Our foundation isn't below the water table; we're just trying to make sure that the water stays away from the foundation & crawl space. Three directions from our house go very precipitiously downhill, but the the drive, which is bedrock  basalt  comes in from above and funnels down onto the south side the house. Some redirection has been done, but the bedrock is disinclined to be shaped or contoured. It would take quite an event for rainfall to be a real problem, but events do happen. (Basically, we're just trying to follow our stinkin' engineered drainage plan.) But the thing is, it IS right there in our engineered drainage plan. Our builder either blew it off or never looked, and that bothers me more than anything else. As you can tell, we don't know enough to take care of ourselves in this situation, and should barely be allowed out alone. It's a shakey feeling to be dependent upon the kindness of strangers (by which I mean the builder, not y'all.)

"I thought a sink cut-out would be finished without the sink in place, based on a tracing of the sink?" Seamed undermount sinks like this Karran Edge series and solid surface sinks are adhered to the deck after either having cut a rough-out as I did here or plunging through an uncut deck for the bearing to ride on the sink. No one can trace as accurately as a bearing bit on a router.

I did mostly IKEA (island, fridge wall and 4 base cabs on rangetop wall. I'm using a local manufacturer for my extremely custom cabs that Conestoga can't do. The rest including all doors will be from Conestoga. Those poor sample doors have been dropped and abused accidentally so many time and the finishes and mortise tenon has held up. I will be frank that the limitations set by California makes cabinet paints suck. I'm planning to drive to Arizona or Nevada soon just to buy oil based paint. All my recent paint jobs using enamel are chipping while my old oil based paint cabs that are being flung around during all this upheaval only shows dust. I feel like the paint is chipping as soon as I breathe on it.

I purchased a persicaria "painter's pallette" from Lazy S, and it will be arriving this spring. The colorful foliage was a draw, but I bought this particular variety because it is rated down to zone 3, so I'm not worried about its ability to tolerate our Vermont sub-zero temperatures. Most of the other varieties were only rated down to zone 5, so they would never survive here.