I have3 grown a chile for 9 yrs. I have seen tepins in Mexico that were at least 20 years old. All chiles are perennial.

thanks kas, they look a little high tech for my remodel but i sent the wife the site. i'll let her check it out. moose i like the samsung as well and i'm pretty sure thats what i'm gonna go with. i'll look into recessing it but honestly i just wanna get it done. being realistic i know it will eat away at me if i don't recess it. in order to recess it, you cut the area out behind the fridge as you would a door way(header etc.)? i guess you have to cut the sill plate too? any thoughts? i was also thinking of leaving a 1" space between the sheet rock and outside wall to at least put some insulation since it's a bareing wall with the garage.all this after i just finished taping before christmas. john

In our case, our builder was a college grad and former successful accountant. Why he wanted to build houses I'll never know. He would be the perfect no personality, deadpan, humorless accountant, lol. I feel for you nhbaskets because we asked repeatedly for an accounting sheet because that was supposed to be his big advantage having been an accountant in the past. He was going to give us regular updates. When we did finally get it, it was about what we thought but had hoped to be wrong, lol. We put quite a bit of cash in along the way as you are doing to pad the allowances. Such as I wanted to buy my own lighting rather than have the cheapest brass fixtures from local big box stores that are in every other house on the street. Ditto with ceiling fans, faucets, those cosmetic features on the exterior such as trim over and under the windows, exterior lighting. I had to laugh when you talked about the wainscot. I was just getting warmed up on choosing windows and stopped by the house later that week and every window was already in! I was shocked!!! Windows are very important to me because the house we moved from had single pane, ill fitting swollen wood windows that wouldn't open without a body builder's help. They would fall shut. Well, these are the same way though they are double pane. They have those awful pinch in mullions that you can take out to clean the window but they never stay in after that and fall out all the time and then just fall apart. Did I mention that I HATE them? Errr….Some of the things still bug me but life goes on. As it turns out, they cut a swath to a new parkway that I can see from my house now and I almost never have the windows open. So much for my wooded view. I have some french doors that I open for cross ventilation sometimes but it's not peaceful since they put the new road in. Sheesh….it's not right in my backyard but I can see it from a distance and it's amazing how much dust and noise it creates. It must have been badly needed because it is constantly busy! Looking back on it I would say you are correct, communication was the whole thing that was missing. I thought we were going to have the opportunity to choose everything from insulation to roofing materials but that was not to be the case. He was calling himself a custom builder but what he meant was you can choose this color or that but everything else was by "his book". He was getting good rates on materials for buying in bulk and being a good payer of bills which let to a spotless reputation. That did not include customer satisfaction but if you checked on him he would have a spotless reputation as far as honesty and paying his suppliers and his subs. That can not be said of all of them. I can see now why he would consider us such a PITA but we felt just as put out not understanding that we did not actually have much say in the process. This was at the height of the building boom and he had more business than he could handle and besides building our house he was building an entire subdivision that was going to be his true bread and butter. It sort of bugged me that those houses were bigger and more impressive than ours but cheaper in price. But the difference is when you go outside the margins of mass production the price goes up exponentially. He probably got a better deal on the land as well. I feel now that some of the misunderstanding was partly our fault as we were just so naive and with him being a man of few words and not good with social skills, it just was a disaster waiting to happen. The pros are that it's a well built house, the framing is excellent, we have very few nail pops, we've never had a roof leak or a basement leak or any other major problem with anything "knock on wood". So I feel grateful for that, the big stuff was definitely done well. I've changed a lot of the cosmetic things over the years through updating things as needed.

I've always thought that factoring in the "cost of my time" was kind of a specious point. My time costs me nothing. If I am not going to be at work (instead of shopping), since opportunities to work over my regularly scheduled hours aren't necessarity available, then the $s that my time could earn really aren't on the table. In fact, if I wouldn't be spending my time at work, then the time I spend bargain hunting really is bringing in $ (in the form of UNSPENT $) for me. That kitchen above -- if I put that in my inspiration folder, it would not be silly. I am fully aware that that kitchen probably cost several years of my income, and my goal was to spend half a year's income. But, I can copy the look (or at least the major elements) in less expensive materials, be inspired by the color combinations, or lighting, or whatever, and get ideas for the use of spaces. I got the idea for my dog food drawer from someone here who I am sure spent 3x what I did. I may be one who some felt denigrated laminate although I don't recall ever saying it was cheap, tacky, ugly etc, only that I didn't want it. You have to understand that the laminate that I was replacing was chipped, crumbling underneath, cut up and yes, stained despite regular bleaching. I have no idea how old it was (at least 25 years), but I sure didn't want more of it. (and have to confess, I still don't like the look of most of it).