Thanks everyone for the additional suggestions. I've been mulling it all over. Burntplants, I hope termites and bugs aren't a problem. We have the foundation treated twice a year and the siding is vinyl but I will check into this to make sure. I hadn't considered this an issue because the wood mulch was a suggestion from our builder and 2 of our landscapers. You have me concerned however. After some thought, I'm concluding that overhauling the grade isn't a viable option for a couple of reasons. DH is dead set against it and the second one is that I don't think it will end up being a livable space for the reasons karin and almondstriation have mentioned. The long term landscape plan involves a much larger outdoor living space in the area of our yard that is above wall and will be connected by steps to our screened porch. This little add on patio on the lower level would not likely get used much. The outdoor living area on the upper grade will be an expensive project and I hate to devote time and money to a make shift patio that will push back the timeline of the larger project. Clematis is another plant I am adding to the list of plants to try. Almondstriation, thanks for that suggestion. I just pulled a volunteer oak seedling out of there so I know there are some forms of plant life that can survive under there......how would an oak tree look in that space ? :) I was reading the thread on landscaping around garden sculpture and noticed the picture with the two large sphere's and the gel fire fire pit. The area has very little plant material but it is dramatic. I hope my space can achieve that kind of interest but not in a tacky way. I did a photo search for "spheres" on Houzz and saw some examples that have me thinking. I would love to hear some thoughts on this from some of you who work sculpture into your landscape plans.

Looks good, hope you finally get to settle down somewhere. Good luck!

If you want to view the presentation and save photos from it I find that I can do so using OpenOffice. After installing open office (which is free) I find that I can save a PowerPoint presentation to my computer, right click on it and select 'open with' and pick open office and it opens in the impress module of open office. The pictures are in a row on the left and I can select one then right click and copy and paste it into paint or another graphics program and save it into a folder on my computer. I don't know if you can do this with powerpoint viewer or not as I have never used it.

1. Try importing the slides from the PPTX file rather than actually opening it. Click "Insert," then "Slides From Files." Browse to and select your file, then click "Insert All." This might extract the slides from the corrupted file and place them in a fresh file, though the formatting may be lost. Checking the "Keep source formatting" box might help. 2. Try opening the presentation in Word. Open Word and click "Open" in the "File" menu. Use the "Files of type" drop-down menu to select "Recover Text From Any File," then try to open your corrupted PowerPoint file. Again, most of your formatting will probably be lost, but your data will be there. 3. Check for a TMP file. These are temporary copies of recently accessed files. There may or may not be a temporary copy of the file you want, but it's worth a shot. Right-click the "Start" button, then click "Search," and run a search for "*.TMP." The search will return many files, most of them probably with incomprehensible names. Click the "Date Modified" button to sort them according to the last time they were edited and find a file that was created around the time you lost the PowerPoint file. Try to open this in PowerPoint. 4. Try opening the file in a different application that supports the PPTX format. The most prominent of these is the Impress program in the OpenOffice suite, a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. 5. Otherwise you may apply http://www.pptx.openfiletool.com/ PPTX Open File Tool