To Add or Not To Add (house expansion part 1)

My wife and I have lived in our house for nearly 10 years and it has gotten to the point where we are at a crossroads on whether to put the house up for sale, buy an older home and renovate, buy a new/newer home, buy some land and build a new home, or build an addition onto our existing home and continue living in the same place.  Oh where to begin?  
At this time, we have agreed to the addition on our existing house, and we spend countless hours pouring over magazines, websites, etc. gathering ideas and images based on what we believe will make us happy for the years to come. What started as a conversation to add "what I thought" was a nice quaint "sunroom" off the back of our house has now developed into a full blown great room addition with vaulted ceilings and a wood burning fireplace.  Just off of this new "great room" will be a large brick paver patio and then off of the paver patio will sit an in ground pool.  I almost forgot to mention,  we are also wanting to reconfigure our existing kitchen and dining room, add additional cabinetry, buy new appliances and countertops, oh, and we will need to replace all of the flooring throughout too!  Woohoo!!

Having said that, we started the week of 4/22/2013 by getting quotes from 3 different contractors and are currently awaiting the frightening results of said quotes.  I think a cool mil will easily take care of all the expenses, now just to find that money tree with the cool mil!  On a positive note, I consider myself to be pretty handy when it comes to building or renovating so I look forward to getting my hands dirty all while reducing or eliminating some of the contractors pricing.

I will leave this post with one of my favorite pics of our backyard and it may never look like this again...to be continued!