Well you hit on a key item. The plants in the pot with potting soil do better than being directly in your current soil. So you just need to amend the soil. Generally, that will be just adding compost to your yard soil, but you can do more different things also, such as measuring your soil PH conditions, etc For adding the compost part, it is sometimes recommended that you can just add it on top, but in your case, since you don't have other plant growth there that you want to keep and you are interested to do some digging anyway, you can till it into the top 3-4" of your soil (a little deeper also if you want to plant plants with deeper roots) However, I'd suggest to do that this year and go with some casual plants that you don't mind if they die. If this works and your soil can sustain them, then next year, you can try other more permanent plants or perennials. The other part is to ask if this area is really right up against your house, is it getting any bad water from gutters or lack of sunshine from the house blocking the area? Rock gardens or xeriscaping is also becoming more popular, especially with the water restrictions that many homeowners are facing. If you're willing to redo the landscape for that, it's a viable possibility also.

I understand, Seil. More than 25 years ago, I would leave an overhead, oscillating sprinkler going over large areas of my Newhall garden, requesting the community gardening staff to turn them off when they left for the day, on triple digit days. The horse manure mulch disappeared quickly. The foliage was huge, plants even more so, and they flowered amazingly. Water was cheap and plentiful, so not an issue there and then. There were no disease or insect issues. The plants were fully clothed in very dense, durable foliage and there was no such thing as sun scald nor Flat Headed Apple Borers which became great issues once that type of watering had to be discontinued due to availability and cost. Black spot and mites were frequent issues with the own root plants we propagated as volunteers at The Huntington. I learned early when bringing home any new plant such as those to pull off all of the foliage before bringing it into the garden. I had an area in filtered sun under a tree where I kept a pile of horse manure. I'd clump the newly arrived own roots in their pots together, surround and fill between them with the manure, often inside them as mulch, then overhead water until new foliage began developing. No mites, no diseases and the plants exploded into growth quickly. A bit of hardening them off in larger cans and higher levels of heat and light and they were ready for planting once they'd filled the five gallon cans. Growing them up in larger cans also permitted me to move them around to see what position was best to their liking. It often made quite a difference. At the beach, I had a number of customers who regularly used my "proprietary blend" of Ultra Fine and Miracle Grow sprayed every two weeks except between the middle of July through the middle of October. In the Perma Fog, it prevented disease, eliminated the constant aphids and saw flies and kept really terrible things there, like one lady's beloved and hated Paul Neyron, viable. He caught her heart in books and she was determined to grow him. He languished until I suggested the Ultra Fine and MG foliar application. She had severe bronchitis, but made sure she brought me a bouquet of beautiful Paul Neyron from her bush! Used during the heat, that mixture did burn, but when there weren't heat and light intensities to contend with, it worked wonders. NO way I could have ever used it in any garden at home! I tried it once, learned my lesson the hard way right there and then! Anything presented as being even slightly phytotoxic WILL burn here. I am in total agreement with your walking the roses daily. I can't imagine having them unless I wanted to walk them every chance I got. Each has its own personality, likes, dislikes, needs and will quickly let you know if you don't provide them. It's the best way not only to head off problems early, but also to detect sports. They can happen so quickly right in front of you and seemingly behind your back. A big part of the serendipity for me! Kim

Okay, it sounds as if you just want a house with a front elevation that looks very similar to the Southern Living plan but which would have the interior rearranged so significantly that it would be an entirely new plan. If so, your local architect would only be using the image of the Southern Living plan as "inspiration" for the front elevation and would probably not be infringing copyright - unless he made the front of the house look identical to the SL plan. So maybe you don't really need to purchase a license to the SL plan after all. But it sounds as if your local architect doesn't "get it" even after seeing your inspiration picture. Perhaps you need a different architect. Or is is possible that the room arrangement you want simply won't fit into a farmhouse with a tall narrow front elevation (which is a good part of the charm of the SL plan). If you want a house that is tooooooo big, or you want too many rooms facing either the front or the back views, then your architect probably keeps winding up with something that is broader than it is tall... and therefore cannot possibly be made to look like the elevation you picture. I had a friend who once insisted that she wanted a nice compact basically rectangular one-story "cottage." But then she started describing all the rooms that just had to have a view of the lake on one side of her property and it quickly became obvious to me that there was no possible way to meet her desires. Her vision of the interior was just incompatible with her vision of the exterior. Ultimately she wound up building a long thin boom-a-rang shaped home that was mostly one room deep. It looked nothing at all like the "little cottage" she originally THOUGHT she wanted but every major room in the house has a view of that lake and it is a gorgeous home. If your interior floor plan vision isn't totally incompatible with your exterior inspiration picture, there is probably already a farmhouse design out there somewhere that comes close to meeting your needs and, when finished would look similar to the SL plan. Why don't you post your "program" (how many bedrooms? baths? garage bays? master upstairs or down? laundry upstairs or down? open plan kitchen/great room or not? office? media room? playroom?) here on GW? Maybe someone here will know of a perfect or near perfect plan that could be modified more easily than the SL plan. I know that finding the perfect plan is very difficult and when you hire an architect and he doesn't seem to be able to "get it", it can be extremely frustrating. BTDT, so you have my sincere sympathy.

Lots of useful points here, thanks. After doing some measuring, we would up tentatively deciding that we'll put in a 36" sink cabinet. We'd have so little room in a 24" cab around a garbage disposal (assuming same model we have now, and assuming the drain is in the center) that we'd be hard pressed to store trash under the sink. So with a 24" cabinet, we'd probably wind up losing 15" somewhere else to making a dedicated trash pull out. Thus it's actually efficient to just go to the 36" sink base. (The 30" doesn't work as well as 24 and 36 sizes, for various reasons involving window placement and ikea sizing.) If we stay with this decision, it seems we'll have a lot of latitude in selecting a sink size / configuration. I'll almost certainly go ahead and move to a larger sink - the question will be whether to maximize the potential of the large cabinet or keep the sink scaled to down a bit since the kitchen is smallish and the window in front of which the sink will be set is just 30". With the current cabinet choices open to me, my main work areas in the kitchen will be 33" to the right of the sink cabinet base, and 54-61" on the left of it. Plus however much smaller the sink opening is than the 36" span of the base cabinet. A little more prep space is always a good thing, but so is making dirty mixing bowls disappear.