Sorry to hear about the KA issues. I was concerned as well when I got a KUDE70FVSS model in February 2010. The vent is located on the left side of the top edge of the door, next to the controls. It is not on the side of the door. KA's are deep and most will not fit flush under normal depth cabinets I hear. We have about a 1 1/4 inch granite countertop overhang which happens to be about the thickness of the door. So in our case we pushed the DW back until the door was lined up with the cabinet fronts but the door is completely underneath the granite countertop. It actually looks pretty good. (Our old WP was flush mounted with cabinet matching panels installed) We put the moisture strip supplied by KA on the bottom of the granite, for no good reason but figured why not. There is a small strip of cabinet under the granite that forms the top of the cabinet opening for the DW that is, of course, wood. If I put the moisture strip on it, it showed since the strip is a shiny material, so I left it off. I kept an eye on it for months to see what happened and I have never seen any moisture or noticed any steam coming from the vents at all, regardless of the time of day we run the DW. The wood under the granite and all around the DW looks fine and has never shown any sign of getting wet. Not sure what system they are using in this model but apparently it does not suffer from the same problems as the side vent models.

Deee, me too. Thank you, everyone. Marina, I hadn't heard of Sara Ward but just looked up her web site. I will keep an eye on her site to see if she's speaking anywhere around me. dlm, good question with a long answer but will try to be brief. Lots of difficulty with friendship until he was in HS. He was in special ed schools until HS, then went to a regular HS but very small and welcoming to kids with "learning differences." Anyway, he found some good friends there and has held onto a couple of them. Then when he went to college briefly, he made a couple of friends who he is still friends with. In the last two years he has really managed to find a few good friends who are quirky but functioning (I mean, none of them are teachers or lawyers, but they are working musicians or artists or bartenders....). Mostly guys but he does have a couple of girls who are friends. He has had a couple of girlfriends and the last one was a disaster of epic proportions but I won't say more about that here. Most of the friends he's made over the past 2-3 years have been a few years older than him. All have their own apts. so he mainly goes to their places and we don't really see them, so it's hard to describe the dynamics of these relationships. When we do meet his friends, they always seem quirky but very nice. I think the linked article explains NLD/NVLD pretty well. DS doesn't have every feature, but definitely has most, including physical awkwardness (never played sports, trips up or down stairs, etc), OCD tendencies, dominates conversations, lousy hygiene, etc. Some of the features he had when he was younger but not as much now, possibly because he has been in therapy since he was 6 years old!? Here is a link that might be useful: description

So sorry to hear of your surprises and the delays. Yes, we've been there, too. Sometimes it's better to have the rough weather come and test our work earlier rather than later. We moved into our house in the spring, and saw that we might have a drainage problem caused by a very large concrete handicap ramp blocking the flow of water away from the house. We'll have to get around to removing that ramp, we figured. Sure enough, soon enough, one night we had a deluge (the night before we were hosting a large family celebration, of course) and found water coming into the basement. Maybe the ramp was causing water to pool, we thought. We looked out back and saw -- a lake (!) ten feet wide and twenty feet long, and a foot deep, against the back of the house. I have fond, ridiculous pictures in my head of my husband sitting on an overturned bucket, in the rain at two in the morning, holding one end of a garden hose under the water level to siphon our lake down, through the hole of the hastily disconnected drier vent, into the drain of the laundry tub in the basement. No, it wasn't fun to put off thinking about cabinet styles and appliance choices for the kitchen, while we removed the ramp, fixed the gutters and downspouts and attended to the grade around the house. And removing the ramp led to the restoration of the whole back porch and the need to restucco a section of the back of the house. Ten months later, I almost have a finished kitchen. You'll get there, too. Hang in there.

In our original set-up, we had the table butted up to the island and the old light hung in the right place. Since then, we moved the table to the window, which we like much better..... buuuut it left that fixture hanging in prime head-knocking space. Also, I was thinking that if I really wanted another light protruding from the ceiling in addition to future fan, it would be better to have it over the sink instead of two hanging things in the center of the room. At this point, I'm thinking I will use that light for now and relegate it to the laundry when I can.