It's 4 am & I'm up checking the porch. It is 38 with up to 34 mph gusts. The night it happened, I checked them at midnight & everything was fine. I didn't check again until it started to feel really cold in the living room (the dog even gave up her spot on the couch & went to the upstairs hall). There is an unheated basement underneath the porch & the eaves of the house over the top (uninsulated). The only side that gets any heat is sharing a wall with the downstairs bedroom & living room. The ice was really solid & they were frozen together in big clumps. As soon as we get a warm day, I'm moving the potted ones to my friend's basement with the others & hope they will come back from the roots. That will give me a lot more space & if I only try to heat half the porch, it will be easier (oh boy, more plastic). Next year, rigid foam insulation panels. Linda

I'll admit straight off that I've only looked at the drawings and haven't read any feedback. I know you have been working on this for a while and I have seen numerous layouts over the last couple of years and they are always changing. I don't fault you for that as I spent a year looking at online plans before deciding to draw my own plans for our future dream home. I re-visit mine every few months, as we are waiting for the market to recover more in our area before moving forward. I tweak a little here and there but the basis layout of the house has never changed. I don't mean this as a negative dig but it seems that you are not quite sure what you want or where you want it. I did my initial drawings using Microsoft excel. Open a spreadsheet. Click the little box in the upper left hand corner to highlight the entire sheet and change both your rows and columns to the same pixel size. This will give you a true graph paper to work with and then everything you do will then be to scale. Use the border function to draw boxes, copy and paste if you don't like the flow and before you know it you'll have a functional floor plan. As I don't know your room sizes this is a rough beginning. I changed a few things. Swapped the sink and range, added a prep sink to the island and swapped the bath with the outside entry as I would not like a view of the toilet from the front door.

Reading this post just made me text my boyfriend and tell him what a good boyfriend he is and how much I appreciate him. You remind me a lot of me. I'm 31 now, but I dated a slew of guys who were takers while I am a giver. My ex bfs were not as bad as yours, they were actually ok guys who just didn't have it in them to be good boyfriends. I am a social worker and have dated a lot of "fixer uppers", LOL, it's in my nature. I accepted less than I deserved from a relationship hoping they would come around and actually be the kind of boyfriend I really wanted. None of them ever did. Then, I started dating someone completely not "my type". Didn't look the my usual type, didn't act like my usual type, wasn't into the same things as my usualy type, etc. He's the best boyfriend I've ever had, we've been dating a year now. He pays for things when I'm low on cash, he walks my dog so I can sleep in, he made a REAL effort on my birthday and surprised me with something very sweet, he drives over an hour multiple times a week to spend time with me, he tells me all the time how much he appreciates and loves me. I'm not a big Dr. Phil fan, but I've come to rely on something he says all the time: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them!". Your boyfriend is an @ss, pure and simple. He treats you like crap despite all the nice things you do for him. At least if you were his maid and whore you would be getting paid for it! Right now you're doing it for free with no appreciation or reciprocation. Be single and happy and the right guy will come along. It has nothing to do with how attractive or not attractive you are. Actually I've seen a direct correlation with guys who think they are soooo good looking and being shallow pieces of crap. Don't settle for any less than a guy head over heels about you who shows you constantly how much you mean to him. Try dating guys you usually don't, maybe you'll be surprised by what you find!

Something I did in my guest bedroom while waiting for the perfect pieces of art was to get a photo calendar with pictures I like and buy some simple black frames. I had a set of four, looked pretty good. The one I had was Japanese watercolor art. Later, I bought two large beach watercolors. I love the beach and I found having beach pictures in the bedroom very relaxing! I like landscapes, but if you don't, then by all means don't. I had some landscapes in my bedroom, but moody ones. One was a cabin glowing with firelight covered by a huge amount of snow illuminated pink by a sunset. Just the perfect spot I would have liked to be and since the snow made it impossible to get in or out of the place, it just evoked peace and relaxation or me. To a Floridian it might have been a living nightmare, lol. Later it was a little homestead cabin on top of a hill, a woodcut. When I went full on beach in one room, I had the typical tropical desert island scene, which also says relax, no interruptions. Landscapes can be very abstract too, my friend's daughter does very abstract landscapes. I'm not trying to sell her stuff, just including a link because I think she does beautiful work and it's a good example of "out of the box" landscapes. Might be too casual for your taste, but who knows, http://emiliesart.blogspot.com/p/gallery-shop.html I also loved metal wall art, and botanical prints. I would love some kind of sculpture made to look like tree branches, but again, that's just me.