Mike - the little green seeds will turn bright red. Pick them then, take the red coating off (slides right off) and plant the little white seed that's inside. I didn't do anything special but put it next to its mother, but I did take other seeds and put them in seed starting mix, cover with plastic and wait. They root rather quickly. I think the key is fresh seeds, like I said. Good luck. Picture will come when it blooms. Do you have plumeria in PR? Love my plumeria. I have some seeds to Black Cyclone that have come up and I've been able to pot already! Oops - that's another forum! RuthAnne

Thanks again for the positive feedback! DH and I met with the owner of the restoration company yesterday, so I thought I'd post an update. I've definitely learned an important lesson. This is the gist of our meeting. 1. The stain can be removed without damaging the logs. He sampled an area with his alcohol based stripper and it looks great. He applied the stripper with a paint brush and then scrubbed it with a scotch brite pad. The stripper is what furniture re-finishers would use. No water, no sand blasting, no sanding. 2. None of our logs were prepped properly (i.e. not all the gray wood was removed before staining). This is actually evident if you look at the "finished" bear paw log. The bottom of it still has gray staining. They will fix that on the inside and outside. The special brushes they use remove the gray wood without affecting the handpeeled logs (he demonstrated this in an area too- osbourne brushes - it's amazing). 3. The outside of our house did not have enough stain applied. This would have led to problems within 1-2 years. They are going to apply another heavy coat of stain. 4. Minor flaws in the logs from transport were not repaired. They are going to fix this too. Anyway, I think this is another example of the need to hire good, experienced, and well-trained trades. The painter who finished our logs is a good painter, but he has never finished logs before. Our contractor has never built a house like this before, so even he didn't know what kind of skill was needed to finish these logs. Obviously, DH and I didn't know any better, or we would have insisted on this restoration company to begin with. However, thanks to that "mistake", the right guys for the job are here and I'm going to have a beautifully finished house! Pay for good work everyone, it will save you money and hassle in the long run. Luckily, I feel like DH and I are following this advice with all other aspects of our build.

We interviewed 5 GCs. First was sort of interested, but our job on an older home was different from the usual work he did building new and/or remodeling newer homes, and it didn't "feel" like a good fit, so we didn't pursue it, even though he seemed like a decent guy and his portfolio of work looked like quality. Second came to look, but when he saw significant structural work he wasn't interested - he was more a cabinet installer/internal design kind of GC than somebody to handle this project. Next one came HIGHLY recommended from a friend who had just done some similar work a few months prior. He came round and gave us some quite attractive rough figures compared to the previous and we wanted some time to think about his suggestions; called him a couple of weeks later to come back, we talked further and asked him for a written bid. Never heard back from him, although we continued to call him to try and get a formal bid. #4 was referred to us via a very bizarre chain of events: even though we got the feeling the project was stalled since we couldn't find a builder, we decided to close on the equity loan anyway since it was all ready to go. At the closing, the title agent started chatting to us, noted that we lived in the same neighbourhood as her family including her brother who oh-by-the-way was a contractor and did we have one yet? I took the number partly to be polite and partly because he was (literally) around the corner, but didn't hold out much hope. In the meantime, I already had an appointment scheduled with a fairly glossy design-build firm so I kept it - they said that we would need at a MINIMUM double our budget, so that was a short meeting! So... feeling somewhat trepidatious I called the guy around the corner that had been recc'd at the bank. He was out of town but we scheduled a meeting for a few days later. He spent 2 hrs at the house, and drove me to see some work he was doing on another property (beautiful work - sealed the deal from my point of view). He came back a few days later with his associate to have another look to see how they could manage the structural stuff, and emailed me a basic proposal a few days after that. We hashed out the remaining details by email and he started 3 weeks later. He CLEARLY wanted the job - he was interested in the house, he (as I later learned) was fascinated by the books on our shelves many of which reflected his own interests and he definitely wanted the gig and he just liked us as much as we did him - it was clearly a "good fit". I had seen his work, his licence and checked his insurance was ok (they all were, of course!), but other than the title agent had no personal references. The day we started work I was PANIC STRICKEN with "what if's?" - I was letting a perfect stranger cut my house in half, I had no human references and aaaaaakkkkkkkk... what was I doing! A neighbour reassured me that she'd seen his work in the neighbourhood and, that in fact, he'd turned DOWN a job she'd asked him to do, but even so - I didn't necessarily do this "by the book"! As those who have been following my renovation know, this guy has been AMAZING, transforming our ideas into reality at a more than fair price (in fact, I truly believe he undercharged us somewhat given the numbers I see other people throwing around for their work). And he, his wife and kids have become friends in the course of it all, so it has truly been "win win" even if we DIDN'T find him via a "conventional" route. Anyway, long answer. I guess the short version is if they follow through, they want the job... !

"The tiler told him that he's gotten four jobs as a result of our glowing review on Yelp (with pictures), and I only posted it 3 weeks ago. I'm guessing that was "tip enough" :-)" If you felt the job he did was so fantastic that you took the 20-30 minutes to write up a glowing review and upload pictures, I would think a small gift would have been appropriate as well as the glowing review I am a small developer/cpntractor, very common for everyone in the company to receive small gifts from happy clients....can be something as small as a $10 Dunkin Donuts GC to a $100 Amazon card, last week we had a large basket of fruit delivered to our office from a project we finished a couple weeks ago along with a lovely well written note that was very appreciated by everyone in the company Have never considered it to be "unprofessional" when we (or any of the guys) received a tip.....and have certainly never considered it to be unprofessional to give any of my subcontractors a tip/gift at the end of a job well done, even though I was paying them for the work they had done