Great input! I appreciate all of it. I'm in the middle of hand surgery, as luck would have it, so I truly can't dig far, but I brushed all the leaf litter away (and there was a fair amount this time of year) and went down a little further with my hands. I think I found root flare. See what you think from the pictures. That leads me to believe the tree might be planted an inch or so below grade -- although this is a slope and the pictures are on the downhill side so the uphill side may be more buried. I failed to answer someone's question about its apparent health during the summer. It has grown like a weed and has leafed out beautifully each summer. The canopy was skimpy the year it was planted, but about a month or so after leafing out last summer it suddenly had a mature canopy. Here are the pix:

What a timely posting! DH and I have had our eye on a "for sale by owner" property for the last few weeks. We have been able to tour the inside of the house several times and have noticed quite a few "need to take care of" issues (must do list: new flooring throughout, insulate garage, replace fridge, reline chimney, thoroughly clean entire house, install new sliding glass door and other various small details). The current homeowner has told us that she received a foreclosure notice last week and that her and her soon to be ex-spouse NEED to sell and need to sell fast. The house reflects the lack of love in the home, the marriage suffered and the house suffered. I look at it as a plus in our favor. We can diy a large majority of the projects, and are hoping to pick up the property at 40k below market average (based on recent sales of the same size/style/model home on the same street). I hate to sound crass, but they need to sell, and things need fixing, so I want to work the situation to my advantage. Right now, for us, it's a race against time, to get our home sold before the bank steps in and takes that home from them. (We need to sell our home in order to come up with the downpayment on the "about to be foreclosed on" home). We used zillow.com and domania.com to find out what the current owners paid for the house, we figured that they put down a 20% down payment (the current homeowner is very open, and told us that she'd rather lose her 20% down payment than have a foreclosure on her credit report) and then we researched to see what the other comparable homes sold for. We are offering low based on the fact that they NEED to get out of that home (we are offering only enough for them to cover the current mortgage balance), we are also taking into consideration the amount of work that the home needs because of the neglect it has suffered. Benefitting from someone else's personal crisis is a tricky situation, it doesn't make me feel good to try to buy our new home for as little as possible (at the current owner's expense), but on the other hand, it would make a good investment for us. The home doesn't necessarily feel "right" for us, as it sits, but with about 20k worth of improvements, I can make it as close to perfect for us as is possible. The way I look at it, it's a win/win situation for all of us, they don't go into foreclosure and we get a heck of a deal. If you can get a great deal, and still manage to swing the costs of the improvements that need to be made (and the ones that aren't evident now, but are probably lurking there just waiting to be found by a home inspector)....then I say go for it. Impending foreclosure can be a great motivator for a seller! jiggreen

No. It's been almost 10 years since the remodel--the new sink is also 9" at the edges--and I definitely wouldn't want a deeper kitchen sink. I do have a laundry sink not so far away. I have a grid in half the sink, but it's only about half an inch tall. It's useful, but sometimes, I could like to have a shallower sink, or something like the reef in the Kohler...Stages? The one with the prep bowls. Fixtures aren't the place to scrimp. If you're changing a big element of quality with the inch, then maybe consider price, but in the normal scheme of things, I wouldn't guess more than a few hundred dollars difference, all else being the same. If so, unless your budget is under $10K for the whole shebang, take the difference out of the finishes, not the useful bits. Keep in mind that sinks are adaptable. If you have a reason for wanting that extra inch, go for it, because it's hard to adapt a sink deeper. OTOH, I have a couple of dishpans that fit nicely in my sink and make it easy to do traditional two bowl dishwashing. Turn one over and one has a platform which is next best to the built in reef. I also have a roll up, over the sink, dish drainer grid. When I just can't stand to lean over a tiny bit, it makes a great platform for setting dishes and pots on while I wash and rinse them. That's the big thing to keep in mind. Every inch deeper your sink is, is another inch lower you have to bend to pick up a dish. I say get the 9" sink. If you can figure out three good reasons why this is wrong and why you must have a deeper sink, then I must be wrong and you should get the 10". Good luck with your decision.

I never thought about blooms. My focus has always been on the leaves. Does a particular eye die after it blooms, then the little buds at the base come up the next year? I normally cut off the flower spikes so I haven't paid attention to that. All mine get the same light, and I control the water. I probably should have been paying more attention to the flowers....or not. It would be good to hear from a pro hosta grower about when they bloom (maturity?). OBTW, I never thought of flowering as an indicator of maturity. The size and shape of of leaves were my indications of maturity. -Babka