It does sound like you have had more than your share of problems with your house. It is not always first houses where this happens, either. We were not in our first house very long before exDH was transferred out of state, but our second house had a few problems. I was giving the dog a bath in the front bathroom when I heard water running under the house. Turns out the drain pipe from this tub emptied into the crawlspace through a big hole in the trap! We later learned that the huge floor furnaces were still hooked up to the gas lines - even though the floor furnaces were now under carpet and padding and we had central heat. My next house was a fixer-upper. I knew that going in. I was single by then. I had an inspection done on the house and some of the faults were pointed out to me - the rotten windowsills and bad gutters, the original gravity furnace with asbestos ducts. I had the furnace replaced before moving in. In cleaning the bathroom, I learned that the shower enclosure was not firmly attached to the walls, and behind it it was very moldy. I pulled it down myself and then had to hire someone to sister new boards into rotten wall framing, kill the mold, and put new walls in the tub surround. I used a cheap wall board as a finish product there because I could not afford ceramic tile at the time. This was all before I moved in. Some of the more obvious problems were noted in the city inspection done before the sale, and the sellers were required to have them fixed. The drip-edge molding where the sill met the foundation was gone, and the fascia boards at the foundation were rotten. They were replaced before the sale. My home inspector said the roof was new. He was right. The shingles were all new, but they were laid on top of the bare roof deck on the back side of the house and on top of two older layers of shingles on the front side of the house. The flashing in the back leaked. We did not find out about that for a few years. I knew the gutters were bad, but not until it rained did I learn that the holes in the gutter were mostly above the front porch. The original concrete porch had been removed at some point and a big wooden porch put on. I did not realize that the old concrete porch was not under the wooden one, or that the concrete porch had been the roof of the root cellar. So when it rained, the gutters leaked onto the porch, where the rain flowed down into the root cellar in the basement, across the basement floor, and into the basement drain! I think it was two years before we (I had remarried) had the money for a new porch. Next we got windows and doors, the year after the porch. The back door going from the garage to the back yard had a crack in it big enough to let the snow in. The window sills on one side of the home were rotted (which I knew going in), and when the new windows were installed, we were able to have the contractor fix the rotted wood in the outer walls there, too. I had some boric acid put into the wall before he closed it up, to kill the carpenter ants there. It helped, but we still saw occasional ants for years. Once the old dying apple tree out back was removed, the ants were gone on that side of the house. I had to replace some rotting wood on the garage before they left for good. I went into this house knowing about some of these problems. My home inspector was really pretty useless in finding these other problems. I have never had a home inspector be THAT helpful with a house. We took about five years to get the house structurally sound, watertight, and comfortable. Our house was 50 years old, though, and I know you did not expect your problems with your newer house. The thing I learned hanging out at the Building a Home and Buying and Selling forums is that the building industry hires people who do not know what they are doing. A ten year-old house should not have the problems yours did, but sometimes they do. If the guy who installed your door knew nothing about proper flashing, it would all rot out, just as you saw. Housekeeping is right in the reply above about not having to fix everything right away. I was up nights worried about the proper sequence for fixing things. It is no fun at all to have more projects to do on your house than you can do or can afford. Eventually, though, you get things done and you begin to like the house. Keep focused on what you liked about it in the first place. Even buyers of new houses have some of these problems. There is one poster on Building a Home who had to have her unfinished home demolished because it rotted to the point of being unfix-able before she even moved in. Just looking at things, no one would ever know to expect these problems. And the home inspectors really don't do enough to ferret them out. You CAN't see some of these problems without tearing off molding or getting into walls. Talk to a lawyer if you want to think about suing. Watch DYI network and subscribe to Handyman magazine. You will learn a lot, I did. We ended up loving our house. I hope you get that back with yours, too.

Usually I read five or six nonfiction books for every one fiction, but here lately I've gone through a spurt of novel reading. Fiction takes so much more effort for me that now I'm ready to kick back and pamper myself for a while with the following: The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, the World's Greatest Traveller by Giles Milton - Sir John is suspected of being one of the biggest travelogue-writing frauds of all time; but was he really? The author attempts to find out by going himself to the places Mandeville claimed to have journeyed through. I just read a bit about Milton going to visit the Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul (Constantinople in Mandeville's time) but he found himself in a seedy part of town and needed directions. Passing an Orthodox Church he stepped inside its door to find a woman in the vestibule. He asked her and after she told him which way to go, Milton asked her if she was a Romioi (a direct descendant of the Roman founders of Constantinople): "No," she said. "I'm Italian. From Bologna." She didn't look Italian, and I asked when she had moved to Istanbul. She paused for a moment, then said: "I think we moved here four centuries ago." If Milton keeps up this sort of thing, I'm going to love this book! The Degaev Affair by Richard Pipes (History, Biography) I'm not well-informed about Russian history, so this bio of an obscure-to-me political terrorist who witnessed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and then directly helped plot the assassination of the chief of Russia's security organization ordinarily would not have attracted me. But I read the back cover anyway, for some reason, and was instantly intrigued because this terrorist, Sergei Degaev, eventually wound up at -- of all places! -- the University of South Dakota as an avuncular mathematics professor known as Alexander Pell. "Jolly little Pell" and his pleasant wife were evidently great favorites of his students, the faculty, and the townspeople. This guy was a terrorist? Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by Steven Mintz The romanticized notions and nostalgia for the halycon days of childhood can be dispensed with quite quickly when we realize that the whole idea of childhood as we think of it only goes back to around the first part of the twentieth century. Even Samuel Clemens who did more than any other American writer of his day to capture the essence of nineteenth-century boyhood was under no illusions that childhood, for the most part, was about one-tenth bliss and nine-tenths pure hell. This overview of the history of American childhood from the 17th century to the beginning of the 21st century looks to be fascinating -- I sure hope so.

Double thumbs up to Lori for sharing a lot of good knowledge on color science. Some of the regional paint companies will have their paint chips organized very similarly because they are part of a trade group that creates the chipsets for them. I'm not sure if Dunn-Edwards is in one of this organizations though. Adrienne, I don't see any harm in trying to get the offending area repainted. It sounds to me like someone used the wrong formula, on that second color, or the database came up with a match and that second formula was used for some reason. I have some insight into the paint side of this. There is a database of tint formulas for all of the colors on the chip racks, as well as a way to match color samples that the customer sends in. Humans usually check these databases to make sure the formulas make sense. The formulas are also optimized to use less expensive tints. 90% of the time, the customer wants some form of white, gray or beige, so the paint is typically tinted with some combination of black, red oxide, yellow oxide, or raw umber. Magenta and gold/medium yellow is typically avoided if possible due to higher cost and lower durability (sadly, brighter organic pigments don't last as well as the oxides).

It all depends on the brush. If it's natural animal hair, it's safe for me to use to dust wood and high gloss finishes. If it's cheap poly fibers or plastic, those brushes will eventually leave scratches and degrade the finish on wood and high gloss surfaces. If the dust is built up over time, more than two weeks, the dust adheres to the surface and needs a dust cloth to break the surface tension between dust and surface. If you don't believe me, vacuum the furniture piece then wipe down the surface with a dark cloth. My natural animal hair brushes. I have this thing about quality, even dusting brushes.