I saw it in my mind when I read your post. Did it have a bunch of white birdhouses on a yellow fence/wall on the front? I bet I have it in the garage in my files...but that is like saying find it on the computer in the next few minutes...I have stacks of saved things...instead of magazines. I did a search on 'birdhouse plaques' and wall birdhouses and Birdhouses to hang on wall and got a lot of pages. And boy did I find some I want to make. Like a TX flag one and an outhouse one and a victorian one. Try some of these links http://www.nenature.com/bird-supplies/birdhouses.htm http://pages.us.com/adsection.php?link=JmJpZGtleXdvcmQ9YmlyZGhvdXNlJmJpZG1hdGNoPWImc291cmNlPUEmcHJvdmtleXdvcmQ9QmlyZCBIb3VzZXM And I found some at Target.com, search birdhouses. I have some on my fence and need to repaint but will take a picture later and post. Anybirdhouse front would be a hint for you. Maybe a picture of your home blow up could be a pattern also.

Lavender or purple will likely be the color of the next CM we put in our yard. I prefer purple, mainly because it should give a more appealing contrast to the blue of the vitex we envision planting next to it. I can understand the interest in pruning to maintain a certain "fill" of foliage and bloom in a certain space. What I don't understand is how that awful, whacked look can be tolerated, even for a moment, while awaiting the return of the next season's growth in that desired look. Not meaning to sound all self-righteous here...it's just my gardening style, to use plants that are suited for the space available to them, instead of filling a space with a plant that has to be pruned to hideous (my opinion) to keep the plant within bounds, even if the view of the whacked look is only temporary. If I put, say, a CM variety with a mature size of 15 feet in a 5-foot space, that would just be too much work for me to keep the plant in bounds every year. I would want a plant with a mature size that fills the 5-foot space. I'm not a crape myrtle expert. But experience and intuition tell me (correctly I believe) a couple of things about the "radical annual pruning" of CMs (just my alternative term for the "murder"): (1) It weakens the plants overall; (2) It possibly deprives the plants and visiting wildlife of mutually beneficial, balanced and natural interaction, and (3) While enabling more concentrated bloom and dense top-growth, it raises risk of losing what might be preferred (a more appealing resultant appearance, that is) to storms or pests because of the naturally weaker new growth. My memory is always "dumping," but I believe I remember seeing some summer storm damage to CMs that were whacked the year before. So all the CMs had for foliage and bloom were the short, weak new branches all clustered together. Maybe I just saw some photos of that damage. Anyway, the damage made them look as if they had never leafed-out and bloomed at all, because all the new growth was torn and bent down, if not torn completely off. Those images, more than any others, swayed me away forever from the "murder" manner of pruning.

Great ideas, great collaboration. Very interesting concepts. The desert straw bale home you posted was a key inspiration picture for us for our "in progress" straw bale home. Some may be interested to find more info about your picture at simple living today. I really compliment you on mastering Sketch up! I gave up. As you say it gives you placeholders, but with straw bale construction and clay plaster you can be so creative with materials like adobe brick and cob. I wish I knew the source of these pictures from Google. Both show thermal mass around a wood burning stove as you propose. The one above is on the funky side of design The next much more sophisticated but two examples of all that straw bale and cob can offer. I know you are in the early design phase and not focusing on details like these yet, but you will have so many options. Enjoy!

A few more updates.. Within the last couple of days, two sapodilla seeds have sprouted, and just today, I saw that two of the Peruvian apple cacti had sprouted, but they were right behind the plant tag, and I didn't see them until moving the tag. I've also got some white pitaya (dragon fruit) seedlings that have been sprouting over the last week or so. I'd all but gave up on many of these things, but I guess there is some hope for things that haven't sprouted so far. Still hoping for some A. Reticulata, A. Squamosa, Mexican cream guavas, purple star apple, blackberry jam fruit, phalsa berries, and jujubes that I'd recently planted (after cracking the shell and soaking in hot water for several days, with several water changes) from a seedling tree I had. So far, I've also had 4 out of the 7 chestnut seeds sprout. So, the final number that will have sprouted will be between 4 and 7. I'll probably propagate them in larger numbers next season, as long as I can verify the type and where they were grown. If nothing else, I could use them as rootstock for grafting. Lastly, I planted out the new unframed no-till (back to Eden) raised bed with two cassava plants and five sweet potato plants. I'll probably go back in after all of this rain and flooding and fill in the area with peanuts as well. It has a higher sand content than any of my other beds.