beware of the "welcome to my garage look that you can get with a wider driveway and less interruption of the view to the garage that the tree now provides. Also consider more than the stairs. Do you want to get more space out of your small front yard for purposes other than mowing exercise and a foreground to your house? If so, consider a retaining wall or more than one with a walkway and steps incorporated through it. I don't know if this street and/or your personality makes it such that you would want to spend time on that side of the house or not, but you should go through that mental exercise. I don't have a problem with bisecting the lawn to make a walk/stairs that would re-center the attention of the curb view of the house from the driveway to the front door.

I had lots of squash bug eggs on all of my cuke/melon/pumpkin leaves. I'm still hoping for a pumpkin or two for halloween, but it's looking very doubtful. I have hot composted the leaves I've removed, and will hot compost the rest when I remove the plants. I plan on removing all the mulch (bark chips) from the garden and putting them in the front yard flower beds. Of course I plan on being far from here next season and a much bigger SFG than this years learning experience! Good luck next year Jim! Btw, I like the idea of the bird feeder. I drove past a garden last week that was very nice looking in a side yard and had a string of about 20 bird feeders hanging above it.

You could look far back for my posts :) But you'd see that when this happened to me I made them rip it out and pay for someone else to do it. It depends on how big the error was. Tile in the wrong place or just a total botch job install. in the first situation I'd let them redo it. In the second (which was mine) I wasn't going to do it twice with the same idiot. I made them pay for a real installer to fix the problem and redo it as well as buy the tile. And why did I make them pay someone else...cuz once a long time ago I was a nice guy and let an idiot installer do a job over when they did it wrong the first time...and the second...and the third and the FOURTH! I haven't been nice since.

Don't know if this will work for you or not... I have a new $900, HDTV LCD TV and 6 times out of 10 hubby hits something on his Universal remote that messes up the TV and both remotes... The first time it happened it took me all night to get the TV back... I ended up unplugging everything from the electrical outlet, disconnecting the DVD player and VCR, took the batteries out of his remote then just plugged in the TV... It worked fine with my remote, the one that came with the TV... I reconnected the DVD player and that worked fine with my remote... I then reprogram his remote for the TV only and everything worked fine... A few weeks later he pressed the wrong thing again, his remote was blinking and wasn't working and the only thing on mine that worked was the On/Off button... To shorten an even longer story... When it happens now I shut off the TV using the button on the TV, press the TV button on his remote then turn the TV on with either remote... Things work fine until he does it again... lol You may also want to clean the... um... ?. electronic eye ?. the little red thingy that blinks when you press buttons on the remote and the one on the TV... Hubby's niece has to do that a few times a day because of all the animals and kids she has, always a few hairs or sticky stuff on one or both of the red thingies... lol Truth be told I'd much rather have my old 100 pound Sony, that I got used, over 25 years ago to the new 15 pound, $900 Toshiba... Hugs, Rita