Pamala...that was deep :oP And in my case quite correct :) I actully feel a connection with the things I add to my home. A lovely little cordial glass can give me as much or more pleasure as an antique piece of jewelry. I love that the things were held in someone's hand a hundred years ago :) and now I get to enjoy them. I've always been this way, from a canning jar to a yellow ware bowl, I just love the joy of old stuff :oP And now I have an excuse to need more...so the hunt continues. And I will say, it's the hunt and kill aspect that makes it so much more fun than if I just walked into a store and said "I'll take that and that and that" to fill spaces verses searching for the perfect silly little thing...which normally I don't find, it finds me :o) I will say, I also have really gotten into the hunt to give away as well! I just gave habitat for humanity enough stuff from this house to fill three truck loads. I love losing the clutter and love that losing it meant it went to help someone else have a home some day or fill a home someday (our habitat store is a nice thrift store and it's a wonderful place to shop). I did the same thing in alaska when we moved into our finished house. It was great to donate a huge heap of very usable stuff that no longer apealed to me or I didn't have a need for anymore. Maybe I have house focused bulemia? Binge and purge syndrome...only instead of food I binge on silly things like antique canning jars LOL

Great thread. I've made many mistakes over the years. When I needed drapes for 5 very tall and wide windows, I thought I would save money by making them myself. I ended up buying 30+ yards of a synthetic moire on sale at a chain fabric store, along with drapery lining, and after making up one panel, found that even with lining, the light coming through the fabric made the color brighter and kind of gaudy. The bolt is still in an upstairs closet, and I found 96" crushed voile panels online that I like very much for about $20 each. Lesson: keep it simple. A couple of years ago, I hired a local designer mainly to help me choose paint colors and advise on accessories/tweaking. In the master bedroom, I had some custom green silk drapes that I never liked that much, and she talked me into spending the money to have them interlined and a printed fabric border added, along with custom shams with the same fabric. I had already spent $2000 on the drapes, and now I spent another $1000, and I still didn't like them. I took them down, and they and the matching euro shams are in the closet in the guest room. I put up natural linen-look semi sheers from target, and I like them better. Lesson: keep it simple, and don't throw good money after bad. We weren't using our formal dining room much, and the same designer suggested moving the dining furniture into one end of our large living room, and making the old dining room into a den and the old den into a home office, which was really needed. Since I wanted to replace the old LR sofa anyway, I moved the den furniture into the living room and had a custom ($$$)sofa made for the new den. It was not a huge space, and we tried to keep the sofa scaled down. When it arrived, the fabric was gorgeous, the style just what I wanted, but the seat depth was so shallow that it was not very comfortable. I had also slipcovered the old den chairs to go with the new sofa ($$). I ended up moving the new sofa to the living room, where it was more appropriate for perching ladies than lounging TV viewers, and now none of the colors I had chosen (with help paid for by the hour) for the LR and new den would work. Plus, the newly slipcovered den chairs (on swivel rocker bases, I love them) don't work that well with the old sofa color. Fortunately, I hadn't painted yet. Lessons: Don't buy furniture without sitting on it. Choose paint colors after you are certain of your fabrics. Don't let your designer talk you into stuff you don't really need. Keep your major pieces fairly neutral. The worst was the master bath update. I had chosen tile for the walls and floor, and the tile vendor gave me a couple of names for the installation. The guy with the higher quote was very highly recommended but I went with the other guy because he said he could also do some other work I needed done. Even though I had a gut feeling I was making a mistake. He did a horrible job on the tile, broke my toilet, and disappeared. I had to buy more wall tile and pay another contractor to replace it, and I'm still stuck with a bad job on the floor. Between the cost of doing the job, redoing the job, and buying a new toilet, I could have had the better contractor do the job, and replaced the vanity and sink as well, and upgraded to a better tile. Lessons: A jack of all trades might be a master of none. Go with your gut. Ask contractors for their license numbers and CHECK IT online with your state to see if it's in effect. I've made more, but these are the recent highlights, LOL. I feel better having confessed them here.

Our intention was to get the questions answered for those who posted yesterday & today...so they don't roll off in a matter of hours. Since we don't know what's going on, we thought this might be a temporary solution until we heard more. If it becomes a long drawn out process, then, yes, we need to move on. However, posting about a finished kitchen or just to mention a new product isn't critical right now...we want to be able to respond to those who are in the middle of problems. If the threads come and go too quickly, then we can't help. I did notice, though, that we're up to Page 5. Whether that means we're rebuilding the pages, I don't know. But it's not just a matter of missing pages, I think it's a matter of missing threads that just happened to reduce the # of pages down to 4 (and now 5). Several of us have noticed that threads that should be in the first 4 pages are missing and there are gaps of hours b/w posts...which we all know is extremely rare on this forum. So, no, this is not a long-term solution, it's a very temporary stop-gap measure to help those who need it most right now. I'd say if we don't hear more positive info by this time tomorrow or know for sure that nothing further is being lost, then we should resume "business as usual".

When I was a young girl working i a large office I loved it when the women walked by and i could sense the special perfume that they wore. Of course a fragrance may be too much for some because smell is the most primitive and intense sense we have. For awhile I had the most boring job in the world, coding page after page of gas meter reading books. I'd fall asleep and the only thing that helped was a splash of water in the face and to reapply some perfume. I never overdid the perfume thing, I am sure. When my husband said he didn't like perfume I gave it up. Imagine this -- about twenty years later he commented on a lovely perfume a friend was wearing!!! This was no attraction, no romance. I wasn't a bit jealous. But at that moment I felt that I had cheated myself out of the pleasure of scent -- for myself!