Having grown up with paper wasps, I see them somewhat differently. While they leave me alone in the garden, if their nest gets bumped (like in a canoe), they will defend it vigorously, and their stings are really painful. I don't think of them as non-aggressive, but rather as being very aggressive if you give them cause, and willing to leave you alone if you don't. Now mud daubers or dirt daubers have always seemed to me to be much more passive. I've been stung many times over the years by paper wasps, mostly as a child, but never by a mud dauber, even when I was knocking down their nests from doorways, etc. But worst of all are hornets. Oh, my. You do NOT want to bump into a hornet's nest (the ones that look like big paper footballs). Hornets and yellow jackets seem to me to be far more aggressive than the other wasps I'm familiar with. Eeeek. Right after we moved into this house, we had yellow jackets suddenly appearing all over the INSIDE of our windows. We were told they probably had a nest inside the walls and that it could be huge. But they started dying on their own shortly thereafter, and never came back. I was sweeping up piles of yellow jacket bodies for weeks. We were lucky that they expired on their own, I reckon. Might have been a very different story if they had hung around long. Marcia

Well, to add a bathroom, you have to subtract space from somewhere else or make the house bigger. If your target for space reduction is the master bath, then what about pushing the laundry room straight up into where the shower is now? Re-orient the door and re-arrange the fixtures in the new, smaller space. The laundry room might have to shrink to accommodate a decent sized bath, but that could work. If you have to increase the footprint, you could do this by bumping the whole RH wall out even with the master suite bump-out. I would ask: how important is it for your parents to have a bathroom that opens from their room? If the other bedroom is going to be an office, and your daughter's room will be downstairs, is it likely that anyone else will be using the bathroom at the same time? Perhaps, if they live with you (or are you just talking visit?), the 3rd bedroom could be their den, with the chairs and TV, giving them a 2-room suite. Also, the linen closet in the bathroom could be eliminated to make the BR closet bigger.

bleach can damage vinyl and cause it to turn brittle. Try a solution of murphy's oil soap, followed by a damp rag soaked in old fashioned brown/red Lysol solution (available at most hardware stores, the old style disinfectant stuff that you mix with water). That will discourage the mildew from coming back. If the upholstery is textured, you can use a soft brush to scrub.

I've lived next to a tournament bass fisherman. They live to get from fishing hole to fishing hole as fast as possible. They have competitions on their personal boats for getting oomph into the engines. The loud noise and smoke on Sundays while they tuned their engines is one reason why I used to live next to a tournament bass fisherman. Sorry, but those kind of serious fishermen would consider a nice quiet lake like that to be completely out of the question. That's a leisure lake, for the retired sit in the sun on the dock kinda fisherman. Market to them! But those kinda folks want easy access to emergency services, doctors, and hospital access. Chart those 15 minute routes and use that as a selling point. Make a list of local doctors and their specialties. And they want to go grocery shopping close, without having to worry about ending up some place "unsavory". That's where it's going to all fall apart for anyone out of the area considering the home. People use Google Maps second nature these days. They'll check out the whole location without ever leaving their armchairs. Are there any plans by the community to address this unsavory area? Downtown redevelopment? New industries coming to town? Who is taking on that challenge? Without some plan by the community to try to address the reputation of the town, out of towners only have that existing reputation to judge the place by. You're not going to be able to hide it, so find a way to address the problem head on.