Ooowweeee! You're amazing. Sheila, I must tell you, I value your cd you sent me so much I am saving it. I never save anything. If I love it, I use it and enjoy it to the greatest extent. The tide pictures are so so so very special to me I am saving them for the icing on the cake. The house is nearing its finish and I cannot wait to get them printed out big as day (that's Southern for humongous!) and put them up in my grey blue bedroom, sea mist color. Envisioning those walls which look like the water moving (its texture and color) and those prints, I see peace and accomplishment. Right now it's just half finished room that has blue walls. One must be tasteful when choosinng items adorning walls when selling. Your prints and Mama's paintings will be it. You are gonna sell my house if I have to sell it.

Here on the east coast there is one nursery that I would recommend visiting, Sylvan's Nursery in Westport, MA. They have hundreds of conifers and specialize in "landscape size" trees and shrubs although they have huge supplies of small affordable plants. They have several "farms" and cover a total of 350 acres or so. They are mostly wholesale but if you sign in and sign out (I guess in case you get lost) they let you roam around the greenhouses and grounds; they'll even drive you in a golf cart. I don't know why they even let me in there as I have seen professionals buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of premium stock. They do, and they are always very friendly and treat me just as well with my $60 purchase as the guy next to me shelling out thousands; of course the mark-up is higher with me (5% discount for cash though). Prices for the premium stuff is premium and the smaller stuff is higher than the box stores, but they no doubt probably have what you want, when you want it and the size you want at a fair price. Anyway, it is worth the trip (probably not from Oregon) as they are located along the Westport River and Buzzard's Bay and it is God's country. Don't go at 3 PM as the irrigation goes off (strange, they always say to water in the early AM) no matter what and you will get soaked. Not bad if its hot. I'm jealous of all the great places and choices you have in the Northwest, but thought I would give a plug for some decent people here. Here is a link that might be useful: Sylvan's nursery

Catching up on this post from yesterday… it just gets progressively funnier. Since we’ve bypassed delicacy, I’m not actually concerned about the *need* for an exhaust fan… And I agree that I don’t expect a guest bath to see much use…just the general strangeness of sitting on the sofa chatting with friends, while some one is in the bathroom two feet away. How often that would be a problem? Probably never… like you said, they can go upstairs. Bellsmom-- I’m impressed with your photoshop skills. That looks really nice!! Thank you! There really isn’t another spot for a powder room. We had considered moving it to the other end of the kitchen, where it could be aligned with the fridge and you wouldn’t see it as a boxed-out area, but then it’s really IN the kitchen. And disrupts the whole layout of the area. We’ve gone back and forth on the backdoor. Bumping it out to square the room would be ideal. But it would require adding a foundation, and also removing the concrete and brick stairs that lead directly down to already existing concrete patio. So it’s not just the door… it’s the other twenty things it affects. I wanted to square the room, and put French doors on the right hand wall, but there is a tree there, and adding steps down to ground level would require removing it. I love seeing it out the window, and was unsure I wanted to take it down. The problem with this project is that we are trying to fix someone else’s poor design rather than doing it right. Which may be only marginally easier than starting from scratch. Thank you so much for sharing all your thoughts!! I will upload a photo when we have some kind of mock up of the wall… hopefully it will give us a better idea of how it might look in reality. Bellsmom’s photo kind of looks too good to be true. And I liked the idea of bookshelves, although the wall would probably be better as a sofa wall, since the room is long and narrow and the sofa depth would be better not sticking into the room.

We live in a sever fire zone in the Southern Sierras I have a complete household inventory on zip drives. We update regularly and I do take pictures of every open drawer, cabinet nook and cranny in the house, garage and out buildings. Even with a high deductable I wouldn’t anticipate any problem getting the full value of our content insurance. According to our insurance agent pictures are a great tool along with any documentation. My DD has a copy as does my DGS plus the pictures are on my iPad. A few years ago I made some phone calls and found out I could get copies of purchase history from places like Costco and such, I can go back years on my ordered from Amazon, the same for eBay and I can get copies of back visa bills for I think 5 years. We put everything possible on the Visa card. I keep any important recipes in a safe we have in our grandson’s home out of state along with our personal papers and original trusts I keep copy’s here at home. We have been evacuated several times in the last 30 years we have been very lucky but we know people who last everything and the fireproof safes they had were mostly gone the ones that were intact only has ash inside. I know one person that her insurance company made her list everything with date purchased and cost. I spoke to our State Farm agent and he said some times they will do that and sometimes not. One time a water dropping helicopter came down so close to our house it shook it badly enough to break a water pipe. Our insurance paid for an 11 day stay at the Marriott while everything was fixed the only issue we had was the Marriott was 60 miles down the mountain. All we can do is keep everything cleared around the house, have an evacuation plan and make sure we have everything possible on our insurance policy to cover us. Make sure you have building code upgrades and demolition some policies don’t automatically include them. A safe deposit box in a vault at a bank is great if your bank is not in the fire zone plus anything you have in the box is not insured by the bank and may or may not be covered with your home owners insurance.