Hello everyone. How is everyone? I have been away from the garden web a long time. Been too busy this year to even think much about my yard. That being said...... I was getting a good chuckle as I read all the posts. You guys are just the greatest on earth and I appreciate you so much!!! But...... Dawn the stickers are not on MY property at all....they are miles and miles away out east of town on my niece's place.She has them in a ditch out by the road. She has been going NUTS over them all summer so as I was speaking on the phone with her last week I just posted the question. Her stickers are not the tiny seed like stick tights but the larger grass burr type. But not goat heads. And they do not make huge plants just small plants which grow profusely along the ground. I told her just what you are saying she should do....use pre-emergent and weed killers until they are gone. Now as to my mystery tree.....it has never produced any kind of "stickers" and when it blooms the blooms are a grape-like cluster of white blooms which hang from one stem....like grapes. That photo of stickers you posted Dawn, do look like some wild plants which tend to come up in our dirt pile out behind my DH's barn. But they are easily pulled up so don't pose much of a problem as long we don't allow any of the trash which comes up there to spread. After looking at the photo and knowing my mystery plant so well after all these years I am sorry to say but my mystery is not solved yet.....ugh.....hahaha. But I don't really mind....it is funny to have a weird plant with no identity and it just gets cut down to the ground each fall. He is still with us for now...but soon he will be gone again. I will miss it if one day it gives up and doesn't come back in the spring....it has been with us for so long. haha Thanks for all the good info...as I said you guys are just wonderful and I so appreciate you. Anyone plan to garden in this cool spell we are about to get? NOT ME! haha Thanks! G.M.

I actually sell a product that is vinyl with a removable adhesive backing. Took more than a year to find the right material and adhesive. Trust me when I tell you there is a humongo range of adhesives. When you purchase wall decals, you really don't know if they were made with the 'good stuff' removable adhesive that really is removable AND repositionable or if it's the cheaper stuff that can leave residue. Good news is even the cheaper adhesives are removable albeit with some elbow grease. So my advice is purchase with caution understanding there are differing qualities of "removable" decals. And NEVER apply a decal to a substrate that is not completely stable.

Old River Cabinets is a custom company like Geppetto is with pricing about the same. Old river does not have a book and is a pain to price on the fly because you have to know every little upcharge that is based in their computer system they only have. Geppetto on the other hand has a book with cabinets every 3" with countless modifcation charges that I can apply to any cabinet to make it what ever size I want as I stated in the original post of modifying depth width or height in any combination. If they do not have a cabinet I can start with I have to fax in what I want and wait for a quote back. 3" increments just gives you an easier way to arrive at an exact cost. I can stack them verticaly, I can join them horizontaly up to 8' long for a custom look when they are installed. I can change the doors add a drawer anything you can think of. I can custom color match the fireplace which we are doing. I can custom color match the door sample which has the perfect color wood she wants which she has looked for 2 years to find. She is very picky when it comes to color. Geppetto will make anything I can dream. They are custom just in a manner that is easier to price as a designer who is not a employee of theirs. My overhead excluding gas is $3,000 a month. This business is about competing with the prices of the next guy. Lowes and Home Depot who's cabinet companies they represent sell approx half of all the cabinets in the US are the largest competition. 50% markups on semi custom products are about what you have to do to compete on price but then you can not compete on being as established as as they are when you are self employed per say. A typical set of semi custom cabinets cost the dealer 4-6k so a mark up would be 2-3k per transaction. Now since most people want to go with the established to big to fail company they will only buy with you if you give them a deal they can not turn down. So you drop your margin to do it if it is possible. Or you have contractors that want to work with you where the end price to customer is close in price to Lowes and Home Depot but they want money the owner is not aware of which makes you cut your margin in half and share it with the contractor. So either way you slice it I sell cabinets for the average kitchen that are all plywood dove tail full overlay soft close full extension for 6k most of the time and make $1,200 if you are lucky! So a custom kitchen which takes about twice as much time to figure out as there are many more ways you can layout the kitchen so you do multiple layouts before you find the perfect one for the customer has 400% more profit in it then the semi custom prices of the big box stores. And according to multiple posts on here the competition in supposed "custom" is 50k and up! Where I would be a total price of half that! I was not trying to make this about me I was more agreeing with the title of the thread of sticker shock shock. I have other people who buy fix and sell condo's and town houses here in the dc area where the cabinets cost me 900 - 1200 and I mark it up the same 50% to stay competitive. That translates to 450 profit. But wait.... that customer comes from a granite company that wants money for referring the business. So when you give them a 15% discount the profit on those kitchens goes to less then 200 including in home delivery costs. The industry forces you to work on percent markups. You spend as much time on a small job like that as you do on a semi custom kitchen which pays 1,200 or a custom one which takes a little longer that I doubled the price like other companies do I would make 25-50k on one kitchen? And people want to say that is the way you stay in business because you have overhead? Sticker Shock Shock. I agree. I must be to practical. I just wanted to give some context to the prices and point out that the orignial poster was correct to be shocked in my opinion and state some facts as to why it is true. Antss is right that it does take money to sustain a showroom. But you do not have to rip off your customer to do it by doubling the price of custom cabinets. How much money do you need to make on one job to stay in business when you are talking about profits upwards of 35k per transaction?

Nancy, I guess I didn't look at my Hobby Lobby ad good enough. I might have zoom on over there sometime this week. I'm going to a crop on Friday (I hope) and get some of my scrapbooking done. Jewels