Culver City has some fun places to eat these days--check out Yelp.com for some ideas. And you can go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It's odd, but it's fun. Also, in Culver City is the former Helms Bakery complex which is now home to a bunch of furniture and decor dealers. H D Buttercup is esp. interesting. http://www.helmsbakerydistrict.com/ And right near there and a good place to eat is Surfas, which is a specialty food and cooking supply place. All the spices, chocolates and cooking tools you'll ever need. Here is a link that might be useful: Museum of Jurassic Technology

The unit is lying on its left side facing, and so if you rotate the photo I posted 90 degrees counterclockwise, it will be in its actual position. I met with the first installer today, and he gave me a good price ($4600) for American Standard unit 3 ton, 13 SEER, and that included all installation requirements. What threw me off a bit was that he said if I wanted to install the outside unit where I wanted it in the first place, he would do it there, but it would be against code and he could not pull a permit for it. I told him that I was not interested in doing anything against code or without permits, but I guess some people do. We found another place to put the outside unit that would go through my garage and not ugly up my back yard. The guy from Westchester will be here tomorrow after work to give me another estimate, and then someone from Bryant will give me an estimate next week. I wasn't planning on having more than two estimates, but I guess it is better to have three, although I may cancel the Bryant estimate if I decide to go with the Westchester guy. It appears that there is room for the condenser in my attic, but some of the ducting will have to be moved somewhat. Also, the heater needs to be reattached because it is being supported by straps at the moment, and the guy today said that he would replace those with brackets. Lars

Oldhousegal, I am in Portland, Ore! I haven't gotten the soapstone yet -- just ordered it on Monday. They told me it will take 2-3 days to leave the warehouse, and then another 5-10 days of transit. Our cabinets will be here in 2 weeks, so I was holding off on getting the soapstone until we had an ETA on the cabinets so that we didn't have too much construction stuff clogging up our staging area (the garage). I will post pics once the stone comes, though! I ordered 4 slabs of Barocca. I was also told by several places that soapstone was not readily available in Portland, but you can find it at Pentel (on NW Yeon). You can visit their warehouse and see the slabs in person -- the slabs are beautiful, but they only have one variety. The frustrating thing is that Pentel only works with fabricators, so they will give you a list of fabricators, but won't tell you how much a slab costs! Annoying. Our contractor has an account through CFM, who is one of the fabricators on the list at Pentel, so we asked them for a quote -- they said it was going to be $4,700 for the soapstone, including installation. Ordering from Texiera and getting my carpenters (who I love) to cut and install will cost about half of that. So far I have been pretty impressed with Texiera. They have been very responsive to my emails, and phone calls. The sample pack that I ordered arrived within a few days, and they were happy to answer all of my questions. I ordered my slabs, but could not find a way to order the tinted epoxy w/o ordering the entire DIY kit (my carpenters have the necessary blades already), so I emailed them -- they got back to me within 10 minutes and added just the epoxy to my order.

Hi, we just used Gary from Maine Soapstone. We are located in southeastern, Ma and he drove all the way from Maine to do our countertops. He is from Maine but does all kinds of jobs in the New England area. We ordered Amazon soapstone and it is beautiful and he was SOOOOO great and personable to work with. Really likes his job and had great experience. Let me know if you need contact info or you can go on mainesoapstone.com. I found out about him on gardenweb when I was researching soapstone dealers in Massachusetts. Glad we went with him and hope to post finished kitchen pics by Christmas! God know I didnt even know about soapstone before I came across this site but am IN LOVE with my counters and I do admit love to just touch them. Hope this helps> Stephanie