Great thread. I've made many mistakes over the years. When I needed drapes for 5 very tall and wide windows, I thought I would save money by making them myself. I ended up buying 30+ yards of a synthetic moire on sale at a chain fabric store, along with drapery lining, and after making up one panel, found that even with lining, the light coming through the fabric made the color brighter and kind of gaudy. The bolt is still in an upstairs closet, and I found 96" crushed voile panels online that I like very much for about $20 each. Lesson: keep it simple. A couple of years ago, I hired a local designer mainly to help me choose paint colors and advise on accessories/tweaking. In the master bedroom, I had some custom green silk drapes that I never liked that much, and she talked me into spending the money to have them interlined and a printed fabric border added, along with custom shams with the same fabric. I had already spent $2000 on the drapes, and now I spent another $1000, and I still didn't like them. I took them down, and they and the matching euro shams are in the closet in the guest room. I put up natural linen-look semi sheers from target, and I like them better. Lesson: keep it simple, and don't throw good money after bad. We weren't using our formal dining room much, and the same designer suggested moving the dining furniture into one end of our large living room, and making the old dining room into a den and the old den into a home office, which was really needed. Since I wanted to replace the old LR sofa anyway, I moved the den furniture into the living room and had a custom ($$$)sofa made for the new den. It was not a huge space, and we tried to keep the sofa scaled down. When it arrived, the fabric was gorgeous, the style just what I wanted, but the seat depth was so shallow that it was not very comfortable. I had also slipcovered the old den chairs to go with the new sofa ($$). I ended up moving the new sofa to the living room, where it was more appropriate for perching ladies than lounging TV viewers, and now none of the colors I had chosen (with help paid for by the hour) for the LR and new den would work. Plus, the newly slipcovered den chairs (on swivel rocker bases, I love them) don't work that well with the old sofa color. Fortunately, I hadn't painted yet. Lessons: Don't buy furniture without sitting on it. Choose paint colors after you are certain of your fabrics. Don't let your designer talk you into stuff you don't really need. Keep your major pieces fairly neutral. The worst was the master bath update. I had chosen tile for the walls and floor, and the tile vendor gave me a couple of names for the installation. The guy with the higher quote was very highly recommended but I went with the other guy because he said he could also do some other work I needed done. Even though I had a gut feeling I was making a mistake. He did a horrible job on the tile, broke my toilet, and disappeared. I had to buy more wall tile and pay another contractor to replace it, and I'm still stuck with a bad job on the floor. Between the cost of doing the job, redoing the job, and buying a new toilet, I could have had the better contractor do the job, and replaced the vanity and sink as well, and upgraded to a better tile. Lessons: A jack of all trades might be a master of none. Go with your gut. Ask contractors for their license numbers and CHECK IT online with your state to see if it's in effect. I've made more, but these are the recent highlights, LOL. I feel better having confessed them here.

susan, all of my family (except me) live in Windsor, and they definitely all prefer to shop in Detroit. The prices and sales are often low enough that we still save more money, despite our dollar being worth less. If one only needs a few items that are comparable price in Canada, then residents usually shop locally to boost our own economy. But if we're either doing a larger amount of shopping,or know that what we want is significantly less expensive across the border, then off we go. This goes against my ethics, but sadly, I can't afford to support our local stores if they're charging twice the price. In Windsor, I prefer crossing over to shop after dinner, when the border crossing traffic is less, and it's usually a 10 minute drive across to Detroit. There is a much greater variety to choose from, whether it's at grocery stores or stores like Target. As well, Canadians can make up for our lesser dollar by utilizing savings opportunities that we can't equal over here. Americans can get amazing deals by using coupons, much to our envy! Most Canadian retailers who do offer coupons put stipulations that say things like "Only one coupon per item. Coupons can't be used toward sale or discounted items. No redeeming coupons for cash value. No cash given if coupon exceeds price of item." And it goes on and on, so while Canadians certainly use coupons, we simply can't use them to such great advantage as American shoppers. Yes, we thankfully have Costco in Canada, but the few Sam's Clubs could not compete with Costco here, so they folded and were replaced with more Walmart Supercentres.

This thread is simply amazing. I wish it weren't 7 years old so I could have read it unfolding in real time. I'm here because I'm doing the kind of research @yeonassky asked about to understand the environmental impact and usability/maintenance tradeoffs of various countertops and eventually everything else. I've found a couple of reasonably local cabinet makers. I'm on the email list for a salvage place--I may score something nice due to some rich Seattleite deciding they can't stand to look at their 5-year-old something-or-other for another minute so maybe I'll be able to get used butcherblock or something. We have a kitchen with a truly unusable layout that will require removing and replacing everything to make it work. We bought the house knowing this was the one major change it would need. We downsized to reduce our footprint; we walk/bike/take transit for much of our transportation and own one old, fuel-efficient car for two people and we think about many other aspects of our impact that others mentioned above. This will be the one and only kitchen remodel I ever do and I'll live with this kitchen until they make me stop baking bread and cookies and making soup and carry me out of here, so these are definitely all decisions for the long run. The remodel is intended to make it easier to care for as we get older so I'm thinking about things like smooth cabinet fronts and radiused sink corners so I'm not cleaning gunk out of little tiny places when I'm 92. (I come from a long-lived family.) We'll donate every usable item out of the kitchen in hopes at least some of it gets another life. It's all builder grade and some of the lower cabinetry has rotted out due to careless past owners so it's not awesome but it's not nothing either. One thought for those finding this thread more recently and thinking about the reuse/recycle elements: I'm a member of my neighborhood's Buy Nothing group and it's simply amazing. People give away appliances, cabinets, closet doors, pots and pans, clothing, books, home decor, and on and on--all in the spirit of building a sharing economy and reducing waste. If your area doesn't have one you might consider starting it up. BuyNothing.org for more information. Humans directly helping and being helped by other humans--powerful stuff. It also helped me connect with a couple of people who may become friends; we're new to this area so that's a bonus. I'll add one more element that picks up on the themes that @steph2000, @funkycamper, and @karin_mt in particular touched on (and maybe others): The genuine solutions will be systemic and our individual choices can only do so much. If we reduce waste and carry our own grocery bags and bike to the farmers' market and all the rest and we don't demand real action from our elected officials, we won't get the changes we need. Those systemic changes--including things like zoning changes to allow more multi-family housing and ADUs so we make more efficient use of the land that already has roads and sewers and utilities--will carry some of the same "waaaah, I can't do what I've always done" sting that the individual changes carry. Gotta toughen up, Buttercup. Because without those changes there won't be very many future generations mining our waste out of landfills and cursing our profligacy. The planet is on fire and we're frogs in the warming water. And yes, I still plan to remodel my kitchen and buy some new things to do so. But they won't involve any child labor.

Yes. Your color add-on can come undone if your browser updates and the add-on doesn't or something like that. Or you could have accidentally pressed a hotkey that did something unexpected. It's not highly likely, but it could happen. Something else that is possible is that they could have changed the exact color number of the gray background. As I said, it still shows gray on my tablet, and white on my computer. If they changed the number, it might be on that looks white on your computer, where the other one didn't. Good idea to ask the kids. Worse comes to worst, they can play with the colorizer to put it back the way you like. :)