HI Erin! Welcome to the wonderful fun of gardening and also, bless you in your new home! Where are you located? Are you thinking of only planting hostas or are you thinking of having a few other plants in there with them? Some contrast and especially color when the hostas are not blooming makes everything look really nice. Hostas are quite happy to have friends among them. My lot is .1 acre and that includes the house. So I do not not get hundreds of hostas or anything else (except slugs). It is pretty shady from my neighbors' trees though the bed in front of the house is in full sun. That is where daylilies and irises go. But I do have at least 25 cultivars of hostas and am planning some more. The advantage to a small garden is you have to plan what you put in it -- or else be prepared to pull out things to give away so you can make room for new acquisitions. And divisions from your older plants! The fun is, you don't get everything at once that you will ever have. Wait a while and put things in a few at a time (annuals will do to fill in places) and then you can have the pleasure of learning about new species and cultivars and acquiring them as the years go by. You will get different plants, hostas or otherwise, from various sources and they will always remind you of the person who gave it to you, swapped with you, or the trip you took when you bought one or another plant(s). I like to have some color spotted here & there so I use impatiens (I can hear the perennial people groaning) and I also have some Heron's Pirouette perennial begonias---these get about 2.5-3" tall when they bloom and have long lasting scapes ( flower stalks), arching gracefully --- here, from Aug till frost. In May, there is old fashioned bleeding heart -- both white and pink/white. These die back in the heat of summer so the hostas, which are getting big, fill in the bare spots the bleeding hearts left. I have a few liriope here & there because they are OK with dry shade & tree roots, and they are not boring if you only use a couple. You can get them with several shades of variegated foliage, and white or medium or dark blue flowers. And they bloom in very late summer/fall when not much else does, in the shady garden. I live in NJ overlooking the Delaware R just north of Trenton. I use astilbe, too--from white to pink to deep red frothy flowers in late spring and early summer. They are also beautiful with the hostas. Right now there are crocuses that have just opened yesterday (when it was sunny) and there will be squills and grape hyacinths, and daffodils are in the sunnier spots. I don't bother with tulips---though I love them, they are an expensive way to feed deer. I have lily of valley under the Norway spruce tree (which has had its lower branches removed to give sun to the bed under it) this is a rather dry shade bed---however the trunk of the spruce is ringed with Gold Standard hostas that are quite happy. The bed gets compost thrown over it every spring and it has sweet woodruff in there along with the hostas, and little spring bulbs such as crocuses & squills, and bigger ones ie English bluebells. Lily of the valley would like to take over the world, but there is easy way to stop it---dig some out. After it blooms, so you can have the wonderful flowers! I try to always have something blooming somewhere in the yard. It does not have to be a lot, just a bit--some white or pink flowered thing next to a dark leaved hosta brightens the corner. I have scilla Hispanica which is "wood hyacinths" -- you can get them in pink, white or blue, and they are very shade tolerant. They will bloom in May (here) and do very well next to hostas too. When the hosta leaves get bigger, the scilla is dying back for the summer. In our yard we have red shale which breaks down to clay in some parts, and what the locals call "the brown sand" in the other areas. In one little lot! Some kind of interesting geology was going on here a long time ago! We now have dark black soil over both, after years of digging in manure, leaves, & compost. You can ameliorate clay quite a lot with gypsum. We dig our yard's leaves right into our beds, around the plants, in fall. When we make a new bed, which we did a lot of after we got the new septic system, we take three years to do this digging, instead of planting things right away. The soil in those beds is wonderful. We also have a compost bin in the back corner---this is not rocket science and do not let compost hobbyists scare you! All you have to do is make a circle a yard or more across with sturdy wire, and throw in the leaves, weeds, and the non-meat kitchen scraps. Also grass clippings if you do not put weed killer and poisons on the lawn. Kitchen stuff meaning plant material such as peels, rinds, stems, leftover salad or other veggies that waited too long in the fridge to be eaten, and cut up toilet paper rollers. Turn it twice a year and when you turn it, take the well-composted stuff out & use it in your garden. When the ground is warm in summer, we just take the kitchen compost bowl out & dig the stuff right into the garden next to the plants. It breaks down very quickly in summer and the nutrition goes right into the plants. You said you have children---by all means, set aside a place for their own garden! Especially if you can make it in a sunny area. Let them plant veggies (then they will eat them) and make it easy ones such as lettuce and beans. You can grow beans as a little tent to save space. Or you can make a taller "tepee" with poles and leave an opening for the kids to crawl in under the beans. You can take a potato from the farmer's market (the organic stand; it won't have been sprayed with anti-sprouting stuff) and cut it up so the pieces have eyes. Just stick them in the ground a few feet apart. Then the kids can have their own potato plants. Well, you have heard enough from me! Once again, welcome to years & years of great fun!

Nothing on the short pantry wall of your kitchen is going to be a "focal point". The geometry of the kitchen plan is such that the cook-top and hood are the strongest visual element in your kitchen, followed by the sink-window area. FWIW, if looks like the rather narrow aisle way between island and refrigerator is going to be a "choke-point" whenever the refrigerator doors are open. If it were my design, I'd relocate the pantry door, and use the entire pantry wall, floor to ceiling, to build in the refrigerator and perhaps a pull-out pantry unit for immediately needed food stuffs, between the refrigerator and corner of the partition. The cabinetry on the refrigerator wall might be best if it is the height and details of the cabinets on the cook-top wall. I'd use the pantry for bulk items and cleaning equipment. Good luck on your project.

Thanks again for the grounding - and don't apologize for being harsh as it can be good for me to hear. I do feel that I am a peacekeeper way too much at home, but I constantly go back to my own two children and I guess I'm trying to protect them from heated battles in front of them or worse - a divorce. I'm to a point now where I seriously wonder whether a divorce might be better on everyone given the angst involved. @ annkathryn: I realize the stipulations of the 529K. What I would do would be to drop his $12,000 into my younger kids' 529 funds which I started for each basically when they were 1. The idea then would be to stop funding those two accounts for a while and pay my SS the amount per month that would normally go to those two accounts until he reaches the $12K. To add insult to this injury, both SS and my wife feel that's too long a time to get the money and would insist I take it out of savings and pay the savings back over time. Seriously, I look back over this stuff and I say to myself "How is it that I can even consider that I'm NOT in the right here". As right as I may be, my wife is so narrowly focused and impervious to reason that she literally goes haywire when I push these buttons. But this is a stepfamily forum and not a divorce forum so let me throw another question in there. My wife and I had a real blow-out this morning over the SS again because now her contention is that her SS is the way he is because I have been a failure as a father to him. She'll admit I was great to him up until he started failing college, but from there I've not been his buddy like she would have hoped. She wants me to take him golfing, to take him on a trip with me somewhere, and to basically put my arm around him and say, "Hey buddy, what can I do to help you in your life." Without the full-on story with this, fact is I have been the one that has tried to help him map his life, and he doesn't ever seem interested. I WAS the one taking him to court, dealing with lawyers, etc when he's had his recent troubles. But I see the way he acts with the money issues above, I see him flick his cigarette butts around the yard and not care, I see his trash he leaves by the driveway every other day because he does not want it in his car, and I still have his texts demanding the child support money because it is his. Frankly, I have no desire to hang around with a person like that. I guess I should be the better person and try harder to mentor him, but I just feel such anger with the way he feels the world owes him stuff that I find myself uninspired. Am I wrong? Do I need to suck it up and be better about this? Is my wife correct when she tells me that I am failing him? This has even more emphasis today - the day after Father's Day. Stepson said nothing to me the whole day. I know I'm not is bio-dad, but in the past he has thanked me for basically fulfilling the role. Guess I shouldn't feel too bad - he said nothing to his bio-dad either.

Popup, I actually LEFT this site a month ago and just started posting her again today. There is alot of BS you will hear here that isn't at all constructive but rather is a outlet for certain members pathetic hang up's. I only returned because the person who torked me off has been lying low, is under an assumed name or no longer posts here. Either way she said something rather horrendous about my step daughters. Imamommy also started a seperate site for the real supportive STEP MOM'S to join. If you go read my "It's been real but later".....post you'll find a link. Read what was said about my step kids and you'll see the lengths some people will go to in order to get the jab in at the Step Parent. Don't let them run you off from here. I'm back and with a new everyone can kiss my ass attitude:)