Is that all the useful wings are under 1 category!

Kitchen, armoury, library...

I love the oven with the kitchen, but I want to show off my spoils and the rare books I've collected

That is a very legitimate complaint, I think. I really wish they'd let the player choose his/her favorite three things, and reshape things as needed to compensate.

I'm actually okay with that general concept of "It must be either this or this" but I don't think "Kitchen" should have been an expansion choice in the first place. It should have been auto-included in all three homes, baking oven included. Especially since there's room for it. For example, can anyone tell me what the point of the room in behind in the fireplace of the main hall is meant to be? I have it fully furnished and I'm looking around and the best I can struggle to come up with is "Um.... office?" It doesn't even look very good. It's just a random assortment of objects that don't really bear any thematic relation to one another and were placed together just to fill the space. Some cupboards, couple of tables, a safe, and a friggin' anvil. The kitchen set-up could have easily gone in this area with the baking oven directly behind the fireplace.

They could have done the houses better if they had let us build one section on top of the other -- Armoury on top of kitchen for example.

What's really annoying about the kitchen option is that there's this absolutely useless room on the back of the great hall that could have been used for the fireplace-ovens in all houses but instead is just used for more storage....

Well, since I need a different container for different stuff (armor, food, weapons, ingots, potions, etc.), that would probably work for me.

Indeed, puting armory and libray in the same spot is evil
I could do without enchanting, because it needs little support and there is already one

I would have prefered a design that allow all 9 wings.
maybe an entry way in each direction that serve as a communication room between each group of 3 wings
I mean, versailles is way bigger than that 8D

I was also upset that the main bedroom was so poorly designed.

the real manors, like in falkreath, always have a vast central hall,
then a hughe master bedroom on one side, and some other room on the other side
(usually the stormclak / empire legion room - but in one case it's an alchemist)
then at the top they got two other rooms, a bit smaller, with a balcony

I think that design was sort of more spacious, and more usefull

I should have been the start for the player house, then add a vast cellar, and a north wing, and some towers or something

another thing that surprised me.
in the creation kit you see they have a potion bookshelves...
which in the end they never used !!!
It would have been nice to make it functional for hearth fires

Do you know where the potions shelves would have been? The only bookshelf they actually left almost vacant was the one in the room behind the main hall, it just has a cup and a flute on it. The book lovers house with the library wing has books on every spare space of those shelves. I could claim that bookshelf for potions in Lakeview Manor, that one is Armory, trophy room and greenhouse with smithing in the cellar, so really no where for potions to be displayed.

Depending on what wing you chose you can end up with a lot of (useless) shelves !!!
(alchemy tower for example)

I wouldn't have guessed the library had stricktly bookshelves for books - LOL
I mean seriously, I wasn't talking about those
Thought with Bethesda, you never know (honeyside for example ...)

If you looked in the creation kit how the actual bookshelves work, they are single shelf countainers that get manually placed on each shelf
That's why, for example, the honeyside bookshelf on the top floor don't have automatic books on its first shelf, but a regular (manual placement) shelf

The potions shelf work the same way

It could allow, for example to make those wall shelf usefull (the single shelf thingy)

Anyway, I do think stuff like that could be fun

certainly more fun than trying to forcibly but a stormcloak officer armor in a large display case ...
only to see it grow wings and pop out
I swear it was immobile when I close the lid
must be one of those necromancers that put some reanimated bones in it

personaly I find sad we didn't get all the wings, or at least a larger more flexible setup,
It's really harsh to choose between library and armory.
and the lack of a kitchen is .... odd

So it does not show which shelves they were trying the potion shelf idea out for? I thought it strange they filled all the shelves up with junk except for the one shelving unit in the back room, which has two actual empty shelves for us to use. Which is why I thought it might have been that one. There are also the two shelves on the back wall. You build an entire house and actually get 4 single shelves in the whole house to use for whatever you want, it had to be a mistake, someone forgot to put the junk on them.


empty
http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j215/aussie500/Skyrim/empty.jpg

books
http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j215/aussie500/Skyrim/books.jpg

potions
http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j215/aussie500/Skyrim/potions.jpg

They made it a potions shelf, you could not put anything else on it, I prefer getting a choice. I will eventually get around to covering the table in potions and bowls as well, although probably someone will sit down and knock them off. The saw and the hook make it an annoying challenge to cover them, and I have yet to test what happens when the house resets, the saw under the books moved slightly, probably they will end up going all over the place.

Agreed. It svcks having to pick and choose over something you want because you cannot put it in one of the other wings. I guess it works more towards the RP players, where they stick to certain roles because they will be less likely hindered by this.

Worked out for me like this since I'm more of a Warrior, so I didn't have to leave anything out that I wanted.

Not necessarily.

What strikes me as odd about this is that the three most "civilian" type rooms to build can't be put all together. You can't make a bedroom, kitchen, and library in the same house, but that's arguably the safest and healthiest setup for your little adopted child to grow up in.

I'm also bothered that they remodeled the base homes from the vanilla game that doesn't provide ovens and rooms for the kids (without removing something else). I honestly hoped that they'd allow you to have a bigger role customizing the player homes in base game to match Hearthfire, so that people still had a lot of incentive to live in the cities too.

Eh, the kitchen trade-off isn't too bad, when you think about it. You still get the cooking pot where you can make plenty of healthy meals for your little adopted child(ren), and if health is a big concern, most of the things you bake in the oven that the kitchen provides are unhealthy sweets anyway. When your sweet tooth starts to ache, you can head over to the closest Inn and purchase what you want to bring home to your family.

...I get your point though.

i wanted to make a mansion or a castle like the one from dawnguard but now as desolate and full of blood and whatnot