Go outside right now and turn on the water. You should have been watering three times per day and not missing a day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are good times to water. Water for 15 minutes each time. Once the grass has been mowed at your mower's highest setting, start to back off on watering. Ultimately you want to water only once a week in the heat of summer. To do that you will need to water for an hour or so to get enough water deep into the soil. In the summer I water once a week for 1-3 hours per zone. The rest of the time I water every other week. Did you roll the seed down? If not go out and walk on every seed you can see. Don't jump up and down on them, just step on them. They need to have good seed-to-surface contact. Walking on them provides the perfect pressure.

This is a serious question; even if most casings fall off, some don't, and they can kill the seedling. On one of the forums, someone posted a method and I used it this spring and it worked perfectly. What you do is spritz the casing and let it soak in for five minutes. Then, you put your finger under the casing and gently flick upwards. The casing should just pop off after a few flicks. If it doesn't, I just left it another day, or even just a couple of hours, and try again. Worked great.

Oh, don't get me started on buying a leather sofa "on the cheap"! I have a disgustingly uncomfortable and obviously NOT true leather "cheap" sofa which my husband convinced me to buy from Sam's Club's internet website. It was also made in China, by the way. It arrived a week ago at 7 p.m. at night and it was not until last Saturday morning we got a good look at it and realized it was just pure junk! It looked so much better online - only $1,200 with shipping and now I have been working with Sam's Club [what a nightmare trying to return something like this to them] to come pick up this sofa because I am returning it and I just want it out of my house. It is bicast leather and call it bicast or "corrected" leather it is not going to last. It also happens to look more like vinyl than leather. I would be replacing this sofa within a couple of years. I have two leather chairs from Lee Industries which are ten years old. They are charming little Paris club chairs. They have taken a beating but they look better each year. They have taken on a patina and I just adore them. I will have them for another ten years. I paid $1,000 for each of them ten years ago - expensive at the time but a great investment. So, I am going to order the $2,400.00 apartment club sofa from Crate and Barrel which I should have ordered to begin with. You get what you pay for. It is real leather and Crate and Barrel has a fantastic warranty. If it does not wear the way it should, they will replace it two years down the road. My friend sent me this link below for leather sofas, which are made from real leather - from a North Carolina furniture mfr. I think they would be nice pieces but I do not want to wait another two months for a sofa. So my recommendation is to bite the bullet and spend the money for a quality piece of furniture which has been made in the USA. You will regret it otherwise. Here is a link that might be useful: Nice, modestly priced leather sofas

"The house has been in his family for many decades and he hasn't even lived there in almost a year." This is your problem, Glassapples. This kind of seller may be one of the hardest to work with, because he/she has no incentive to bargain with you. Owners who have inherited property from parents or family members often have very little, or even zero, costs associated with the house -- especially if Mom & Dad left a bit of cash to cover taxes and repairs. Consequently, they are disinclined to see the disadvantages of the home in realistic terms and are all about making as much pure profit as possible. If you end up in contract with this seller, I think you should be prepared for a tough time. When we were looking to buy two years ago we focused our search in a small city where prices were flat and where there was a good-sized inventory of small, affordable homes from the 1920s - 1960s. What I realize now is that many of these older and smaller homes change hands because the initial sellers die off and no one from the second generation wants to go back and live in their childhood home. Instead, they plan to sell the property off and share the proceeds. The problem seems to be that this type of seller often sees the sale as a windfall, not as a business deal, and they won't budge from the imagined value they've placed on the home. We viewed several properties with 'off-premise' sellers offering horror-homes for nutty prices -- like the one home that was filled with dead flies covering the pink wall-to-wall carpet, or the closets that held porta-potties and molting mink stoles. We saw one -- a small 1 & 1/2 story built in 1935 -- that could have been the right place for us, with some work. The hardwood floor in the liv. room stank of cat pee, however, and the small kitchen hadn't been updated since 1979. The selling agent explained that the husband and wife who raised their family there had both died and the kids were selling it (my heart sank when I discovered Dad's well-worn moccasins tucked in a cubby on the stairway down to the basement... son and daughter had overlooked them when cleaning the house out, along with two truckloads of trash in the basement.) We asked her if they were firm on the price, because it reflected a house of that vintage in top condition, with new appliances, a new roof and nore modern bathrooms -- in other words, about $20,000-30,000 more than the fixer-upper was worth. The agent said no, don't even bother making an offer much below asking -- apparently the house had been listed for three months already and the sellers were 'holding out' for their price. Not long after, we found the house we were looking for, at a very good price, and we live there now. About a year later, I found myself in the same part of town and drove up the hill to see the little Colonial with the shaggy camellias and the old man's moccasins on the stairs. The place looked shabbier than ever. It was empty, and a new agency's "For Rent" sign stood out front in the uncut grass. The moral of this story is: beware of a buyer with nothing to lose and everything to gain. From you. If he/she has got the house you want, then you may willing to deal. But as you yourself have pointed out, so far, you're the only one negotiating.