Suebot - don't think i'm going to tell you anything that somebody else hasn't said, but since i've had too much experience with deer & rabbits, i figured i'd concur with the remedies that worked for me. i used to live/learned to garden on nantucket and martha's vineyard, where the deer are at least as unreasonably tame and probably more abundant than they are in ct. i've heard stories of people standing 10 ft away from them yelling at them while they chomp on their hydrangea flower buds. one woman i was talking to claimed she saw the deer attacking her dalmation!! anyway, my first thought about your original message was are you sure all damage is due to deer and not rabbits? - when they stand on their hind legs, they can eat quite high - on a couple of my client's properties on the islands, i had more problems with bunnies than deer, especially with my daylilies & echinacea. so, i also found success with the deer away spray products; i can't remember which one i used, but i believe it had garlic & mint in it and i actually liked the way it smelled. the directions said to spray every couple of weeks (??), but i found that i had to spray every couple of days or so & definitely after a rain. it was pretty time consuming. unfortunately, my other success was fencing in the gardens. i just tried to be decorative about it - i used nice cedar posts with caps, bird netting @ 4' high (you can't really see it, so the garden still looks nice), i hung rope along the top of the netting (for a nautical look...). I did throw netting on top of the gardens in the spring until things grew too tall, but i have to admit, the deer hopped in a couple of times (- that would've been a mess i kind of would have liked to see). i now live in maine and have a large cutting garden in my back yard, a good distance from my house and i use the bird netting as the fencing (simply because it was the only fencing i could find that would be high enough in one piece) and it works (doesn't handle snow load, though). i see deer in the back and they walk right around the garden. chipmunks are now my problem. unfortunately, my true feeling is that if the deer want to get to something, they will. sorry to be so lengthy, good luck. just out of curiosity, do you have phlox and is it being eaten - that always gets destroyed the worst for me. -mara

Well, I am still here, I spent the day at the doctors offices, and hospital with my son. I did not get home until 6pm, and I was too tried to drive to the coast. I am so glad I was off so that I could be there for my son. I have my car packed and ready to go, I am leaving as soon as I wake up. I have left instructions with my hubby to do a porch check every day when he gets home. He has been given instructions, and he knows what to do in case Santa comes. Barbra,

I would definitely wait until I came back. Brick suppliers are notorious for sending out multiple lot runs of brick for 1 job. There can be huge color variation between lots that you may not notice until you're looking at a giant expanse of wall. We had 3 different lot#s show up in our shipment--only 1 was the same as the brick they had already put down for the foundation. I noticed it and brought it to the GC's attention. The brick supplier apologized and brought out more brick in the correct lot. Our framer was working on a gorgeous house in the town I work in that had a brick lot problem--beautiful large Georgian-Federalist style house. There was a definite line that ran across the front of the house about 2/3 of the way up where you could clearly see a different lot of brick was used--the options were to tear down the wall and start over, live with it as-is, or paint the brick. They now have a beautiful very large Georgian-Federalist style home in a pale yellow color.

Walls. Oh, dear deity, walls. I can remember buying my first home--as a single person, I was looking at condos. My guess is that 99.999% of condos just plunk the kitchen in a corner of the living room, adding a counter/eating bar to create "separation." My agent had a hard time understanding that I wanted a kitchen that was a separate room. Open concept may be great for entertaining or if you have kids. But I am home alone a lot more than I entertain and I don't have kids. What I want is walls to contain the noise of the dishwasher and doors to keep cooking odors contained. The idea of having the kitchen in the living room and the smells and grease getting into my nice furniture is not appealing. And there's the dirty dishes issues, as expressed by lavender lass. There are mornings I don't have time to wash my cereal bowl before dashing out to work. There are days when I eat dinner and just want to collapse. So while the dishes get done promptly most days, some days they don't. And I don't want to curl up in the living room to relax and have those dirty dishes staring at me from across the room, reminding me that I'm being lazy.