Nuts!

How on earth do people who are not technical manage to build houses? Does the actual design come as a surprise when built? Alan and I can read drawings, understand specs, envisage things in 3D - and even so we're finding that we need to build little bits of the proposed design in our house to see how the drawings work... or not, in some instances... Central to the new house was the idea of one big light living space which is kitchen/dining/living. But now we've laid out all the proposed rooms over the weekend, we've concluded that you need a really really big space if you're going to have them all together - otherwise your chips will fall down the back of the sofa. So - do we go back to a separate living room or can Peter-the-architect come up with a large enough single room? Panic-ometer reading was full scale for a bit over the weekend once we established this, but a bit of rational thought has calmed us down somewhat - there WILL be a workable solution, it's just not the one we have on paper in front of us at present... By the way, our working title for the new house was originally Walnut Tree House, imaginatively named for the huge walnut tree on the front boundary. However just about every other house in Tytherley has bagged the walnut - Walnut House, Walnut Lodge, Walnut Tree Cottage etc etc so we had to abandon that. There are also many hazels on the plot so provisionally and appropriately at present the working title has become 'The Nut House'...