Thanks for the input guys . First question I have to ask all of you is do any of you own or manitain a vari-drive transmission? Also I'll eat ever piece of plastic that you can find in that vari-drive system. The tractor is 4 years old and I have pulled many items including a driveway drag with 4 concrete blocks on top. The only problem that I encountered was some slipping of the belts at low speed. And the case of the 300# roller ,heck I can pull that by hand. I was hopeing someone with a vari-drive encountered the same problem. I will be tearing it down this weekend to check belt alignment ,movable pully ,belt tensioners and adjustment of the pedal linkage.

I mow a 3 acre kennel, a 2 acre shop area, and a 1 acre homesite. I run a Kubota diesel with a 54" belly deck; a 48" ZTR; and a 42" GT. Good: In large areas, the Kubota is much faster, and much cheaper to operate. It will run all day on 2 galls, the gas ZTR will use 5. It cuts better because it really does have faster rotational blade speed. Bad: The Kubota is heavy and will get stuck in the infamous Crosby (sod capital of the world) mud so we can't use it much in the rainy season. Good: The ZTR is extremely nimble and great for areas with lots of trees, etc. It is incredibly fast for smaller areas with lots of turns. Bad: ZTRs are uncontrollable on slippery and / or sloped ground. They are dangerous around ditches, ponds, etc. The problem is that the casters do not provide the stability of wheels. Like a motorcycle, they have only 2 wheels which must do everything: drive, steer, hold a course, etc. If you get in mud, the casters rut in and it is a nightmare to get going again unless you have a tractor to pull them out. Only a gorilla can push a stuck ZTR. I am a big guy but eventually mounted a boat winch on mine. Also, a ZTR is nimble ONLY if you can swing the deck. In corners or tight spots they are treacherous. You must be able to swing the deck ... or else you have to shut it down, get off, lift the deck (keep an 8 foot 4x4 nearby), and move the casters around by hand. Don't bother to carry a water bottle. You cannot use a hand to fend off branches, wipe your face, swat mosquitoes, etc., etc. You must keep both hands on both sticks; they are very sensitive. Good: The 42" twin blade GT works around the pond, ditches, fence corners, etc. I outline everything with it before I fire up the big stuff. It also carries a 50 footlong nylon rope to pull the others out when they are (frequently) stuck in the mud. Bad: Fast it ain't.

For a Mom and Pop farmette, something to haul feed/hay/compost/etc. in is a MUST. Either a full sized truck/suburban and small car for economy or one small truck. That decision would depend on the situation, insurance, extra vet costs for them to come to your place instead of you hauling the cow in, etc. We have 100+ acres and 14 head of cattle along with the usual farm menagerie (goats, sheep, chickens, horse, dogs). We have a one-ton dually diesel truck and have just decided that even all this can't justify the expense of that big of a truck. It was nice when Kenny was selling firewood for a living, but we really just don't need that much truck. So we'll sell it and get something smaller, preferably something older so Kenny can work on it himself. As for tractors, I think a "farmette" could get by quite nicely with a large garden tractor or small farm tractor with a bucket on the front. That bucket sure does come in handy! We have a bobcat with a posthole auger and I can't tell you how much I LOVE that thing! We've been pricing shredder attachments for it. But we don't have a way to plow with it. That's okay with us as we grow mostly in raised beds, but for someone with a market garden it wouldn't be so good. Whatever it is, a bucket on the front is a MUST IMHO ~ easy to fix the driveway, dig a hole to bury an animal, fill that hole back in, flatten the feedlot of all the hoof-holes made after the last rain, stir the compost and much easier to clean out the barn with that than a shovel. And the best part ~ feeding the Longhorns! Ours are pretty docile, but do get excited when you start feeding. With the bobcat, we can just fill the bucket with the breeder cubes, climb up in the caged "cockpit" and head out to the pasture. MUCH less chance of becoming a Kennykabob that way!

I knew a lady who had a 'Formal Room'. Her house was known, locally, as "The Castle", and was a Tudor dating from 1925. Anyway, the 'Formal Room' was a large walk-in closet next to the kitchen, where, when the maids weren't doing anything else, they could go and get a 'Formal' (party dress/evening gown), and "iron-on-it" for awhile. The lady's daddy had owned a beer joint, but she'd been Miss-something-or-other, and had snagged the richest boy around. It was real smart of her to have 'The Formals' where the maids could grab one, when the Lady of the House, or her Daughter, called from upstairs, or from the Country Club, and said, "Vinah! Git me thaaayit blue Dior ready. Wuhrrr goin' ta thuh University Club tanite!", or "Git me up some formals, Queen Esther! Tha inlaws are flyin' us up ta thuh KENtucky Derby." That 'Formal Room', now that you've jogged my memory, was probably the house's original Pantry, and is roughly the size of YOUR pantry. In fact, your house is roughly the same size as 'The Castle'. And its facade seems about as complex and expensive-to-build as 1920s Tudor architecture. Yours is a HUGE, luxurious house, by most people's standards. So, I'm baffled as to why the dining table is relegated to a 13'x13' 'Dining Area' off the Kitchen. I'm guessing you're in someplace like Northern Michigan, where people are very unpretentious. But still, there seem to be a lot of people in your life, and jamming them all into that little space, when food seems rather important in the scheme of things (the well-developed kitchen... the large pantry....) would seem to potentially make for tense and unpleasant meals, when the whole family is together. We recently moved back South, when it turned out we'd taken over another corporation (honestly, I didn't mean to...), and someone was offering us too much money on our almost-complete house outside Portland, and somebody else took our lowball offer on a silly, overgrown "Old-South-Style-Dream-Home" (on considerable acreage, with millions in landscaping and embassy-style electric fencing that we were getting basically for-free). As much as I hate Mississippi, all those tempting numbers made the move back home impossible to resist. So, here we sit. This house had the typical tiny, prissy little Dining Room, just big enough to hold the previous Owner's "Mamaw's (Grandma's) Mahogany Dining Set from Montgomery Ward" (C. 1957). The space was too small. It became my husband's Library. Stretching across the back of "The Gracious Mansion" was some bizarre free-flowing conglomeration of space, that was a den/great room... something... I had that space gutted before I even let my Decorator in the door. Didn't want to give him a cerebral hemorrhage... and it's cheaper to let your design team know the raw dimensions from the get-go. They're going to come in and take measurements, and photograph every stub-up and framing anomaly... So I had studs, sub-floor - tutto - sprayed in white primer, before they arrived. Well, I had sold our Portland house before I was able to use my custom table built for 30. But that table (and a kitchen designed for caterers) turned out to have made the house irresistible to my Best Friend's Daughter, who ONLY entertains formally, and otherwise has meals across the meadow at her Parents' house. I have a history of selling my houses to pairs of surgeons. These particular surgeons, despite their youth, paid cash. Seems they'd each been letting their trust incomes pile-up while they were in residency. Good kids. So, here, in my newly-acquired bargain manse, I wanted the same thing: long table, with three big chandeliers overhead... lots of sconces, mulberry silk shades for really soft lighting... but with a big, long buffet, because this IS the South, and we ALL dine buffet-style. In Portland, caterers and rent-a-butlers are fun people. In Mississippi, they're failed actors and musicians, and are bitter, spiteful little bundles of passive aggression. And anyway, everybody at our table here, even when there are 30, are 'family' in some way, and the Caterers really don't need to overhear whatever schemes we're hatching, or whatever dirt we're dishing. Although we use fancy plates and fancy goblets and Whiting's 'Lily' flatware from 1902, we DON'T DINE FORMALLY. Everybody's too busy, and it's basically an open-house-in-the-Dining-Room: arrive at some approximate hour, grab a plate, leave whenever... But the table seats an easy 30 (three feet for each person), with blazing chandeliers overhead, and my favorite ancestor, a banker from Riga, glowering over everybody, from the center of the longest wall. It's a practical room: brick herringbone floors that can be mopped with strong soaps; fractionally non-parallel walls for better accoustics; embossed velvet 'papering' the walls, for even better accoustics; a tented ceiling where it once 'cathedraled', for soaking-up our family's cacophony; sturdy chairs, and a sturdy table... And "immediate family", for us, can easily fill the room. We totally fill up the room with people, at least once a week. I'm thinking that you're happy 'Yoopers' (or some sort of Central European/Alpine types, in a snowy part of America) with none of our Southern pretensions or obsessions. But still: wouldn't you be able to use an old-style English 'Long Room', with a long, rugged refectory/trestle table (a long, narrow, rustic table), in a more expansive space? A refectory table can be used for reading, computing, etc., when not used for dining. What I see on those plans just seems like the 'kitchenette' in a 1950s tract house... a tract house that just grew and grew. Your house is the size of a MANSION, but the dining area is like a breakfast nook in Levittown.