Hayward here (though now we're retired we spend a lot of time in Baja - no veggies there - just cactus!) First year garden at this location. I was late getting started because I had to till, bring in soil amendments, till, bring in sand and till some more - still not totally happy with the soil, but ran out of patience. First seedlings didn't get planted out until May 10th - but I ate my first squash yesterday (had to borrow a male flower from my neighbor to pollinate it)and will have bush beans and beet tops within a week. Tomatoes (17 varieties, 22 plants)are full of blossoms and seem to be setting fruit, as are the various cukes, peppers and eggplants. Snap peas are flowering, as are the potatoes (will pinch them off tomorrow), green onions are over a foot tall and Elephant garlic is similar. Have various lettuces growing in a Flowerhouse Seedhouse, along with some Chinese Cabbage. Multiple melons, mostly musk type, went in the ground today. Gonna try to train the little devils to climb - the cukes caught on quite quickly. Winter squash (Dumpling, Delicata, Spaghetti & Butternut) goes in tomorrow. So far the only 'dud' was the English Peas, they went in right before the 3 day heatwave last month and got crisped - got about 3 peas off each vine and they never got above 6 inches tall. Of course, since then we have had no heat at all and cold winds every day (which is why the melons only just graduated from the Seedhouse). From here on, it's just a daily battle between me and the multitude of bugs that want to beat me to the harvest and I am determined they will not win!

As far as water hardness, it depends where in the Bay area you live. If you are in San Francisco or south til about Palo Alto, your water mainly comes from Hetch Hetchy and is pretty pure and soft. If you're just south of there like me or beyond including San Jose and Silicon Valley, much of your water can come from groundwater sources and is pretty hard. I just put in a water softener last week - they seem uncommon for this area even though water can be fairly hard, but I learned about them visiting my parents in Las Vegas where the water is very hard. With zero hardness I may even try doing without rinse aid altogether. Our friends were admiring one family's brand new Miele from a just-completed kitchen remodel. One couple with a Bosch weren't happy with the (lack of) condensing drying on their plastics, and admired that the new Miele pops open the door automatically to help with the air drying. So amongst our friends, two happy Miele owners and one somewhat dissatisfied Bosch owner. For ourselves, unfortunately we had a top-end Maytag carried over from before our own remodel - it is a fairly mediocre performer but just refuses to die (even when it was left in the yard for a year during the remodel). I do hope it does die prematurely, admittedly it mostly works OK as long as I clean out the holes in the spray arms from accumulated gunk about once a year.

Laura, So sorry you are having a tough time finding a CP loan. I do understand what you are going thru since we went thru very similarly hard time finding our CP loan. Next best advice is to lock into an ARM with the lowest possible fees and that will cost you the least in interest during construction, no matter what the final rate is. Then, figure out who you will be using to refi to a Fixed and have them help you keep a VERY close eye on the rate market. If they start to rapidly deteriorate, you can lock into a long lock period for a Fixed rate refinance ... you will go ahead and be underwritten and will close on the refi into a Fixed as soon as your construction is finished. This lender or broker needs to be someone who has access to Mortgage Baked Securities market that they can monitor the movement for you. Rate lock periods can generally be for up to 60 days. Some lenders will allow 90 day locks. Other lenders will allow even longer lock periods with an upfront fee. Keep in mind .. As a general rule, the longer your lock period, the worse the rate at the same origination cost. I.e. If you are paying 1% origination

Also, depending on where in the Bay Area you are (hello East Bay!), your wastewater *does* sometimes go directly into the Bay without treatment when it rains and the wastewater facilities overflow (not that we've had this problem in recent months!) This is one reason the EPA sued the East Bay municipalities a few years back; the settlement of that suit is the reason you now have to replace sewer laterals whenever a home in the area is sold. The utility companies are slowly replacing the century-old combined city sewers, but until that's complete and all of the sewer laterals are in compliance, we'll continue to have the challenge of overflow going untreated into the Bay and other water bodies in heavy rains. Not sure how many other Bay Area communities are in similar situations, but I know San Francisco has a huge sewer repair and replacement program underway for the same reason. Anyway, now that this schpiel is done... ;) We have a three-year-old Miele (bought on closeout right before they switched to their current line) that we've been pretty happy with (caveat: we didn't have a dishwasher before then, so have little basis for comparison!) We ordered it from Universal Appliance and Kitchen Center in Los Angeles--it was the only major purchase we made out of the area, but they had the discontinued model on clearance so it was a $300-$400 cost difference. We use Ecover dishwasher tabs and have been happy with those. Mixed results with Trader Joe's; I also like the Ecover powder but had problems with overfilling, etc. and just decided that the tabs were a better plan overall. I don't think we've tried Seventh Generation, so that might be fine too. Haven't tried the Miele detergent either so I don't know if it's a lot better, but Ecover seems fine to us. Have never had to service it, but I did ask around before we decided to get one and there are several shops in the Oakland/Berkeley area that service them--I imagine this is also the case in other parts of the region. We opted to install it ourselves and purchased it on a credit card that doubled the warranty, as opposed to having Miele install it, which automatically extends your warranty. Figured that if we did need it serviced, that might simplify things. The install was impressively simple. The other big plus to it was that our city waived the California air gap requirement for it because the manual included documentation of how the dishwasher addresses this internally. We didn't see a significant change in our water or electric bills post-remodel, which I took as a good sign since we added both the dishwasher and a range hood. It's pretty quiet (again, no basis for comparison, but we have a small house and when it's running it's barely audible in the adjoining rooms except if water is running into it). We put absolutely everything in and mostly just run it on the normal setting, and it does a pretty solid job most of the time. I do use the pots and pans setting for really caked on stuff, and even then it can't always tackle pots that have been sitting for a while--but that seems reasonable! HTH!