Hearthfire is a nice plugin. Building my home and see it progressing from a barren land to a fully furnished manor is satisfying, but barring the painful smithings aside, I have little problems with the manors themselves...

• Too many useless containers. There are only, what, 10 categories of items (let's say 20), and in Main hall alone you have more than that. Sacks being the biggest offenders. Then when you purchase the storage room for a nice balcony to actually view the lake, you get absurd amount of useless containers cluttering the place.
  
• Not enough containers that make sense in context. In your master bedroom in Main Hall, you have 2 wardrobes, enough to separate armors and clothing, but for some reason no safe, which for some reason is in the back room downstairs along with a dang anvil. What you do have is a small strongbox guarded by 2 sets of silverware that are ever vigilant protecting the actual strongbox against your crosshair. Beside Arcane Enchanter we get a wardrobe, and beside the Alchemy Lab, we get a satchel and absurd amount of sacks.
  
• Extension choices are too limiting. I'm not talking about how there's only 9 choices or why we can't get balcony-friendly versions for all extensions. I'm talking about how the East and West Wing extension are not interchangeable, considering that they consume the same space, and rotating them 180 degrees might be enough.
  
• The extension rooms are a bit too cramped. Kitchen, for example, is not a place where you can really cook anything if more than one person happens to be there, greenhouse too.
  
• Can't really know what gets built and where. Yeah, there's always the save and reload, but really, do you know where will this "Mounted Goat Head" getas built, when there are 2 of them on the craft list? What about the chests? There are many furnishing options, but there is little detail about what gets built and where, and it's a bit hard to define personal taste when I have to go back and forth saving and reloading.