I used to do daycare so all poisonous plants had to kept out of the play area. Totally understandable to me. When you have a bunch of 2 year olds its better to play it safe. I no longer do daycare and my children are older. So I have no problem planting brugs or anything else in all areas of my yard. I dont put them close to the fence by my one neighbor cause they have puppies and I would hate to harm them if they were stupid enough to eat them. My other side of the yard there are no puppies or small children so it is loaded. lol My children are older and they know better. But to know better they have to be tought better and usually that doesnt happen. BTW regarding the drug wars. Kids will learn better with the basic facts. Trying to make it cute or funny doesnt work. When I was a teen the this is your brain and this is your brain on drugs with the egg in the skillet was the big THIS WILL KEEP THEM FROM DOING DRUGS. Lol I know more kids that tried it cause it had to be good if they were making that big of a deal of it. Ok this got long, but the short of it is, if that commercial was more along the lines of you will be nothing with no money and no life when you get older, those kids might have thought twice Carey

I agree on having our kids appreciate what they have. They really don't know how good we've had it! We have 1 incredibly small bathroom we are sharing (that right there has been a growing experience for me - not loving that nor the lack of water pressure - ack). It's an old home - as in no outlets or switches in one of the bedrooms upstairs. They were sharing a room but they've already rearranged. The room without any outlets also doesn't have a heat vent so I don't see my oldest staying in there come winter - but it is also the largest of the 2 rooms. :) We also have no dishwasher and no a/c. Those are basically the comforts that we had that we are now getting used to being without. I keep reminding myself that there is no perfect home and surely there will be things after living with it that we might think are too large, too small or a little off one way or another. Our pantry is pretty sizable - fits our chest freezer which I'm excited about but the doorway is off the kitchen, not IN the kitchen proper. That bugged me for a while but I think it's going to be okay. I was off a bit on my $250k number - dh informed me that it's more like $280k. :( Besides the roofing the other number that came in considerably higher than we thought was lumber. It recently took a jump so that was a bit disappointing. We are hoping to get all of our quotes by the end of the month so we can lock in our I/R before it also takes another jump. We will be doing all priming, painting, laying wood floor, tile, setting cabinets, some trim work, putting stone on fireplace (we have done that before and it's actually a very rewarding project but took way longer than we thought), hardware on doors and cabinets, lighting, ceiling fans. We too will be doing some of those very things you mentioned after the fact. Definitely closets and even the small office we have will be done after we are in. With work schedules and keeping timing on track it may come down to having to hire things out that we originally planned on DIY. We are not moving communities or school districts and are paying rent so time is money to a certain degree. For now though that is what we hope to do in sweat equity. I think you are wise to start working through house plans now. There are certainly many details to ponder. We were hoping to be about 2000 sq feet total for the main and upstairs but ended up at 2400. We don't feel the rooms are excessively large or that we have rarely used rooms so we went ahead with it. I had a few things that I really wanted configured a certain way and made sure they were laid out accordingly. After those boxes were checked I really didn't feel so picky about the rest. Hopefully they will live how I feel they will in my mind! :)

Oh - that is SWEET. Truer words could not be spoken, because they came from the heart!! I love that you posted this. My father always said "smoke follows beauty", and I have repeated this to my kids. Fun to hear someone else say that too!

Be sure to ask questions because you want a good installer. When our carpet was installed, the guys didn't use stretchers and it looked like crap. The company wanted to send the same installers back to fix it. Long story short, it wasn't worth any more aggravation so we cut ties and found a good local guy that fixed their poor install. I've heard carpet padding is more important than the carpet itself. I don't know if I fully believe that but a good base seems to be important of other things. Also really think about what color you're going with. I thought we were picking a 'neutral brown that would work with everything' when it's actually a pinky brown. I'm fine with it now, but couldn't understand why I didn't like the combination of my gold paint with it (orange and yellow clash with pink undertones). So definitely bring samples home - the larger the better.