Thanks everyone for your input! I like the idea of adding in a color or two into each of the rooms to give them some interest. Because I consider decorating my house kind of a hobby of mine, I want that to be reflected in the actual decor. I don't want people to walk in and say of course her rooms are put together, she only used one color. Does that make any sense? Perhaps I care too much what other people MIGHT think when they come into my home. My husband and my little girl feel at home, thats what matters! But just so you get a better idea of what I am talking about, I will post some pictures after I am feeling better. I have the flu right now and the house doesn't look quite photo-ready!!

Instant milk powder is a larger grain because it's puffed-up with air and is designed to be reconstituted in cold water - hence the INSTANT aspect. Non-instant requires warm/hot water to reconstitute. As Linda pointed out, that was the cause of your mixing problems. If a recipe calls for NON-instant powdered milk and all you have is INSTANT, you need to run the dry instant powder through a blender or food processor to make a fine powder BEFORE you measure it for a substitute for non-instant. There is just too much air in instant milk to use measure-for-measure for non-instant. Important to note... Because of so much air in instant dry milk, you may need as much as 50% more to equal the same amount as non-instant. So choose carefully and figure the amount of reconstituted milk each brand makes. It takes more instant milk than non-instant to make the same amount of milk. In my long history of using dry milk products exclusively (over 28-years) instant non-fat dry milk is rarely a bargain over non-instant because they never make as much reconstituted milk. Brands vary in taste, texture and what works in certain recipes the best, and because of that I keep 5 brands of dry milk and whey-based milk substitutes in storage (instant and non-instant). One brand of instant non-fat dry milk powder has nearly half the weight in a #10 can, and another 2/3 as much as my non-instant whey-based milk substitutes - so you nearly always get half as many servings with instant dry milk products than non-instant. If you are using powdered milk products with young children, you will want to include some dry whole milk products since children require the additional fat for brain development. -Grainlady

-Prep sink. This may be useful in a multi-cook household or a huge kitchen, but I hardly ever used the one I had and it was just once more thing to clean. -Garbage disposal. My worms do a much better job, don't take up electricity and never smell or require cleaning. -Fancy multi-function toaster, oven, rotisserie, pizza, etc. Does nothing well. -Trash can with a motion sensor. Everyone I know who has one has them break in under a year. Mine only took 4 months to break. A foot pedal is much more reliable and a lot cheaper to replace. -Stainless steel sink. What a pain to clean. You can call it patina, butafter a while they don't look clean no matter what you do. (The one in my apartment right now looks positively foul no matter how much Barkeeper's Friend you use.) Of course cast iron will eventually chip and I don't know if the granite composite sinks will stand the test of time -Range-top grill. Only pay for these if you have a bodacious vent system and no way to have an outdoor grill. They are better than the George Foreman-like grills but not a patch on a decent outdoor gas grill or charcoal. ---- As for sink tip-outs... since discovering them I have knocked the front panel off every sink in every home I've rented or owned and installed these. In the bathroom they are perfect for the tweezers and nail files and such. In the kitchen, the sponges, scrubbers, stoppers and the toothbrush you use for cleaning around the faucet plate are neatly hidden away but close at hand. Love 'em!

Well now, that's a good question. All I have are these pix I took when someone showed it to me and asked me what I thought it was. I tried to look closely at the picture and it looks like the leaves more rotate around the stem than are opposite, but I really couldn't say. The stem has some lines going through it which could mean it is square - but again, I can't say from the picture. What plant were you thinking of?