PJ,

My dad thinks I've just gone nuts with the airplanes because of my workshop. As you can see, it's not fully painted, and it's not carpeted. When I got the drum set for my kid and myself a couple of months ago, I had to get something to dampen the sound, so I bought a 6x9 carpet pad and that helped. At a Home Depot I found an indoor/outdoor carpet remnant in 12' x 9' for $28 which was perfect for the space between the work tables on the drum end. Then at another Home Depot I found an end of roll remnant that was 12' x 22' in the same color for $58. So now it's sort of carpeted.

When the carpenters were framing the house, they half way finished the stairs on a Friday. I came down to the house, and when I climbed up to the second floor, and walked into the "big" bonus room, I just sat down and couldn't believe what I had designed. It was just staggering. Then I went into my office over the garage, and was just as overwhelmed. It's only 25' x 12' with a knee walled 8' ceiling. What was staggering was that I could stand at the front wall of my office and see 75 feet to the windows over the drum area.

A few weeks later, my dad said that he could easily add another room adjacent to the back bonus room. Since I had made arrangements with the builder for dad to be able to do anything he wanted on site as long as it didn't interfere, we made the decision for him to go ahead. Because I had designed out the tall ceiling in the central family room, we were able to add a 22' x 13' x 8' ceiling room, and still have over 700 sq ft of attic storage. The room is currently used for model storage, raw materials storage, the foam cutting table, and the hot box.

Dad also pulled about 4000' feet of CAT5 cable and 2000' of RG6 TV cable to my specs and it all runs into a closet on the second floor. I've got 2 CAT5 and 1 RG6 on every South wall and also every North wall. So the house is wired almost to the max. The home network was up and running shortly after we moved in.

I hope my future income will allow us to retire in the house, because my wife and kid really love it, and I'm proud of having designed and realizing it. I've been diversifying my knowledge base to try to insure that we can retire here. But you know what's going on in the IT sector.