Welcome to all my relatives. I live in a small 4 room house. DH has one bedroom for his office, stuff,& twin bed on boxes. Mine has my huge computer desk, and no floor space to put anything of any size. My cat sleeps by my electric radiator heater. I have long plastic storage boxes under my bed, a small four drawer unit in my closet, & am hiding a new gardening book that I paid #30 for & that was 1/2 price, an extra shelf hung on the closet door piled high and underhung w/ clothes. Storage container under my "puter desk. A bench at the foot of my bed piled high w/ papers & books, also on my bed that rotates from my desk chair to bed day/night. And the list goes on. My living room is called a ware house by one son, but it is oxygen blessed w/ way of the many house plants and I want more. My kitchen has 2 aero gardens hung on the wall, plants on all windosw sills, DH put 2 extra shelves on 2 windows. I use plastic shelving units because the kitche is bereft of adequate cabinets. DH built shelving down the basement stairs for pantry & it is maxed out w/ food. Oh yes, the bathroom is a postage stamp size room for one person unless one is in the tub. The steps are over populated w/ stuff also. The bottom of the steps received a shelf unit yesterday that is not full yet. The window has 2 plastic crates w/ a box on top for storeage, w/ 2 6" pots of onion sets on top w/ 8 noses up to get the afternoon sun. 2 rose bushes live there and the garlic pot went outside 2 days ago. I finally brought up the last 5 amaryllis buulbs from the basemnt yesterday, cleaned out the pots, cut off the roots and repotted them w/ fresh dirt that lives outside the back door on the walk w/ 2 other bags of potting amendments. My basement is a vertiable warehouse of food, dishes, laundry machines, storage storage, junk, empty boxes, exercise equipment that we threaten to use some day. My DH keeps paint cans, et all in one corner........ His garage is worse, no car has been in the 2 car building since we moved here 3 years ago. Sunday he hauled out an oil tank to make room for shelf units so he could unload tools etc. from his car plus the stuff he brought home from his mothers, she is moving into assisted living... He put up a canopy for his car, and it only fits 2/4 way under it now because of the stuff he hauled home, & I stacked there. Being a handy mand he has all kinds of advantages to adopt other peoples cast offs that might be usefull someday. Not to mention what is lined up against and behind the garage, including the suburban he got 25 plus years ago, along w/ the other 2 suburbans that live in the front of the garage along w/ my buick and the 23 foot trailor we hauled to Oregon and back 17 yeass ago, overloaded and had to stop to put stuff in a storage unit that we retrieved coming back a year later, & only 1/2 of it came back... and it is full too.....another trailor lives on daughters property, full of goodies, like a small pot belly stove I want to use for a plant stand someday, and my 30 year old Mother Earth magazines. Hoarding is an addiction according to an article in Readers Digest last month. If/when I move to my won home I will have a gigantic "curb sale" Not to mention all the 70 plus pots of flowering plants in the yard. When I get my own home they go w/ & some that will get dug up too. 3 violet leaves I propagated produced 13 babies & I put the original leaves back in water. YUP I belong to this family... Vangy love to play in the dirt & in the kitchen w/ food.

Oh, You are not anal at all--LOL--I'm an electronics engineer by trade and software engineering manager in practice. That makes me really, really anal about data. Many fields in my db are drop-down or checkbox type. When I upgrade to the next version of base db software it will also handle attaching photos and export to HTML web page. Like Excel, it is very easy to add/subtract fields with this program and easy to sort on any field. Here are the fields my db has for each cultivar: 1. drop down for: want/really want/no thanks/have/ordered/auction bid/auction won 2. variety name 3. hybridizer 4. year registered 5. scape height 6. bloom size 7. foliage type 8. bloom season 9. bloom description bloom form nocturnal rebloom extended fragrant awards tet/diploid pollen fertile pod fertile 1st yr grown source property where grown (I've moved and not all plants I've grown came with me but still want to track my experience with them) landscape location (drop down that can be easily customized) additional notes (degree of info here varies by my interest/use of the plant. It might include: parentage, offspring, $ paid, when I expect order to arrive, etc) I'm trying to see if there is a way to link db's with this program so that I could use this initial data as the base for a hybridizer's tool that would link seedlings listed to the parents in the original list. It exports in a standard format so I was thinking about making my data available in exchange for DL trades sometime in the future as I get more of the data verified and/or importing data from other's Excel files to customize a db for them in exchange for DL trades if they were interested in purchasing the base program from Illium (I use the db tool for a lot more than DL too. I use it to keep all my shopping lists, recipes, inventories (books, reading lists, movies, collectibles, etc), to do lists, medical and perscription histories for my family, household/auto maintenance, special quotes, and much more- just about anything you want to organize in a list or small db format and carry with you on your pda. You can password protect any sensitive lists. So its a handy tool anyway. In fact I was already using it for all this other stuff before I decided to use it for DL & plants. LOL- adding plants was just another extension of my already over the top data obsessions...

Not in the living room. In our family room. And much to my chagrin, one in the bedroom. DH just HAD to have it there and needless to say, he turns it on for 10 minutes before he is ready to sleep! lol When my son was young, he tried to weasel a tv for his room and there was NO WAY we were EVER going to put one in his room NO WAY! lol Wow! 58", 65", 68" you guys must have HUGE rooms to have a tv that large! I can't imagine! lol I have some friends that mounted their flat screen above the fireplace and it is VERY uncomfortable to watch. You have to hold your head at quite an angle to see it. ouch!

We never use our formal dining room nor our formal living room. Our kitchen has a table in it and is probably about the size of your kitchen and dining room combined. An eat-in kitchen would be a great idea for you. Use the dining room as part of the kitchen and then open up the whole area to either the current living or family room so you can see what's going on in that room from the kitchen (open concept). Don't live now for re-sale later! (unless resale is imminent) Use the extra room as living or dining room, whichever you will actually use. Hardly anybody I know ever uses the formal dining room, but we all have eat-in kitchens. Since neither room has special plumbing etc, for resale it can be staged however you like. Just make it what you need for now. In my dreams, I open up my kitchen to the dining room and put in a 12 foot long island with an angle and an overhang for stools. I would keep my table in it an maybe put a little tiny conversation area at one end if I had space. I woul never miss my formal dining area, except that it looks pretty if anybody ever did go in there..