Here are some fantastic home plans: http://www.frankbetz.com/homeplans/country_home_plans.php If you don't like that flavor, their search engine rocks. As far as the rest of it goes, for you, You have a choice - Deal with it, or Don't. Pretty simple, eh? If you choose to Deal with it, you will get a tremendously varied & experienced wealth of information - but (like the rest of us), you need to work for it. Yes, you will read a lot of stuff that you don't need - that is what "skimming" is all about. If you choose to Not Deal with it, then we all wish you the best of luck I'm sure. But you should be careful about your judgement calls about those here on the board - you literally have no idea with whom you are speaking at any given time. When you come to a Party & throw red paint in our face & on everyone's decor, what type of welcome to you expect?? Seriously..... LOL

Now even I had to look up an acronym - SIL. ;-) Ok, so you have MS Works XLR & WPS files. The problems you are having - or going to have - is that Works is old, and the Office XP Pro your SIL gave you is also old, being actually Office 2002, version 10 of Office. If you don't have too many files, I think your best bet is to try an online file converter. Zamzar claims to be able to open and convert Works files. http://www.zamzar.com/ Save : XLR (spreadsheet) files to xlsx WPS (word) files to docx If you don't want to buy a new version of MS Office, try installing LibreOffice - the newer version of OpenOffice - and it will open xlsx and docx files [ If you want to stick with your SIL's MS Office XP Pro, then convert those files to xls & doc files, respectively. That version of Office is very old though. ] There are other ways of handling this, but probably if you you're going to try anything else, your best bet would be buy MS Works off Ebay or Amazon for $10 or so, open and convert all the files. Btw, you can't even open a .doc file in Office XP Pro ?? That's not a good sign - probably a sign of corruption. Btw #2 - When you say you can't open files, I take it they are on your current hard drive, and not within some compressed backup folder. That is, not within a zip file or the like. Re your backup cds : Can you load one of them, then rummage around in their files and tell us what you find ? (as in, names of files and extensions ?) Most likely they are proprietary formats, but if we know what they are, we could perhaps tell you how to retrieve them. Last, anyway you can get the hard drive back from the repair service ? Probably not, but it would be a second source of backup files. Let us know how it all works out.

If you use Photobucket, PLEASE reduce the size of your pictures to something like 800x600 at the most (400x600 is better) before uploading them. You don't need any fancy software, the basic image software that most likely came with your computer, like Windows Paint, will do just fine! We don't all have monster monitors (if anyone would like to send me a new extra-widescreen laptop I'd be more than happy to accept it, but I won't be able to afford one for a long time) and having oversize pictures screws up the text in the rest of the thread, forcing the reader to scroll left and right to read each individual line. It gets extremely annoying. (It's a netiquette thing, kind of like not typing everything in capital letters or, worse, 24pt bright red type in some fancypants font. *shudder*) Or you can use Picturetrail, which also has free accounts, because they resize your pictures automatically when you upload them (I use the medium setting). Picturetrail also allows direct linking and IMO has a nicer public album design than Photobucket.

Thanks everyone! Here is one of the layouts, it may be hard to see. The sink cabinet bump out is 3 inches (legs are three inches also). The sink bumps out an additional 1 inch. From the sink cabinet to the island is 39 inches. So in other spots that aisle is 42 inches. The other side of the island has a 49 inch aisle. Originally the plans showed the 49 inch side 1.5 inches wider. Once they laid out the island I had major misgivings and I made them move the plumbing over 1.5 inches towards the sink line of cabinets- bc the 47.5 inch aisle seemed way too narrow with the door there and the fact its a major walk through. I am happy with the dimensions now. Even with my husband and 2 small kids (3rd due soon!) milling around in the kitchen it doesn't feel cramped. It feels much bigger than our old kitchen, very functional. I did 39 inch uppers and then 4 or 5 inches of crown molding. I also have 8 foot ceilings. 36 is pretty short, we had that before with like 9-12 inch soffits. As for the grout, I was stressed over that like everything else and did briefly considering going with a darker contrasting color- it might not look as bad as you think. I often hate things at first, even when I carefully plan them! The Miracle 511 sealer was well recommended and we havent had any trouble with it. If you still dont like your grout, I have heard of grout lighteners. When I did my grout, I did some test patches with broken tiles before the grouters came and that is how I decided on a color. I think the grout was dry in a day or two- yours sounds like its taking a long time to dry, but I am not an expert. I had unsanded grout I think.