Thanks for the reply guys, with your help, and that of some guys in
rec.woodworking as well, I've rethought the plan. Your responses are
exactly what I needed to hear, whether it would be practical in reality
rather than just on paper. Looks like I'm going to go with 2 doors that
open in the center instead of the large draw, and have them be the sort that
can fold back into the cabinet, pockets or slides, not sure which is the
right term. Then I will have two large pull out shelves instead of a large
drawer and shelf. I'm quite obviously still in the planning stage, so I
appreciate your patience with this building newbie.

Any tips on easy to use software to try and draw this out? I've done it on
the grid paper, to the best of my ability, but I couldn't figure out how to
draw out that the bottom half of the furniture pieces would be 14" deep, and
the top (hutch) pieces would all be 12" deep. I think if I could draw it
out more accurately it would be easier to plan for what size each piece of
wood would need to be cut to, and to plan for how much wood to buy. I tried
on some home planning software, but the program wouldn't allow me to build
my own cabinet (at least not that I could see), and the pre-desgined
cabinets couldn't be adjusted enough to work. Nothing fancy, as this job
will probably do me in for quite some time and I likely won't contemplate
another for a long time.

--
Melissa