Oh, Sandy, that buck story is hilarious. LOL. As for an intercom system, I don't have one of those now, but did when my girls were babies. My dad made it for me. I was always afraid I wouldn't hear them, but they both had great lungs. Once, he rigged up an old school bell to my phone. It's not funny, yet it was, but the reactions of company when the phone rang, would crack you up. A couple of folks were out the door before they realized what it was. I have been able to have the windows open all day the past week, and it is neat to hear all the noises from outside, waterfall included. I have to be careful though, cause sounds like that probably keep my husband up at night. Poor, wonderful guy. The things he will do for me. When I first found out 2 years ago, it rattled me a little, but it is just one of those things that have to be taken in stride. I've been keeping myself up to date on the progress of research into Retinitus Pigmentosa, which is what I have, plus the hearing loss, and things look promising. Will wait and see, and in the meantime, I will walk verryy carefully. A sense of humor helps alot, and I told my daughter, who is 20, that someday she could call me Helen Keller. She said, "Who's that?" I just shook my head and laughed. Gosh, I love those girls. :)

Thanks for your reply, owbist. The Event Viewer had, under errors, a DciVecp service that failed because a file was not found. This has occurred multiple times since around the time of the beeping sound's first occurrence (I am not sure of the exact date/time any more). I did scan the Event Viewer information until I reached the last posted message and that item was the only Error-type of message; a few Warnings sounded lack of Internet connectivity issues and a bunch of Information-al messages (I skipped reading those). The sounds was a long beeping sound, not a clicking sound. It occurred when the Windows was loading and the Windows XP Pro Logo was displayed. The Welcome Screen had not displayed yet. Yes, the PC has a floppy drive but I do not think that is the source of the long sound. None of the components has ever issued that long sound before. Once the PC started making the sound, it continued and the screen looked frozen. There are long and short beeps you say? Hmm. This sounded like a long beep but I seem to remember some additional beeps imbeded. It may have been the short beeps that you are talking about. I am not used to software generated sounds so I will just say no to that question and to the grinding/rubbing sound. By the way, I now have a WD External Hard Drive that I use to back up the PC's internal HDD using Acronis. This unit was added hours after the incident. As mentioned earlier, the Windows XP Pro Logo was on the screen at the time. What I call a "progress bar" was also being displayed as well and it was displaying as usual. The progress bar fills up with blue squares and resets empty to start again. It did this several times, as usual. But on the last display, on the last half an inch or so of the prograess bar, it stopped changing and the sound started. I rebooted using the power on/off button.

We have a two-story open kitchen that we are making a one-story room with a bedroom (master) above. We are also adding a loft / expanding our hallway. So they are putting a new ceiling in the kitchen, and new room upstairs in the area that is now just air.

Jay, thanks for the Green site. I'll have to sit down and take my time going through it. marti8a, that is quite the house. It looks huge! It looks like they have implemented some good ideas, but the absolute true cracker style is very simple compared to that home, in the general style. However, whose to say if those early settlers were still around they wouldn't be trying something new, right? There were a few around with a cupola in the early days, but they don't seem to be common. We were going to put one on the house originally, but they can be hard to maintain and is another area for a potential roof leak. My husband said with the proper vents the house will perform the same as if it had a cupola. Some of the older homes have vents on the gable ends. I can't even imagine having a cupola with windows. I've seen a couple of them on modern versions of a cracker home. For one thing, who would ever want to clean the things? No one. So then you see dirty windows all the time. The other thing is the sun would be beating in and making the house extremely hot. There really isn't a practical way to cover them. Some cupolas do not have windows, but anytime you make a hole in your roof for something...... As people settled here from different areas they gradually brought some other styles with them. There are a few old homes in town that have been restored, and they have a more victorian look. There are also a few southern plantation styles that are old. The most common style still standing here is a two story "I" house with the added addition(s) on the back of the home. They had their kitchens outside the main living area for heat and safety reasons. They also added on as their families grew. The area that we live in is so cool because we can study these homes everytime we go into town or for a ride on back roads. We had a composting toilet in our "little house" (about 400 square feet) that we lived in while we built the main house many moons ago, when we were first married. I love the idea of composting toilets, and would have no problem with one in an outbuilding, but I didn't enjoy having one in my home. I'm not a squeemish person either. It made me feel like I had an outhouse in my house. They also have to be delt with properly or you can end up with odors, flies etc. I didn't get bugs in the house, but sometimes the venting fan froze in the winter and then pee you! The shower we build will most likely have a lip as well because the roll in ones can make a mess. I guess if one of us ever needs a wheelchair we'll have to remodel the shower. Hopefully, it'll never happen. My big thing is no shower door to clean and no shower curtains to deal with either. I'm still feeling really good about my loft. I won't be changing my mind again. Gee, I sure wish all of you were my neighbors. We'd have such a good time! Sandy