Helen, I haven't had a chance to call them yet - I'm in the wedding biz and we had a BIG one last night, so I was crazy-busy all week getting ready for it. Thanks for checking - I'll have to do some digging. Patrick, I did a search of eBay and nothing is listed under mitrata. Any chance you could post a link?? Denise in Omaha

Box Elder bugs, probably kind of a misnomer, eat pollen from about any "Acer" plant species, maples, of which the Box Elder is one. They are around all year, are harmless critters and in the fall look around for some warm, cozy place to spend the winter and that is, anymore, our houses. They find their way in though cracks in the protectivce envelope of our houses, the siding, so the best way to keep them out is to carefully inspect the exterior of your house and caulk any and all points of entry since other, less desireable, thingys can use these same cracks, points of entry, to get inside.

If it is uniform it might look ok, (I don't think I would do it) but for some reason, with all of the people that worked on my kitchen, no one realized that the fridge cabinet would stick out about an inch from the soffit until it was installed. It looked terrible. We had the soffit extended about 3" on that wall to make it work. We have 9' ceilings and 24" soffits. We really didn't see any reason to take them out as they have electrical and duct work in there. Ours add visual interest that we liked as well, and we didn't need more storage. Can you post pictures? This probably doesn't help you, but this is after we added it. Will your fridge stick out even farther? We had to make that one 27" to work. Good luck!

And what about the dangerous levels of carbon monoxide? How about venting? And insulation for a "livable space"? What about code requirements? And fire codes for escape routes? Code for electrical? Code for stairs? As Sophie and Patricia point out, this is probably a no-go unless you spend +++ money on all the upgrades to make it "safe". And safe means "to code" for all these requirements.