I assume since you are attempting to an "authentic" kitchen that you will be closing up that passthrough? And getting rid of your refrigerator? And your granite? And your range vent? And only using your one single light fixture? Because that is all "authentic" to the period that the home was built--IF the home was one that would have been electrified at all, that is. Many homes were still on gas if they were urban or candles or lanterns if they were rural, right up until the mid 1930's when the REC made it their mission to bring electricity into the country homes. Yes, my point is that you're being inconsistent and arbitrary about which modern conveniences you are picking and choosing from to allow into your kitchen to achieve a "correct" look. A lot of things have changed for the better in 100 years and lighting design is certainly one of them! In a small room the size of your kitchen, all that would have been in the home originally would have been a single central light fixture. (And not one as ornate as that in a working room like a kitchen.) That's it. One light fixture. You would not have had 6 other fixtures in that room! It's too small, and that would have been much too expensive for a modest home. You recognize that being correct and choosing one fixture does not provide enough light, but you're unwilling to take the next logical step of working with a modern lighting design. This is one of those places that you can pick to be "correct" and suffer with bad lighting, or you can look at using modern lighting design to achieve less eyestrain and a pleasing visual look. The lighting plan that I gave you will give you enough light to do the work you need to do in the kitchen. You don't care for it, that's fine. But you are operating of some incorrect assumptions on your part when it comes to lighting your home. Please do ask the hundreds of people on here who use chandeliers/pendants over their kitchen islands whether or not they have any tall family members bump their heads on them. Not one will say yes, because not one is placed in the traffic aisle. They are placed over the work surface. Stand at your counter edge and bend forward. Your head goes down it does not remain at 6' and glide across the counter. A pendant over a work surface will work, and well. Or a down light. I stand by my statement that two semi flush lights can provide general room lighting and that adding more similar in function lights at the same level in the ceiling will do nothing to give your good lighting for working in your kitchen. It will give you glare and overkill. Ceiling lighting is not task lighting in a kitchen. You will either suffer from not enough light on your work surfaces, or you will install task lighting such as under cabinet lighting and/or pendants and downlights directly over your work surfaces. Perhaps you should consult with a paid professional lighting designer.

Ok, deep breath. Remember you're spending a lot of money and taking some time to research is part of the process. If I catch myself getting rattled, indecisive or feeling a lot of pressure, sometimes its good to remember that its not a life or death decision. If its not clear, do some more research or just take a week off from doing anything about the kitchen. First point, your carpenter can assemble and install any of them. Don't worry about that. I have Scherrs and they are rock solid. They are better much constructed than ikea. You can get any size of anything and not pay more for it. You order sample doors to see colors. There are a couple of things I wish ikea would improve in their cabinets, but they are likely better than jsi (more below). The cabinet size selection is poor. Their cam locks aren't the greatest, neither is the particle board. If put together and installed well, they should last a long time. Their drawers are fine. You can do something blended by getting scherrs to make the odd cabinets and your drawer fronts, trim pieces and doors for ikea cabinets. They know how. You can have ikea-cherry. From the published information on jsi's site, its impossible to tell how the cabinet is built. So I have just two bits of info to go on. I've seen the insides of a couple of brands of chinese cabinets and they were pretty crappy. The outsides looked nice, but the drawers and cabinet were constructed poorly. These remind me of those, but I could be wrong. You'd lose a lot of potential storage space in drawers because of the frames. Click the picture with the drawer extended and you'll see what I mean - the usable height of the drawer is a little more than half of the height of the drawer front. Also, the "dovetail" drawer only has three pretty chunky dovetails and visible sanding defects. The surrounding doors have stain blotches. This is what they photographed to show you how wonderful they are... Diamond is a problem - they are very pretty and have a large selection of sizes and types. The way the cabinets are made - the dimensions of the pieces and the way they are assembled - isn't very good. So, as an every day quality measure and completely unfair I might add, I've never seen a diamond display intact and I've not seen an ikea built-in cabinet display falling apart. YMMV. hth

I did tell grandma that her and her hubbys involvement means the world to the kids and that we are so happy that they are so involved. I told her what wonderful grandparents we think they are and how much we appreciate all they do for the kids. Grandma told me that she is just ashamed and in disbelief of how her dd turned out. She says her heart aches for the kids and she keeps telling her dd that once the kids are grown you can never get back the chance to make those childhood memories. She says her dd shuts down and refuses to admit fault. Its always someone elses fault or someone is lying, etc. (Just like when she claimed to bring the kids to the waterpark and had not even seen them in months!) The real heart warming part was when grandma said that she is greatful that the children have such a loving and caring person as me in their lives. It made me feel good to hear that, especially coming from someone on the "opposite side" if you will. That had to be hard for her to say so it meant a lot. One of bm's other relatives is still close to dh and I have become close to the relatives wife. She kinda knows all that is going on and she told me the other day that she considers me the only mom the kids have and said they are so much better off with us then they would be with their bm!

You think birds are eating your cauliflower plants? I've never seen that happen (but I'm not saying it won't happen). One easy way to figure out what creature is "stealing" plants is to lightly dust a white powder (I've done it with flour once and diatomaceous earth on another occasion) on the ground around your plants after you've planted them. Obviously this works best on a calm day or evening when the white powder won't blow away. Any small creature that is stealing your plants should leave footprints in the white powder, and from them you ought to be able to figure out if it is a rodent, bird, rabbit, etc. Bird netting placed over PVC hoops is the quick fix to protect plants from birds. I use bird netting at various times to protect plants. I feed the birds all winter, but sometimes they get hungry for something green to eat. My garden is full of birds and, as far as I can tell, they haven't bothered a thing this year, and I've got lettuce plants varying from 4 to 8" tall. Sometimes they pick at the lettuce, but they haven't this year. I am surprised that the stores up there do not have strawberry plants in containers yet. They were in stores here in 3" peat pots from Bonnie Plants around the end of January, or possible even earlier because I think I saw a variety I didn't want in mid-January and just waited a couple more weeks for a variety that I wanted to arrive. Those first rounds of strawberry plants sold out fast, but then they got in new shipments around mid-February, and the good varieties for this region sold out. Then, there was a new shipment this week. I will say that our local stores here saw the warming trend and jumped right on it and now you can buy almost any veggie you want (well, I haven't seen watermelons or winter squash) as transplants in the stores here the last couple of weeks----not just the cool-season crops, but almost all the warm season ones as well--tomatoes, peppers, corn (silly to buy it as transplants and expensive too), cucumbers, summer squash, etc. Of course, we are nearing the end of the time to plant cool-season plants, so naturally the warm-season ones are showing up, but for most of those it still seems early to me. In Sherman, TX, yesterday, I saw hanging baskets with strawberries in them, plants in 3" pots and some larger plants in 4-6" pots. Meanwhile I found my non-gardening hubby circling the containers of strawberry plants in our garden yesterday, trying to find the almost-ripe strawberry because I had sent him a photo of it on Friday. It was in the last container he looked at, and it still isn't fully ripe. I guess when it ripens we will celebrate by cutting it in half and having half a strawberry each to celebrate the arrival of spring in our garden. I have planted strawberries from bare root in the past, and those plants did well for a couple of years, but I like the small plants in peat pots. I do remove the peat pots and not plant them (because we are often dry and the peat pots wick moisture away from the plant roots) but the plants take of fast since they already have a good root system when planted. During the last 4 or 5 years, stores here have begun carrying veggie transplants much earlier than in the past. It is a trend that kind of worries me---because I fear brand-new gardeners will be lured into buying plants that cannot go into the ground as early as the stores have them. Hopefully people do their research and understand when each type of plant can go into the ground and have a reasonable chance of survival before they buy the plants. I'd hate to see people putting tomato plants or pepper plants in the ground during the last week of January or first week of February just because the plants appear in the stores around that time. On the other hand, once soil temperatures reach the right point, and air temperatures are in the right range, I'd plant early if it felt right, but then, I have heavy-duty floating row covers that give 10 degrees of protection so I can take some chances. New gardeners seldom really understand how much our temperatures spike up and down at this time of the year. Case in point? I believe it was on Friday or Saturday a week ago that we hit 82 degrees here, but then about 5 or 6 nights later we hit 26 degrees. The 82 degrees tempts people into planting warm-season stuff early, and then the 26 degrees kills the warm-season plants. Then the stores make more money as people come back to buy replacement plants for the ones that froze. I wish the stores would post recommended planting dates in stores so new gardeners would know when to buy the stuff they see on store shelves, but they're never going to do that because it would hurt their plant sales too much. Oh, and do you have rabbits or other small animals around that might be nibbling your plants? A rabbit got into my garden a year or two ago and went to town nibbling on nasturtium stems. I didn't figure out what was eating the nasturtiums until I actually saw the rabbit. Then, it ran from me and went back out in the same spot where it apparently had entered the garden, which showed me where it had found a way into the garden through the fence. I patched that spot and haven't had a rabbit in there since. Yesterday I found a hole dug under the garden fence, and after searching, I found the spot where the hole came out into the garden. A big hole. It is big enough that a possum, skunk or armadillo could have dug it, but I've never seen them dig a prolonged tunnel that runs several feet underground. I'm going to fill that hole with large rocks today and put soil back on top of it, and then I'll run the cultivator over the tunnel to collapse it. No matter what we do, the critters seem to find a way in if they're hungry enough.