Here I flipped the floorplan. This is America, people get out of their cars on the left, so the door connecting the garage to the house should be on the left. I made the garage wider, 23 x 24 feet. The tiny mudroom connects the garage, front door, and kitchen. I measured the stairs along the round room carefully and found they only occupy 1/6 of the circumference, not 1/4 as I had assumed earlier. This let me eliminate some hallway as well, pushing the laundry and bath right up to the round room. Most of the rooms are bigger here than in earlier plans, and there is less narrow hallway.

What's called the "living room" there I should have called the "round room", and the large odd-shaped room on the other side of the stairs would be the "long room". The stairway next to the bathroom leads down to the basement. The other entrance to that stairway leads up to the second-floor round bedroom plus full bath. The full basement has a round room and full bath too. All the baths are on top of each other. The outside stairway leads up to the roof.

The crosshatched area in the dining room is an opening with 3' walls leading down into the basement. A ladder on the mudroom wall leads to a latched door in the 3' wall, and there is a metal pole next to the ladder to hold onto while you open the door and step out from the ladder. Is such an opening and ladder a good idea? Dunno. I could replace it with closets if it's a bad idea. I could cover it with a board most of the time if it's usually a bad idea but worthwhile as an extra escape route in case of emergencies. (After further thought, I've decided this just looks bad and left it out of future designs. It could be replaced by a trap door in some high-traffic area.)

The long room only has one window (at the back of the house). What to do about lighting? The floor is divided into two sections: (kitchen, dining room, garage, laundry) and (long room, stairway, round room, bedrooms, bathroom), separated by one 5-foot wide hallway lined with closets. I don't like having just one connection between the two, but I don't see any way around it. What furniture will there be, where does it go, and will that make any rooms unacceptably narrow or small? What is the long room good for?