the kitchen and below the laundry room is the pantry.

Being a new home, it's got some new options that we'll find especially useful. Top of that list is the Net4Home option, which will prewire the house with 6 telephone lines, 6 data jacks for Ethernet, and four coax outlets for video. All of these go back to a central wiring box. Cable TV in the area isn't that great, so we expect to get cable just for local channels and a satellite dish for more complete viewing; the Net4Home people will pre-position a connector box with coax up on the roofline. Pretty cool.

The back yard is kind of small, which suits us; we're not exactly the hearty outdoor types. It does, however, have enough room for a hot tub. We're thinking about it.