Laundry drain pipes are required to be 2", and you are required to drain the laundry through the use of a standpipe or another indirect method like pumping into a properly plumbed laundry tub. Because of the height requirements of a laundry standpipe, the best location for it is usually directly behind the laundry equipment. A properly sized laundry standpipe would be tall enough that it is usually visible behind the washer. This is dictated by local as well as national codes. The separate standpipe is required. You can't just join a drain line to the main drain. It must be a standpipe with the P-trap in the wall. THis protects you against sewer gas escaping into you home and potentially killing you. So, while a licensed plumber can possibly move your laundry standpipe to a more convenient location behind your washer for you, he will have to remove the drywall in that section to do so, and the standpipe must remain at the current height. A licensed plumber who will pull a permit for the work and have it inspected is your best choice. Flooding your home through an incorrectly installed laundry drain is a very real possibility, and your insurance would probably not pay if the install was not up to code.

blfenton -- IMO people use too much soap, and it gets left in the wash. Softeners just add more goop. The white vinegar gets any remaining soap out. I put 1/4 cup Tide Free in the soap dispenser of my front load and 1/4 cup white vinegar in the 'softener' dispenser. Liquid detergents and 'softeners' have the liquifiers and preservatives common to all liquid soaps and lotions. (Without these, the contents would grow mold and solidify.) These additives can build up in the washer. I don't want to spread goopy 'softener' onto my freshly washed laundry, and I do want to get all the soap out. I think I learned to tear the dryer sheets in half from the KT! I also leave my front load washer's door and dispenser slots open a bit to dry out between uses. You can test for residual soap. Next time you have a load of towels, don't put any soap in the wash water. If you see suds once the agitator starts, that's soap coming out of the towels. A soap-free towel feels soft out of the dryer. One with soap left in it feels stiff, and it won't absorb water well when you dry with it. I do darks last because I pretreat stains with Oxi-Clean. That can be working while I run sheets, then whites. We re-use bathroom towels. We're *clean* when we dry off, and towels dry completely on towel rods in the bathroom. (Two of our rods are directly over floor heat registers. I'd take credit for planning that, but it was just luck.) We do change wash cloths, but dry them before adding them to the laundry basket. If you dump used towels and wash cloths into a hamper, don't they get smelly? I've never washed *every day*, even when DS was living at home. Doing laundry today is such a big *nothing*! I grew up helping my mother with a small capacity wringer washer in a dark basement. We pinned up wash on clotheslines -- in the basement in rainy weather and out in the back yard on a whirligig in good weather. I carried many a load of heavy, wet wash up the basement stairs. (We did have a laundry chute with openings in the kitchen and upstairs bedroom hallway.) "Pre-treating" in those days was scrubbing with Fels-Naptha bar soap on a washboard while your feet froze on the cold, wet basement floor. There was also bluing and starch water -- and tons of ironing. My mother had a mangle for sheets, but there was still plenty of stand up ironing before the easy-care fabrics of today.

I really miss having a prep sink in my current rental and can't fit one in the kitchen in my new digs. In my previous kitchen the prep sink was near the fridge on a counter that served purely as a prep area....large woods chopping counter, with built in slots for knives. The clean-up sink was six feet away on the other side of the kitchen. I used the area to wash and chop fruits and legs, and to cut meat & poultry, and pretty much do everything else to prepare foods before putting it in the oven or on the cooktop (or straight into serving dish if it wasn't being cooked.) The only thing I didn't do on that counter was my baking prep. The one regret ( a rather big one) I had about it is that I did NOT install a disposal in that sink. I really wish I had. Then, I could have just dumped veg peelings, meat scraps, etc. right into the prep sink. As it was I did tote them across the kitchen to the clean up sink. But I would definitely NOT worry about soap and washing dishes in a prep sink. Just dump the scraps in and grind 'em up, and MAYBE give a dish a rinse if it looked like it would drip nasty stuff on the floor getting it to the clean up sink for a proper washing. Remember that a prep sink is often, if not usually a much smaller sink...just large enough to rinse off produce, for example. But it also did make it handy to be able to get a glass of water or dump out a pot of pasta water, when the main sink was otherwise engaged!

Hey Jackie, I have the schedule taped to my garage wall, right by all my all my fertilizers and sprays :). I followed it for all my roses, newly planted or old, and got great results. I've grown to look forward to mixing up a batch of whatever according to the calendar. K&M roses of Mississippi, where I order most of my plants, recommends a similar routine. I posted Ryan's routine because I like his calendar format, but that's two great rose professionals in the humid south doing about the same thing. Sharon, I think it'd be great for the frigid NE too, of course you'd adjust the calendar a bit. Dingo, Yes, Mills Rose Magic is similar to Rosetone. Mills Easy feed is more like the dissolvable MiracleGro, except it also has a bunch of organics, too (fish emulsion, seaweed etc). It smells bad but works great! It does come with a nice tight lid haha. I thought using Urea to jumpstart roses in early spring was interesting too, might try it next spring. One more thing: That list was made in 2013. If anyone plans on spraying miticide, may I recommend a newer treatment called 'Forbid 4F'. It's special in three very important ways: It's known to kill Eriophyid mites, which transmit RRD, while many of the others do not. Mites cannot build resistance to it. It has residual of a month or more. You can buy it economically by the ounce on EBay (we have the booming Cannabis business to thank for its availability, lol). An ounce will last a season or more, unless you have hundreds of plants.