I have no major complaints about my garden, but I can't stop worrying about global warming, the starving polar bears, the overfished blue fin tuna whose demise will completely upset the ocean ecosystem, dolphins and whales being slaughtered as though they were cockroaches, endless tornadoes laying waste to a third of the country, oil spills, world-wide pesticide overuse, senseless killings everywhere, and I could go on and on. I feel as though I'm living in a relatively untouched island in the sky and that all around me everything is going to hell in a handbasket, and it won't be long before this too is ruined in some way. Floridarose's post made me so frustrated, just another piece of stupidity foisted on humanity by short-sighted and greedy politicians whose palms are probably being greased by the strawberry lobby. I think I'm done now and will proceed to read a cozy mystery where none of those things are ever mentioned. Thank you for allowing me this useless but still somewhat cleansing vent. Misery shared is always better. Ingrid

Annie that really is a bummer, why does something like that always happen when you have something planned. Your kitchen sounds charming, wait till your tile is down I know you'll be as thrilled as I am with mine. It took a while ZZZZZZZZZZZZ but finally the dream of having tiled floors is turning into a reality. The kitchen cupboards are the originals DH built when we added two rooms on, a new kitchen and an extra bedroom. The then kitchen became our dining room, the hinges and drawer pulls on the cupboards were salvaged from a neighbor who was going to throw them out. The counter top I did myself, first I painted it black then sprayed a white fleck tone over it and sealed it with a couple of coats of a water based urethane. The walls in the kitchen, dining room and living room are an off white grey, the kitchen cupboards are one shade darker. The dining room and living room are lath and plaster, they had a lot of damage like poorly filled cracks when we moved in so rather then tear them all down I fixed the cracks and put a rough coat of plaster over the whole works. The walls can't be washed just vacuumed so when they need freshening up I just spray another thin coat of the same color over them. It's a funky little house with an Annette twist on it LOL. I'm a do-it-yourself kind of gal and as long as I'm able I'll keep on plugging along. We heard today they are coming to do the other two floors around the 15th, the new stove should be here on tuesday so hopefully there will be no more snags. It will be nice to have the house back in some kind of order. The trouble is I'll be looking around for the next project to sink my teeth into, I still have those lousey built in shelves in the living room to deal with, DH thinks I've forgotten about that, little does he know LOL. In my hidey hole (a small bedroom) I have an old metal trunk I use for a coffee table, a baker's rack I use as a desk for my computer. I have my own TV and best of all my own remote control :o). There's also Futon a couple of bookcases and storage for my DVD collection. It's a tight squeeze but it works for me. Having this little room is a blessing, the rest of this small house stays almost tidy as DH has the other spare bedroom for all his stuff and we can just shut the doors when company comes a calling. Enough rambling for now, Annette

houses14 - Why did we hire him? Because the ONE thing he turned out to be very good at was talking a good game! He comes across as the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. I called all the references he gave us. Then I found out later that one of the three references was his GIRL FRIEND! Another admitted to me later that the only reason he agreed to give a reference was in order to get the builder to finally come fix punch list items that he'd been waiting over 2 years for! The 3rd was actually a satisfied customer...at the time he gave the reference. But by the time we started doing discovery in my law suit, that customer too was pissed off at builder because he had started having some problems with his house due to some of the shoddy building practices builder had employed. We also talked to a couple of builder's subs before hiring him. Later on we found out that builder had owed them large sums of money and had flat out told them that the only way he'd be able to pay them was if he managed to land another job... so it was in their financial interests to tell me they'd never had any issues with him! When we started having issues ( the second week of the build!), according to builder, the problems were always due to a "misunderstanding" because I had somehow not made myself clear. Builder always promised that HE would make everything right b/c he just wanted me to be happy. Despite problem after problem after problem - none of which ever seemed to actually get resolved to my satisfaction - I continued to believe for quite a while that he wanted to build me the home of my dreams and would eventually do so. It was only after he very clearly lied to me on two separate occasions where there was absolutely no possibility of a misunderstanding that I started insisting that every single communication between us be in writing. Even when we met and talked about something, I started carrying my computer with me and IMMEDIATELY sitting down and writing up exactly what we had agreed to, emailing him a copy to his smart phone and demanding that he read it and sign it if he agreed with it OR that he respond with a revision stating his own understanding before we went any further. That's when it became more and more difficult for him to get me to agree to sign off on additional draws when the work that he claimed was completed really was NOT. Once I was dried up the spigot of easy money, we started getting liens filed against our house by subs and material men. Then builder started claiming that he had more money tied up in our house than we had paid to him - although he could not seem to tell me exactly how much. I told him that if he could show me with DOCUMENTS (receipts and canceled checks) where he had paid out more than he had been given, I would reimburse him every penny of the overage. When he started sending me documents to back up his claim, I called the materialmen and subs and went thru every receipt with a fine tooth comb. Turned out he was sending me bogus documents... eg., receipts for materials that were never put into our house; lien releases from subs who told me that either the signature on the lien release was NOT theirs or that they had signed the release in exchange for a payment check that then bounced so that the release was not valid, and so forth! Builder was only able to reasonably document an amount equal to about 60% of what we'd paid to him in draws...which means that he apparently pocketed close to 40% of the $290K we paid to him. That's over $100K in "profits" taken out UP FRONT on a $540K build that was less than half complete at the time we fired him. Yet he claimed we OWED him money! In answer to your next question about why the builder is not in jail, I talked to the local district attorney about a criminal prosecution for fraud. The DA told me that he had TRIED to bring a criminal case against my builder previously due to the claims of another previous client of his and had failed. According to the DA, builder and his attorney convinced the grand jury that the only thing going on was a contract dispute so it belonged in civil court not criminal court. You should now that Builder is a local boy, son of one of the wealthiest citizens in the area, a deacon in the local church, and - as I said earlier - a very smooth talker. Like us, his previous client who sought to have him prosecuted was a newcomer to the area. Having failed once, the DA was not willing to attempt to prosecute him again. Thus my only option was to go thru the civil court system. And before I could complete that process, builder passed all his assets to his father who put everything into a spendthrift trust leaving builder "judgment proof". Then builder declared bankruptcy.

I hate it when that happens!! Once while I was cleaning my bathroom I smelled something foul but couldn't locate a source. I cleaned EVERYTHING from top to bottom, including all of the cupboards. When I was done it still stank! I went to take a shower and the smell was horrible, I finally traced it to my husbands soap. His mother had it in her pack-rat stock and gave it to him. It was probably 10 years old if it was a day and must have been breaking down. I never would have thought that soap could smell so bad. Ah well, at least the the bathroom was sparkling clean.