We moved into this new home in Sun City, Palm Desert, on October 12, 2003. It is a St. Croix model which was by far the most popular of the thirty odd floor plans available in the Sun City development. Its primary feature was that with a "great room" design it avoided wasting space for a separate living room. The central living area, dining area and kitchen are basically all one big open space. Additionally, the two-car portion of the garage was an extra 4' deep making room for a work bench. The garage was triple wide but the single side was strictly adapted for parking a golf cart. Just in front of the golf cart parking area there was a "hobby room" which basically took up about half of that side of the garage. By the way, all the drawings you see below were done using Microsoft's Visio program.

The below drawings show the floor plan of the house and the design of the backyard area. The house is aproximately 2,100 square feet. As you view the below photos you might want to refer back to this drawing to get your bearings on where things are located.
This shows the front elevation of the house. As you can see, it features an "all rock" landscape. The interior patio area (behind the gate) features a Spanish style water fountain. This view also shows the small half garage door used for our golf cart. The half garage is normal width but the door is not.
The backyard also has a rock-type landscape in addition to a very large concrete patio. The fountain is large and dominates the area. The grill and bar were custom built to fit on an angle adjacent to the support pillar. The aluminum lattice cover for the patio has angled lattices that match the angle of the fountain and the grill island. Two years ago we had a mister system installed on the patio cover and along the back edge of the house. The stools are of the same design as the stools used for the kitchen bar.
This is the media area within the great room. The custom wall cabinet was built by a local cabinet shop shortly after we moved in. It is very similar to the wall cabinet design in the model home and was built by the same cabinet shop. Recently we added a 52" Sony lcd HDTV to the wall. Right after that we installed a new Sony Dolby 7.1 AV amplifier and Blu-ray player. Initially we tried it with the traditional four rear speakers but that didn't work very well--perhaps the room is the wrong shape. So we removed the rear speakers and installed two of them into the far left and right sides of the cabinet, thus making it a 5.1 system. One of the below photos shows the location of all the speakers and the sub-woofer. When we bought this house we opted for maple cabinets in the kitchen. This media wall is also maple and the lighter color on it matches the kitchen cabinets. The darker color matches the adjoining dining set.
The dining area is directly adjacent to the media area in the open living space (see above drawing). The dining set pictured is one which we have owned for many years. Of special note, the seat covers have been reupholstered in the same fabric as the window valances. We made the valances using foam bats.
These are six views of the kitchen and bar area. The kitchen includes a breakfast nook inside the bay window area. All the cabinets in the kitchen were part of a "gourmet option" offered by the builder. This primarily meant the inclusion of lots of roll-out shelves in the lower cabinets. The counter tops are Corian and the seat covers on the stools match the fabric on the dining room chairs and valances. The maple wood on the front of the refrigerator was an extravagance.
The first photo below is of the entry way adjacent to the library. If you look at the drawing above you can see how the library opens off the great room through a double wide entry. The cabinetry and book shelves in this room were built by the shop which constructed our media wall and it was done at the same time, shortly after we moved in. The two primary functions of this room are to provide lots of book shelf space and room for two recliners to provide a comfortable place to sit and read. This is the room we normally occupy to read the morning paper.
Moving toward the front of the house adjacent to the library is a very small, 10' X 10' room which the developer called a "hobby" room. We rechristened it our "computer" room. As delivered, the room had a pocket door leading to the library and a regular door leading to the garage. Because we needed all the wall space we could get, we removed the door to the garage and filled in the wall. The cabinetry in this room was built a couple years after the cabinets in the other two rooms and was done by a different cabinet shop. The objective, as shown in the drawing below, was to get the absolute maximum utilization of the room for the two of us. It provides two computer stations and lots of overhead cabinet storage. My brother David helped us concepualize the design.
The guest bedroom is rather small but we managed to cram in a king-sized bed nonetheless. The bed was left over from our last house so we decided we might as well make our guests as comfortable as possible. The huge mirror was also a left over, but not to worry, it is firmly attached to the wall. Opposite the bed in the corner is a new Vizio 24" HDTV mounted to an extension bracket. The only thing this room needs to meet motel standards is a mini-bar and a microwave.
The next six photos are of the master bedroom. This is a very large room so we have functionally divided it into two spaces: a sleeping space and a TV/reading space. The TV/reading space includes two recliners, a substantial amount of book shelves and a corner TV cabinet. The corner cabinet sports a brand new Vizio 37" HDTV and Blu-ray player. The bedroom furniture was brought from our last house and since it was oak everything we bought new for this room was also oak, with one exception. In the corner you can see a chrome storage rack. This was recently added primarily to provide Carolyn with a place to store all her HOA paperwork. The last photo features the armoire we converted to a dressing table. The small table between the two recliners sports a structure made of two old saw horses that my dad made many years ago. I was about to throw them out when I got the idea of turning them into a table support and thus retained this small bit of nostalgia. Most recently we bought new recliners for the room and repainted the table to a more sympathetic color..
Not long after we moved in we made a major investment in garage cabinets from Home Depot. Basically, all the walls in the garage are covered with cabinets of one sort or the other. Our basic theory of garage development is that almost everything has to be mounted off the floor. The only exceptions are things like stools, trash cans and golf bags. The first two photos show the workshop area at the front of the garage. This area was made possible by the garage being an extra four feet deep. As you can see, this is also where we keep our extra freezer and refrigerator. To keep things cool the garage is air conditioned with a two-ton Fujitsu mini-split air conditioner. We run that during the day in summer but turn it off when we go to bed. Over in the corner of the golf cart garage there is an air compressor for pumping up tires, a fifty-foot air hose on a reel and the golf cart battery charger. Lastly, as should be found in every good garage, we have stereo for the workbench and a telephone. Sorry, no garage TV. Most recently we had the floor coated with epoxy and bought a new golf cart..