I like Bloomingdale's, but when I've given pajamas as gifts, I've always made them myself because I like to give night shirts, and good ones are hard to find. I made a really nice one for my BIL with 3/4 sleeves and a shirttail hem out of some black and green striped very thick jersey with black cuffs and collar. My sister ended up stealing it from him. I mention this because your niece might like a man's nightshirt. Lars

I have placed several online orders. The ones I've been most impressed with are the CNS stores. There are several stores ... lighting, plumbing, knobs etc. They offer free shipping, no tax (except in their home state) and the orders are sent very quickly with tracking emails to keep up with where your order is at. I did order all my large appliances from www.homeeverything.com and seriously, I wouldn't recommend them. I did get all my appliances about 2 months later, the FD SS frig was damaged in transit, so I refused it, called them and had a new replacement within 7 days. I bought all my blanco silgranit sinks from a company on eBay. It was free shipping, no tax, plus buying through Mr. Rebates.com I got another 3% rebate. Their customer service was wonderful... I called to make sure I had ordered everything I needed and they gave me another 10% off. They shipped from Florida and I had my sinks, drains, and grids within two weeks. They also sent tracking numbers. Faucets.direct is higher on their prices, but certainly a reputable company. I also ordered my door hardware from www.doorhardwareplus.com (I think it's a CNS store) and they were much cheaper than the local big box store. My Baldwin sets came from www.handlesets.com and I was very pleased with their service. My husband was the GC for our build and he opened up a commercial credit card at Lowe's and everything purchased is between 5 - 15% off. Also, Sherwin Williams will give you a discount on your paint if you have an account. Every little bit helps. Good luck!

Having been experimenting with the online dating connection enough to have a few reflections of my own, I decided to Google the phrase, "reflections on online dating". Whala! Found your post and was heartily amused. I'm afraid my dabbling does not offer a harvest of such outrageous (and funny) anecdotes. However, I can certainly relate and find your post an inspiration to use my pen to at least document the crazy world of dating in the new millennium. Thanks a bunch for the chuckles! Hope a few of your dates have been more than fodder for the humor-mill [wink].

If you like Southern Living type homes, why has SL not been your first choice for looking at possible plans? Several of them are designed by well known architects and are quite good for mill plans. Many of the architects of those plans offer revisions to meet local codes for a standard fee. Changing them to meet your local topography of the lot itself is quite a bit trickier. Mill plans from every source are almost universally assuming that you will be building on a dead flat lot, and that the front of the house faces north. If the lot faces west and has a steep slope from front to back, you will have a very difficult time finding something among existing plans that can deal with that challenge. What happens when you try to make a plan designed for one situation fit another? Lots more money to excavate or to have fill dirt brought in is one thing that happens. That can be a very large budget buster. Especially if the lot is rocky, in a seismic zone, or has access Issues. Then there is the added concrete for the taller foundation that is needed, and the stone or brick cladding for that additional exposed foundation. Now you have to figure out how to get people access to a back yard that’s 13’ down from the kitchen. That means some type of deck with stairs. All of that from a house designed for a flat lot being placed on a slope. What about that Western sun beating into the front of the house? Thst means more overhang to help with that, and better windows too. That still won’t help at 6:00 pm in the summer. If you have the formal living and dining rooms facing the street, that may not bother you as badly as if your master bedroom faces the street, and you have a shift worker who needs to catch some sleep before being due in at 11. But there won’t be any dinner gatherings in the summer in your dining room. It all be too hot and glaring. So that means maybe you go more casual. It’s summer, after all. Now that bare minimum deck that you put on the house just to have back yard access isn’t going to be big enough for your Labor Day party. And those mosquitos aren’t helping things either. How you arrive to a home, bring your groceries in, and go out into the yard matters. Where and how your family gathers to eat and socialize together matters. Being able to stay up late with the kids for old movies in the summer and not disturb the person who has to be at work at 6:00 am matters. There are no unimportant parts. There are no unimportant details if those details force you into adapting with a negative behavior pattern that you would not otherwise have. The best houses seem effortless and “right”. Because they fit you. You’re not giving up family Sunday dinners in the dining room because it’s too hot and too glaring to occupy at dinner time. You’re not giving up a quick after work barbecue meal because it’s two flights of stairs down to the ground where it’s actually safe to put the barbecue fire rather than put the grill on the deck. Generic houses that get placed on lots often have these kinds of issues. The expenses associated with you adapting to the house’s demand to need a flat lot can often pay a good deal of an architect’s fee to create something that actually fits the property and your family. Keep looking at plans and noting what you like about each. Start to develop a library of ideas that you would like to have. Keep it simple. Don’t be blinded by the “cool hidden door pantry” that costs 6K when you could be wanting an east facing breakfast room with lots of windows to start off your day with the family. Home features impact behavior. But also look at the homes that local architects are producing. Houzz is a good place to look for that. So are Facebook groups too. Talk to a few architects. See if anyone gets what you mean by your collection of ideas. A free initial meeting to see what their process is, and how that might work for you, and to look at some of their past projects that might echo your wants is a good educational field trip. Think of it as exactly that: an educational field trip, just like junior high. Instead of going to the space center to learn about rocketry developments, you’re learning about what it might be like to have a home built for you. Do the same thing with builders. Look at their projects. Have a 15 minute meeting with them to see if they are someone you want to have a year long relationship with. It’s like speed dating. You don’t want to waste their time, and they don’t want to waste yours. But you both need to see if you are compatible as the very first step. At the end of the discovery process, you should have 3-4 plans that you like a lot, and 2/3 architects, and 2/3 builders. Then it’s time to decide what approach you want to consider. Just go into it with an open mind, learning as much as you can from everyone you encounter. Your decision might not be what someone else would choose. But you will have researched enough, and from enough different sources, that you won’t feel like you’re going into your build completely blind about how the processes work.