We're starting to nail down designs. I'm still a little wary about the width of it.  The property is very narrow -- 55 feet. The house will end up being 40 feet wide. That means only 7.5 feet of space on each side before you're on someone else's property. That seems pretty tight.  I am losing 6 foot of the width because we really want to have an outdoor bathroom. The cottage is on a sandy beech at Higgins Lake so we really want kids to be able to go "potty" without having to come inside.

The other peculiarity of the design has to do with the fact that the entrance to the property is much higher than the rest of it -- it's on a hill.  So the garage is on the upper floor causing people to have to go downstairs from the garage.  My concern on that is from a resale point of view: Stairs != friendly to older people. However, that is the situation I'm basically faced with - a cottage designed for a family with children or a cottage designed for retired people.  Since we have 3 small children, we wanted a design that had the action area on the bottom floor -- kitchen, great froom, dining room.  That way, someone wants a snack or a drink, they run in from the beech, open the front sliding door (or go up to the outside bar) and get a drink or some food.  If we had the upper floor be the center of activity, you'd have to run upstairs to get anything.  But like I said, having the downstairs be the center of activity means you have to go down steps from when you arrive.  Once you're inside, you can stay on that bottom floor but the entrance of the cottage could prove tricky.

The goal of it is to get this all built by next Spring so we can actually go up north and use it.