Hi Nancy, Our kitty was sick for a very long time and unfortunately, we had to lay her down to rest last week. Anyways, she threw up several times on our new Frieze carpet right after eating soft food (gross). To clean it I put a little bit of laundry detergent on a bar towel and soaked it with hot water. Once the towel was a little sudsy like a big washcloth I gently rung it out a bit over the stain so the stain was wet but not too concentrated with soap. With just that little bit of detergent I was able to gently rub and pat the stains out completely. Then we blotted the water back up with dry towels until the rug barely damp. It dried up by the next day and the fibers looked and felt like new. I've tried a lot of the carpet cleaners in the past and this worked so much better.

I used Iams for over 17 years - then the dogs didn't seem to do so well on it any more. So 1.5 years ago I switched to Nutro dry kibble. In the month or so before the wet food recall, I noticed my dog's coats weren't as nice, they vomited on/off yellow frothy stuff, and they avoided eating it until the last moment before we went to bed. Sometimes I had to encourage them with people food on it. These are dogs that are 12, have always willingly ate dry kibble, live indoors with us, and never over eat. The vet and I attributed it to hunting dogs doing what they like to do on our long daily walks (we live in the middle of nowhere, where there are many tasty temptations on the trails). Then around the first part of March, one of mine had violent seizures for the first time in her life at age 12. There is a family history; her brother has mild seizures 2-3 times year. so mild we don't medicate for them; and I know they can spring up at any age, so truly that is the most likely answer. However, that day I stopped feeding the Nutro, and began home cooking cold turkey. That strange vomiting with both dogs ended that day (despite the fact I thought switching to such a rich home cooked diet would cause some upset). Coats sleeked back up in short order. Please knock on wood for us, but no seizures yet (I still am reluctant to connect that to the food, because of the dog family history, but need to put it out there because I do think there is something less than fatal in this food that was at the least causing the vomiting/tummy upsets. My girl had a cluster of 6 in less than 24 hours, and it took days before she was "normal", ie pacing for hours, some vision issues, couldn't sleep, wobbly legs, etc.) It was a nightmare. Then I heard about the wet food recall. I thought I was a food snob. I did ask questions, but 1) how can I know if I am not told truthful answers re QC and ingredient issues, and 2) frankly, accidents like a bad batch of X can happen - to both pet and human grade food. I don't know what to think now, except that if commercial wet food has issues with rat poison, plastics poison, god-knows-what-else is still in it that is causing problems less than death in it, too much Vitamin D (the Royal Canin lawsuit, which btw, I had tried the cat food years ago and it was simply awesome at the time, but still, they screwed up)... well, I can guarantee that as a home cooker, I can be more careful than that. I am just lucky that I can make the time to home cook - what a burden that would be in other circumstances for a lot of people. The cat would be harder to do a good home job with; so I am trying Felidae dry kibble. P.S. The store and Nutro were very stand up about taking our returned sacks of dry kibble for full credit.

sink

Oh, with your sunroom and skylights you can probably ignore my concern about light through that window then. It sounds like you'll also be fine with landing space for the fridge. Mama Goose raises a good point about how you can work at your sink. I tend to place my items from the fridge next to the sink but then pull them out and work on them all while standing in about the same spot. I don't move from one side to the other. Of course, my sink is next to a corner so that would make sense for me, right? But you don't have that constraint. I understanding agonizing. We've all been there, I think. The thing to remember is that none of us probably have the ideal. Most of us have to make some compromises. From what I've seen in discussions here, even people building new end up having to compromise a bit. But since we all cook a bit differently, that includes cooking techniques and the types of food we tend to eat, and we all have our own preferences, we are going to make different compromises. Something that drives me batty, may not bother you at all. And vice-versa. I think the key is to understand the general rules, pluses-and-minuses of the various options, and how each decision will impact how you use your kitchen, and then you are making an informed decision that you can probably live with. What would be worse is finalizing and remodeling with a plan in place where you didn't know that this would impact how you do that and then find out how much you don't like it and, only afterwards, realizing there were other ways you could have compromised that you would have preferred. Yikes to that! In my own kitchen, I'm going to be thrilled to get the DW out of the middle of my prep space where it opens out into the room and is a constant source of irritation when both of us are in the kitchen. I'm also going to be thrilled to get a prep sink because both of us trying to use the sink at the same time or the frequent pauses we make while waiting for the other are another major irritation. Now, to get the sink out of the prep space, I need to move it to the end of a peninsula. It will be a huge improvement for the above reasons but it will also cause a problem. I can currently unload about 85-90% of the items without having to take a step. I can bend, lift, put away. The other items take 2-3 steps. Quick and easy. After it's moved, I'm guesstimating that about 70% or so of the items will require 1-2 steps to put away while the rest will be 4-10 steps. This is partially due to the new DW placement but also do to create a baking center and a beverage/snack center out of the main kitchen area. Since I really dislike unloading the DW, I'm a bit worried about this as this will increase the time it takes to unload. I've made DH do a bit of pretend prepping and clean-up with me using the proposed layout and I think the trade-off will be worth it but there is still a bit of a nagging voice telling me I might be wrong. In anticipation, I bought Ikea's cute, little Raskog cart that will fit well near the DW and I figure I can group things together in it like, for example, all items that go to the baking center together, all items for the beverage center, etc., and then move the cart to where these types of items will go to put them away. This will alleviate numerous trips across the kitchen so at least I'll only need to take one trip across and around the kitchen and I won't be juggling things and probably dropping them. The cart shelves have raised sides so items won't fall off. Just trying to give you an example of a compromise that isn't ideal and then trying to identify potential solutions to work around it. No kitchen is perfect so the goal is to make it the best possible kitchen for you. Hope this all makes sense, gives you food for thought and helps you get past agonizing to problem-solving.