I just love this thread!! Jeanne you must come to the holiday forum. It's been a little slow lately but Spring and Easter tables will be wonderful!! I do not have as many inside collections as I used too but have some new things I'm looking for. Number one collection CHRISTMAS decorations. It's the first thing that brought me to the Holiday forum. I love vintage decorations. Shiney bright orniments, nativities and angels. And thanks to the folks over there have started a snow village... small scale because of space. Number two love is depression glass. I do not have alot.. Started collecting sugar and creamers too many years ago!! Havn't bought many lately. I will have to wash them all and take a picture. Number three is charm braclets... I have been looking on ebay and antique shops for vintage ones....and buttons. I need to learn more about vintage buttons. There are several projects I want to do as well as make a bracelet from buttons. And of course anything JUNK!!! Lots of pretty colored glass and things to break... and rusty too!!

Nancy, I keep their compartment doors shut until I see them sitting on top of the house each year. They make it very easy for me because they arrive almost the same day of the month every year. Then I open the doors and they set up housekeeping and I don't think any birds we have will bother them then. They are pretty feisty. But you don't want to let some other bird get into their house and set up houskeeping before they do. Then when they say goodbye and leave I clean out their compartments and shut the doors again until the next year. This year hubby and I left for 2 weeks before they left. The day we returned we were out by the pond and they flew down around us twittering, very obviously saying goodbye. The next day they were gone. It was as though they were waiting for our return to leave. I haven't had any problems so far... We are planning to put up more houses for them next year. Glenda

I'll definitely 2nd the completely separate laundry, I would have liked our laundry room to be a bit bigger for a table but just the fact that if I'm crazy busy and can't do anything but wash the clothes and they stay in there on the floor and I just close the door, it's SOOO nice, greatly reduces the stress that endless laundry brings. We also put our main laundry upstairs with the kids bedroom and added a separate washer/dryer hookup in our master bedroom closet for a small stackable. Our house build I also love that we have a an island big enough for 5 chairs and our breakfast "nook" (which isn't really a nook, it's just in between the kitchen and the family room) is big enough for a dining room table and we can also add a foldable table for when we have large family gatherings. Everyone can be in the same room, which was never possible when we had a formal dining room. We also put in an attic fan or whole house fan. It's great for energy savings if you want to reduce your a/c usage. At the end of the day when the kids finally go upstairs to get ready for bed we open the tops of all the windows and turn on the attic fan and it pulls in the cool night air, cooling it down fast. We also put in a full freezer and full freezerless refrigerator in the kitchen, side by side so it looks like one unit. We can fit everything we want and not constantly losing stuff in the back of those super deep fridges. We also had insulation put around our 1/2 bath so that we can't hear people in the bathroom and it really works!! I really, really wish we had done that around our master bedroom so if one of us has to get up early it doesn't wake the other still sleeping. We really like our blue star open burner all cast iron rangetop. We just take off a grate and put in a round bottom wok and we're stir frying. Blue Star is a great price for what you get. The cast iron stays looking better than stainless steel and we love the open burners. I love the layout of our kitchen. The kitchen is mostly used for those quick and easy meals, like cereal, sandwiches, or reheating leftovers. We really thought about that in the design. We open the fridge take everything out and put it on the island right next to it. Then we have the microwave in the island and the pullout trashcan right under where we put things. So it's easy to brush trash and crumbs into the trash and heat stuff up and our sink is close for washing. But for more involved meals we spread out from there which really works if there is more than one person in the kitchen. That's where our sink in the island comes in. We've had 6 or more people in our kitchen preparing food and there was plenty of room. We have a place for a formal dining room but we made it big enough to be a formal living room which is how we use it. I love it, I sit in there for some peace and quiet while the kids are in the family room. It's close enough to keep tabs on what it going on but separate to relax. I could go on, but I linked some pictures to my house we built, we since added some things, like built ins in the family room. I do wish our mudroom was bigger and had a door b/c it needs to be completely functional and it's always messy. I think I would have liked to have a desk in there since that is where mail ends up, oh and a table or something for all those kids crafts that are messy and don't get cleaned up right away.

Gorgeous Strelitzia! Yes, I'm afraid the politics in this state have become decidedly moronic. That is, the more idiotic the proposal, the greater likelihood it will not only be passed into law, it will be "fast-tracked" through so as to give folks the barest of bare minimum of time to react and provide input. These guys and gals are not into that citizen input thing. Oh, except billionaire citizens of primarily other states, with very deep pockets for "their kind of people". +om