Glenda, lots of work, but I too love older homes. This one is really special to us and yes it did call out to us. We can't take credit for much of the renovation as the PO did much of the interior work. However, we picked up where he left off when he moved to another old house (in much better repair). When we purchased it there was not one perennial flower in the yard! Tammy, we have 4 "squeaking" wood screen doors! :-) One on each of the porches on the house. I am lucky in that both DH and I are lovers of old homes. natal, doubt there is anything in store for the pink "blob". Maybe, sometime down the road, we may try to remove it but it will be a very tedious job. We did think of painting just the brick on that side of the house as it is not visible from the road, but decided we did not want to do that. Guess we just consider it part of the character of the old house. My only concern with the new color scheme is that it won't blend as nicely with the garden room colors of pink,blue,red and whites. The new colors are an olive green, yellowish gold and rust, historical colors. With the green being the primary color. oceanna, thank you. miracle? nope, just hard work, if we can do it so can others. I am playing around with the idea of blogging, but not sure if I want to commit to the time involved with doing that, or if anyone would want to read it. I have seen many of your "eye candy" posts and have thoroughly enjoyed them. You are a very caring person to spend the amount of time it must take to share all those beautiful pictures! gramma jan, yes, so far it does look like it is unanimous. That surprises me as I thought for sure some would say it was done, and it was time for me to move on. If I would remove it, it would not be until next year. I will finish the 2009 page for this year. Others with opinions? Any "nay" sayers?

Nice website. I especially like the Smoky Mountains/SC trip report. Did you see all of those snakes just walking the boardwalk? If I could make a small suggestion it would be that it might be a good idea to resize your photos to a smaller file size. In photoshop and similar programs, you can do this while keeping the picture the same size and also maintaining quality. We've got a pretty fast internet so it doesnt affect me, but for those on dial-up it could take 20 seconds or longer to download a picture that is 800K.

The most practical way to have the running tally is to use an e-commerce suite installed on the web server. It sets cookies necessary to do what you want. They run about $400 unless you pay a higher monthy hosting bill. Thats why I suggested an experienced web designer/mgr can set this up for you, possibly bypassing the need for added expense. Maybe you can find some cheapo shopping cart scripts or software too by doing a search.

I've got clients using the free space that came with one of their DirecTV subscriptions, and they are (relatively) happy with it. On the (nearly) free hosting packages, often access to expanded features is harshly limited (or services a web server normally provides by "default" are turned off), and more fully featured packages at those same sites are substantialy above industry rates. If (when) you move to a better hosting package, look for something in the $99 a year range with a good feature bundle including PHP, MySQL database, and a variety of pre-configured scripts you can integrate into your site. UNIX based hosting will suit your needs just fine. Many plans in this range will support FrontPage, but I'd suggest staying away from Frontpage in the first place. Using Frontpage (or Express) ties future development of that site to Frontpage software on webservers supporting Frontpage because of all the proprietary junk it crams in. When I inherit a site that was previously developed in Frontpage (or with MS Office products), its often easier for me to paste all the site text into a plaintext editor (to strip the formatting) and then back into new documents, rebuilding the site and all its links and formatting from scratch. That's a lot more labor that my client gets charged for, when using a less obnoxious development program (and Netscape Composer is fine) would ahve let me either cut and pasted directly (preserving the internal links) or just modifying existing pages to incorporate the new "look and feel".